Popular terms and common jargon come and go faster in the marketing and promotional businesses than in street crime. For the last dozen years or so, though, "branding" has managed to stick. Everyone with a pencil or a copy of Adobe CS2 will help you with your "branding." Presumably, that moniker goes with the name given to a product that you recognize as being different, better, more powerful (efficacious, if it is a medical brand), or just warm and cuddly.
Buying something "brand new" when I grew up meant that it hadn't been around long enough for the "brand," or the label, to wear off. Something that didn't have a brand to wear off was probably not very good because no one wanted to take credit for having made it. By the time the '70s rolled around, brandless products were linked with "green" and called generic, in that sort of carpenter's logic that suggested that if no money was spent advertising or promoting them, the savings would be passed on to the consumer and therefore the planet. Generic dinner plates, generic book matches and generic laundry detergents were soon themselves replaced by store brands.
Store brands were no different than generic products other than being emblazoned with the logo of the grocery or department store that wanted to run them up against genuinely branded products, as though the integrity of the retailer was equal to the manufacturing experience, research and development and expensively promoted marquees of their competitors. It was sometime in the '80s that names like Kenmore, Craftsman, Frigidaire, International Harvester and Lik'm Aide began to blur in the minds of consumers as others crowded into the playing fields. For many known and well-loved names, it was simply too expensive to continue to play the branding game; for others, corporate maneuvering and stock value became more important than making products that consumers could trust.
And so we're now in the game of selling "branding" services to clients who often don't have products worthy of "brands," and trying to build reputations on personal, product and corporate branding.
A few fundamentals need to be remembered when playing the "branding" game, whether it is the post-2000 vapor-brand variety or the kind actually built on product and performance. The basics haven't changed very much.
When asked about branding in the last part of the first decade of the millennium, I tend to ask a few questions before embarking on a strategy. Are you trying to build something of value beyond the actual intrinsic value of the thing itself? If so, how will the "brand" affect the consumer? Will it remind them of the product they enjoyed or from which they obtained value so they can return to it, enjoying its consistency, thereafter? Or, are they trying to come up with a catchy phrase that will be remembered for its catchiness or cleverness beyond its ability to deliver value to the consumer?
An example may be the manufacturer of garden rakes that are of little difference than garden rakes made by any of two dozen other manufacturers. The handles are wooden, the paint is one-coat spray enamel, the spring is a single-loop affair purchased in container lots in China, the tines are no stronger than any others on the market. This is not, in my thought, a candidate for branding. Instead, this is a product that should compete on the basis of price and availability. Advertising should most likely focus around "truckload" quantities of "solid garden rakes" at prices that remind you of the original stagflation. The poet Alan Dugan was fond of saying, "You can't plume a dray horse," and it certainly applies in such situations.
Branding a company is a little like branding a pharmaceutical; no one really knows what it does or whether it works unless they've had prior experience with it. Branding - that is, having the consuming public, your demographic, strike a positive chord with your name and what you do - gives you two classic choices: it takes a lot of time or a lot of money or both. Experience, positive experience, with the people, the product, or the service is the best building block to creating and sustaining a brand.
There's an old adage that "no one ever got fired for specifying IBM," and to that extent having a well-known, recognized brand can be worth millions. But without the product, the service, the people or the commitment to customer satisfaction, no brand in the world can build or sustain sales. Dow Chemical fights that battle two decades after Bhopal. Enron fought it to the bitter end, and Exxon's name will forever be attached to Alaska's Prince William Sound.
Branding starts with products and people committed to delivering the goods for the consumers who will use them. Word of mouth is often even faster than our multimillion-dollar promotional budgets, as consumers, particularly in light of accelerated opinions and speed-of-light reviews made possible by the beginning of the digital age and only more likely to accelerate with logarithmic speed into the future, hang on to products long after the brand is illegible or get rid of them while the paint is still fresh. How many friends do you know who drive a Segway to work?
Ron Jackson is the CEO and president of The Idea Farm, an international advertising, marketing and public relations group based in Danville. You can reach him at ron@theideafarm.net.