Most of America’s 15,000 advertising agencies are committed to the concept of building a brand with advertising.
“The fundamental thing we’re all about is building brand leaders,” said the chief executive of D’Arcy Masius Benton & Bowles recently. “The way to do that is to have a superior understanding of the consumer, which leads to better, fresher, more powerful creative work that ultimately builds brands.”
Building brand leaders with better, fresher creative work? We think not. Most marketers confuse brand building with brand maintenance. While a hefty advertising budget might be needed to maintain high-flying brands like McDonald’s and Coca-Cola, advertising generally won’t get a new brand off the ground.
Anita Roddick built The Body Shop into a major brand with no advertising at all. Instead she traveled the world on a relentless quest for publicity, pushing her ideas about the environment. It was the endless torrent of newspaper and magazine articles, plus radio and television interviews, that literally created The Body Shop brand.
Starbucks doesn’t spend a hill of beans on advertising either. In its first ten years, the company spent less than $10 million on advertising, a trivial amount for a brand that delivers $2.6 billion in annual sales.
Wal-Mart became the world’s largest retailer with annual sales of more than $200 billion with very little advertising. A Wal-Mart sibling, Sam’s Club, averages $45 million per store with almost no advertising.
On the other hand, Miller Brewing spent $50 million to launch a brand called Miller Regular. (Or just plain Miller.) The brand generated no publicity, almost no perceptions in the minds of beer drinkers, and very little sales—$50 million down the drain.
Would better, fresher creative work have built a beer called Miller Regular into a brand leader? We think not. There is no publicity potential in a regular beer with a line-extended name like Miller.
In the past, it may have been true that a beefy advertising budget was the key ingredient in the brand-building process. But what worked in the past doesn’t necessarily work today. We live in an overcommunicated society, where each of us gets hit with hundreds of commercial messages daily.
Today brands are born, not made. A new brand must be capable of generating favorable publicity in the media or it won’t have a chance in the marketplace.
And just how do you generate publicity? The best way to generate publicity is by being first. In other words, by being the first brand in a new category.
All of these brands (and many, many more) were first in a new category and, in the process, generated enormous amounts of publicity.
There’s a strong relationship between the two. The news media wants to talk about what’s new, what’s first, and what’s hot, not what’s better. When your brand can make news, it has a chance to generate publicity. And the best way to make news is to announce a new category, not a new product.
What others say about your brand is much more powerful than what you say about it yourself. That’s why publicity in general is more effective than advertising. And why, over the past two decades, public relations has eclipsed advertising as the most effective force in branding.
Yet for years public relations has been treated as a secondary function to advertising. PR people even used to measure their successes in terms of advertising space. Publicity stories were converted into equivalent advertising expenditures.
Even worse, marketing strategies were usually formulated first into advertising slogans. Then the public relations people were asked to reinforce the advertising by creating PR programs to communicate those slogans.
Not anymore. Today brands are built with publicity and maintained with advertising. The cart is now driving the horse.
So why hasn’t the ascendancy of PR made news in the media? Why are public relations departments in most companies still subservient to advertising departments? Why are nine of the top ten public relations firms still owned by advertising agencies instead of vice versa?
Why have the media ignored the biggest news story in marketing?
It’s the grass phenomenon. Nobody ever notices the grass growing or pays attention to a trend that is slow in developing.
Take facsimile, for example. Over the past two decades, the facsimile has become an indispensable part of every company’s communication portfolio. Americans will send 65 billion pages of faxes this year, more than 230 per person. And 50 percent of all international telephone calls are now fax calls.
Yet we don’t remember a single article in any of the major management publications on the rise of facsimile. It happened too slowly.
On the other hand, the opposite is true of the Internet. The rise of the Internet happened so quickly that it created a blaze of publicity, as did the rapid fall of Internet stocks.
Advertising executives in particular are inclined to slight public relations. “If the advertising is brilliant, the PR will fall out of that,” said one particularly brilliant advertising executive recently.
But what works in branding today is publicity, not advertising. This is especially true in the high-tech field. All of the big global marketing powerhouses—Microsoft, Intel, Dell, Compaq, Gateway, Oracle, Cisco, SAP, and Sun Microsystems—were first created in the pages of The Wall Street Journal, Business Week, Forbes, and Fortune. By publicity, not by advertising.
Years ago we worked with Lotus Development Corp. on branding strategy for Lotus Notes. The essence of the strategy was the promotion of Notes as “the first successful groupware product.” With, of course, the emphasis on “groupware.”
This idea caught on like crazy with the media, which ran story after story on the new groupware concept. Yet typically the Lotus advertising people ignored the groupware idea in favor of nonsensical advertising pabulum.
It didn’t matter because public relations is more important than advertising. As a result of the publicity program, Notes became an enormous success and ultimately IBM paid the astounding price of $3.5 billion for Lotus Development Corp.
Most companies develop their branding strategies as if advertising were their primary communications vehicle. They’re wrong. Strategy should be developed first from a publicity point of view.