In yesterday’s post “A Branding Strategy Horror Story” I gave an example of a completely pointless branding exercise. As I fully expected, a number of marketeers commented that the activities described in the post weren’t really “branding.” Here’s a representative comment:
“Wow, you clearly do not know what the definition of branding is. A brand is a collection of perceptions in the mind of the consumer. EVERYTHING the brand does makes up that perception - the product itself, the sales team (are they rude or nice), the name, the logo, the price, the packaging, the placement, the promise delivered by advertising. All of these pieces make impressions on the consumer and the sum of these impressions is the brand.”
Actually, I’m quite familiar with this definition of branding… and I think it’s a crock. It’s a marketing-centric way of looking at business that’s specifically designed to fold everything that happens under the aegis of marketing.
It’s a vision of “branding” that bundles trivial things (mostly controlled by Marketing) with important things (mostly controlled by other groups) and then lets marketing take credit for the whole kaboodle.
The concept of “branding” is, in short, simply a power play that allows Marketing to pretend that they’re “driving” the business. It’s a concept that channels budget money toward Marketing, where it is usually wasted on egregious nonsense.
For a marketeer, being “responsible” for “branding strategy” means that you don’t have to do any REAL marketing. It means being able to kibitz on everyone else’s job and taking credit for the real work that goes in Sales and Engineering.
More importantly, the concept of “branding” frees Marketing from being measured objectively, because “brand equity” is measured by (guess who!) companies staffed by marketeers who sell their services to the marketing groups who are supposedly being measured.
Now, I don’t think for a minute that marketeers are stupid. Far from it. They’re smart. They know that they’ll have more fun and a faster career path if they use this grandiose notion of “branding” to avoid objective measurement.Because here’s the dirty little secret: REAL marketing is hard work. It’s not all that fun.
Real marketing consists of two functions: generating quality leads and reducing sales costs. Every traditional marketing activity, if effective, does one of those two things.
If an advertisement, for example, doesn’t draw in customers (lead generation) or make them more inclined to buy (reduce sales cost), it’s crap. Same thing with brochures, positioning statements, market research, channel building, product training, etc., etc.
Many marketeers hate that their REAL job consists of generating quality leads and reducing sales cost, because those activities can be measured objectively. And (unlike doing a re-branding exercise and having it measured by your cronies), you might get fired or demoted if you fail.
In other words, marketeers are driven, by both training and inclination, to conflate what’s good for their career with what’s good for the company.
Armed and empowered with a “branding strategy,” marketeers ALWAYS gravitate towards activities that are fun and expensive.
Here’s an example. Suppose you had a choice between the two following activities:
- Shadowing five sales rep on 20 sales calls to determine which marketing messages are proving effective and which are falling flat.
- Making big budget industrial videos on expense account in New York, while hanging out with the hottie interns who work for the ad firm.
Which sounds more fun to you?
Here’s another example. Suppose you had a choice between the two following activities:
- Researching and installing a lead generation application where campaign results can be measured and where failure means a demotion.
- Working with the CEO on a management directive to force employees to use the new tag line every time they answer the telephone.
Which do you think give you more chance of advancing up the management chain?
How do I know all of this? From personal experience.
I’ve worked inside marketing groups. I’ve jawboned about “brand.” I drank the kool-aid and ladled it out to top management. I’ve spent the big bucks.
So I know whereof I speak, even though I’ve since seen the light.
If I could do it all over again, I’d go back to all the sales pros whose time and money I wasted in the past and BEG forgiveness. Then I’d listen to what they had to say and figure out some ways to make their jobs easier.
