In this morning’s post “Branding Strategy = Marketing Boondoggle” I explained exactly that branding strategy is mostly an excuse to waste marketing money. To illustrate the point, here’s a real-life horror story.
In the late 90’s, Ken Fitzpatrick, the CMO at Computer Associates, spent $100 million on a massive branding exercise — at a time when the company’s shareholders were trying to throw out top management and the CEO was about to be arrested (and subsequently convicted) for securities fraud.
Any sane person would realize that, if you’re in a management crisis, you hunker down and go into damage control mode. But Fitzpatrick merrily blew through his branding budget, just as if the company weren’t falling apart. Here’s what did CA got:
- A new logo that was pretty much like the original one.
- The painfully trite tag line: “The software that manages e-business!”
- A directive that everybody in the firm answer the phone with the tag line.
- Some dopey TV ads featuring chickens. (OK. Watch the video now.)
For $100 freakin’ million.
That’s a million dollars per chicken, I figure.
Now, the CA “branding strategy” would just be a weird joke if it weren’t for the fact that the debacle is only unusual due to its size and scope. The same kind of sliced baloney takes place all the time inside hundreds of firms big and small.
So I say again: branding strategy is just an excuse to spend money. If you take care of your products, your employees and your finances, you’ll have as much “brand equity” as you’ll ever need.
And you’ll have a lower cost-of-sales, a better bottom line, and employees who aren’t always grinding their teeth when they see marketing folk wasting hard-earned profit.
This discussion is continued in”Why Marketeers Hate REAL Marketing“.
. Nice post.
