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“The cus­tomer is in charge. If you think you own your brand, you’re wrong – the cus­tomer does. In fact, for­get brand­ing. No one buys that stuff anymore.”

Sound famil­iar?

Cer­tainly, if you read many of today’s mar­ket­ing blogs, you’ll be left with the impres­sion that these days there’s vir­tu­ally noth­ing you can do to cre­ate, improve or sus­tain a com­pelling brand. The growth of social media and other peer-to-peer com­mu­ni­ca­tions has meant that cus­tomers don’t need to lis­ten to com­pa­nies to get their infor­ma­tion any more. They are more than happy to form their own opin­ions thank you very much. As the Clue­train Man­i­festo says:

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Money is tight. Bud­gets are squeezed. You sim­ply don’t have the resources to do every­thing. It’s deci­sion time: do you spend what you have on grow­ing the brand or on gen­er­at­ing demand and hit­ting the num­bers? If you are like two-thirds of the atten­dees at one recent B2B event, you’ll have cho­sen brand. If on the other hand you are in the grip of the bean coun­ters, you’ll have opted for demand.

But here’s the rub: whichever you chose, you chose wrong.

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Ah the heady scent of the incom­pre­hen­si­ble part num­ber. It’s taken some time but finally the tide seems to be turn­ing against the SKU-reference-as-product-name.

LG renamed its KG800 phone, Choco­late. Apple has kept the devel­op­ment names (Pan­ther, Tiger etc) for releases of its OSX oper­at­ing sys­tem. And Dyson’s lat­est ‘hoover’ was named The Ball.

These days, it’s dif­fi­cult enough for cus­tomers to remem­ber even top-level brand names with­out hav­ing to mem­o­rise an essen­tially mean­ing­less prod­uct name too. It’s ironic that so many com­pa­nies spend so much time and money invest­ing in cre­at­ing the right asso­ci­a­tions for their brands and then dehu­man­ise them right at the point where a cus­tomer needs to buy-in enough to part with some money.

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