Branding fascinates people because it is ubiquitous. We are surrounded by brands daily. But it is only a relatively recent phenomenon. It is only in the last thirty years or so that we have begun to appreciate the disciplines of branding and of brand management, the economic value brands generate and the complex ways in which we as consumers interact with them. So it is not surprising that there are many myths about branding, what it does and what it does not do. We hope you have enjoyed our exposition of the myths in this book.
For convenience, here is the full list of myths and a very brief summary of our main arguments against them.
People buy brands for more reasons than just the product. There are psychological benefits from buying brands which transcend product features. Ultimately we, the customers, decide what price we are prepared to pay for a brand. Rather than being fooled into parting with more money than we need to, we often actively collude with companies to pay a premium, because we are buying into so much more than just a simple product or service.
The evidence is that if you have a strong brand and a desire to take decisive and restorative action then in most circumstances (given time) trust can often be either fully or at least partially restored. That doesn’t mean that brands can rest on their laurels. Many of the high-profile scandals could have proved fatal if they had affected weaker brands with less robust balance sheets. Trust is hard-fought, easily lost and often costly to restore. But it can be restored and rebuilt.
In today’s marketplace a brand is not seen as separate or distinct from the business it serves. They are in fact integral to each other. Attempts to use brand identity and advertising as a way of hoodwinking your customers into a poor purchase are likely to prove unsustainable and counterproductive. At the same time if you are a good business and you can apply that virtue to a business and brand that are underperforming you are likely to be able to accelerate the growth and value of your business.
Brands are powerful because they help to generate demand and create loyalty. Brands work because they are intimately linked to self-expression. Technology has not changed this. Technology is not challenging the power of brands but it is disrupting markets, transforming business and profoundly changing the practice of brand building.
A whole chain of experiences that shape perceptions and preferences creates brands. The logo is always fundamental, advertising is often crucially important, but these are not the essential brand builders. Jeff Bezos famously said that ‘your brand is what people say about you when you’re not in the room’. And what they say about you tends to be the result of what you say and do. For the modern brand builder in a multichannel world in which people are craving authentic and engaging experiences and not just entertaining advertising, remembering to build your brand on everything you say and everything you do is vital.
Brands create both financial and economic value. They are specific assets which generate a security of income for any business and they can be sold by one business to another, providing cash for the vendor. They create economic value because of what their owners do with their brands: how they invest in them, how they extend them, how they update them and keep them relevant and fit-for-purpose for their consumers.
It’s not that a brand needs to be distinctive rather than different. It needs to be both. But it needs to focus on what will make it genuinely distinctive and keep focused on delivering that consistently. The combination of that plus the constancy of protecting the brand identity that it owns, and which genuinely differentiates it, makes it remarkable.
The response to this myth is very simple but it is hard to effect. You first have to know who your right customers are, you then have to know what they most value and deliver it to them. Then if the right customer complains because you are not treating them right, they are right to complain. The right customer is always right.
It now takes much less time to build a genuinely global brand. Tesla has managed to achieve global brand status in just a little less than fifteen years. It is also quite possible that this process will get even faster. Facebook, Uber or Airbnb all are proof that a brand can rise from relative obscurity and within just a handful of years become a global giant.
For businesses of all types, future success will depend on the ability to organize around the customer, to accept that reputation is earned and not cynically manipulated, to move from a tendency to command and control towards a more open and flexible way of working. To understand that while trademarks and IP can be legally owned by a business or individual, the real power of brands is that they reside in the mind of the customer and that every single action taken on behalf of a customer has the potential to add value and equity. Brands need to be owned by the board, not the marketing department.
A genuine brand purpose is not about traditional corporate and social responsibility. It is the authentic expression and enactment of an organization’s primary motivation, the reason why that brand or business exists in the first place, often found in the one thing that matters most to both customers and employees.
Be wary of the idea that the majority of customers are seeking a personal relationship with your brand; most of them are not. Recognize this and you can start to build a more effective brand. Nurture the smaller cohort of customers who are open to a relationship and help them to build a community where customers can talk openly to each other. Use the money you would have spent trying to build relationships with customers who aren’t interested to sharpen your offer, build distinctiveness and use insight to stay with and ahead of changing customer needs and motivations.
There are definitive tools and established rigorous processes for branding. There is also a range of great expertise and effective processes available to support the brand owner. But importantly, none of these should be considered as a replacement for genuine insight and creative thinking. Brands should be built on clear insight; they should be relevant and distinctive, and they should excite and empower the customer. Creating them is hard work and involves a melding of IQ and EQ. There are tools to guide the practitioner and to provide shortcuts but they should never replace the human factor that sits at the heart of every successful brand.
Brands have a part to play in nearly all aspects of a functioning free market economy. They help to drive value, maintain competitive advantage and are highly protectable. Brands help businesses connect with and retain customers. And customers are the lifeblood of any business.
Brands are everything to do with the customer experience. Although it is easy to think about brands in purely visual terms, a brand is really the unique mix of emotional and rational associations that form as the consequence of all of our interactions with that brand. As customers have grown more sophisticated and experience more highly valued, so brands have sought to build a more distinctive edge to their experience. Technology is helping to accelerate this change, shifting expectations, disrupting established markets and helping brand owners to build new and more compelling experiences. Getting the customer experience right really matters.
A brand is much more than just the product alone. A brand is a composite of hundreds of activities designed to form and occupy a space in the mind of the customer. A brand, much more than any individual product or service, is still the best way of building and protecting long-term competitive advantage.
Creating a brand name can look easy and sometimes it can be. The small trader or domestic entrepreneur is unlikely to get too vexed by the process and will probably worry about trademark registration much later on. For most other businesses, though, the process of name development needs to be approached more carefully. The process will need to be carefully managed, with prospective names being both checked for legal availability and cultural and linguistic suitability. That is much harder than it sounds.
There are brands for services, business-to-business companies, technology companies, charities, sports organizations and, as David Beckham reminds us, brands for celebrities too.
In this era of total branding (where every interaction with a customer affects their propensity to like or dislike you), little distinction should be made between employees and customers. Both have the potential to be passionate advocates for your brand and both are critical to your success. To get it right on the outside you first have to get it right on the inside.
The nature of brand loyalty has changed. It requires brands to deliver consistently on their promises rather than bribe people through so-called loyalty schemes. But in return customers will become advocates for your brand. Brand loyalty is now hard earned. But brand loyalty still exists and it still pays.
As we said in the Introduction, these are the myths we have chosen and the rebuttals of them are very much our opinions. We’d be delighted to hear from you if you have other myths you wish to share or discuss and of course if you disagree with or want to add to our opinions on the twenty myths.
Please visit www.thisiscaffeine.com/mythsofbranding