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:

“People in networked markets have figured out that they get far better information and support from one another than from vendors.”

And anyway, with the focus ever-increasingly on demand generation, who has time for branding anyway? We all remember when we had to spend too much time and money “developing” our brands before we could get anywhere near generating a lead. Try that one on today’s board!

Balancing the picture on branding

There is of course some truth in all this. The days of the big brand campaign are pretty much over. But does that mean branding itself is dead?

Branding did, and still does, offer tangible benefits to an organisation:

• Increased recognition – which in today’s ultra-fragmented media is no bad thing (now what was that URL?).
• Greater perception of quality – when your competitors are creating cheap alternatives, how will you stand out if you can’t (or don’t wish to) compete on price?
• De-commoditisation – increasingly, especially in the tech industry, all products are tending to look the same. Standards rule. Any advantage tends to be fleeting. Successful branding creates meaningful differentiation.
• Stronger loyalty – it is so easy to switch vendors these days. Search for any product on Google and you’ll get gazillions of options back. But a strong brand relationship puts a brake on customer defections.
• Focus – really knowing who you are, what that means and why customers should care brings focus for all your activities. It gives you a foundation on which to base your communications and programmes.

So the benefits haven’t changed. What has changed, however, is the communication landscape.

The way we engage with customers is less spun (or should be) and more direct and conversational. It is about helping customers get stuff done – typically with useful, engaging content. Having a strong sense of who you are and what you are about can only make these interactions stronger. And stronger interactions deliver better results.

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

In the land of the blind

After all these years, it still amazes me that so many in the industry think in these kinds of binary terms. Brand or demand. Strategic or tactical. Even marketing or sales. It’s a recipe for death by silo.

The truth of course, is that the decision is never binary. Every piece of demand activity you produce is an embodiment of your brand. Likewise every brand communication should drive demand.

To focus on demand generation for a moment – there is a tendency in the industry to think purely in terms of the numbers. How many clicks/downloads/sales/whatevers did this communication achieve? It often leads to a nail the problem, hammer the offer, forget the brand approach (well, we did follow the guidelines). And you know what? It works. To a degree at least.

The problem is that this tends to focus so heavily on what we do it leaves no room for how we do it. The end obliterates the means.

Demand meet brand, brand meet demand

As soon as we focus on how we generate demand and what it means for the brand, something interesting happens.

For one thing, the customer comes more sharply into focus. We think more about how we can help them deal with the problems they face and less about simply what carrot we can dangle to get them to do stuff.

We also take a longer term view. Not of the results – we still need to hit the numbers. But we begin to consider the legacy of what we create. What effect will it have on our reputation? What will the recipients say to friends and colleagues about us? What will they think, the next time they see something from us?

And, while I’ve focused on demand generation here, the benefits also extend the other way. By making more brand-focused communication responsible for growing demand as well as brand, we give it focus. We avoid the upward creep that ends with brands trying to capture lofty ideals that are irrelevant to the context their customers find themselves in (the world peace syndrome).

The result will be a stronger brand, greater demand and increased loyalty. Now doesn’t that sound like a good decision?

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.

Of course, there are still a lot of 564-3Gz V2s out there but it’s the others that will capture people’s imaginations and increased market share.