As I sit pool side at the happiest place on earth reading Small is the New Big I can’t help but come to the conclusion, that most companies are wasting their time and money on branding.
Don’t get me wrong I put on my t-shirt with a commercially licensed logo, Levi’s jeans, Nike sneakers, get in my Toyota, drive to McDonalds and order a big mac and coke more often then I’ll admit to. However for small and growing companies spending time, money, and resources on branding is not the most productive choice.
When you’re growing a business the best way for you to do any branding is to put out a higher quality of work. I remember reading that the average person has to see you name between 8 to 12 times before they remember you. The same person only needs to hear your name between 1 to 4 times from friend or acquaintance for them to remember it. (I really need a citeable resource for that and I just can’t remember where I read it or find it online).
If you wanted to make the argument that shameless self promotion and/or visibility building is branding, I might argue the semantics of the issue, but eventually agree it’s important. However shameless self promotion without the work to back it up, it’s just a load of BS. So work on having something worth promoting, before you actually start promoting.
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Since when is Toyota a brand worth mentioning? With the rest you are right, though.
B.
“So work on having something worth promoting, before you actually start promoting.”
I hate to say, “well, duh”, but seriously. Duh.
I think the people who are writing the books and the blogs touting branding and visibility building have to operate under the assumption you’re promoting a good, solid product or service.
The books are aimed at the people who normally spend all their time developing and producing high quality stuff, but who might erroneously think that simply having an outstanding product is *enough*…. and in many cases, it is not. A little shameless promotion and visibility building works wonders for those people.
Who would read a book titled, “How to fool people into buying your useless, piece-of-shit product” anyway?
I think the last sentence makes for a more accurate title of this piece since you are not actually saying not to spend on branding.
Also re: “However for small and growing companies spending time, money, and resources on branding is not the most productive choice.” – tell that to the people at Viatimin Water who just sold the company to coke for 4.1 bil and 50Cents (the rapper)who just net 400mil from the deal. They spent their branding dollars more than wisely.
You’re right. You have to do something notable before anyone will recognize your brand or before you become famous (infamous?).
If you’re just going out there spamming your brand or site around and your site doesn’t have the content to back it up, then why waste your time promoting or marketing it?
People will try something once and if they don’t have a good experience with your product, it tastes funny, or they don’t like the hotel room, then they won’t go back to that hotel. If you have a bad experience at Disney then you won’t be back.
Yes, it’s all about branding…but there also has to be a “total experience” there, as well. If they try your site, they love it, and they can’t remember how to get back to it then what’s the use of having it?
If someone loves your new energy drink but they cannot remember the name of it and cannot find it anywhere then they won’t buy it again (and get hooked on it).
Try to build your credibility as stated in this article and brand yourself. The best book for the Brand You would have to be ReImagine — I’m posting books for marketing and such on my site shortly – via the LibraryThing widget. But until then, you have to read that book, especially if you love books like Seth Godin’s Small is the New Big.
Great post again Mike
I think branding is still key, but it’s important to recognize that companies no longer ‘own’ their brand… the customers do. Gone are the days of the marketers owning the message – thanks to the Internet consumers do.
Where marketers used to create and mold the brand, now they need to harness consumers’ thoughts and messaging to fully leverage it. As well, they need to respond immediately when their brand is in danger.
“I think the people who are writing the books and the blogs touting branding and visibility building have to operate under the assumption…” that there is a huge demand for books that make people feel good about what they are doing and might give them nice sounding things they can do so they can feel busy.
One or Two books on a subject means that a few someones had something worthwhile to say. Hundreds on that suject mans that the audience has more money than sense.
When building a company its important to consider the brand, however until you reach a high enough level of income (and thereby marketing money) you generally don’t need to focus on it. This is especially true of net only businesses.
E-commerce businesses do need to remember that customers will search for them by name if they can remember it. Having an easy or semi-branded name doubles or triples your repeat and direct traffic.
Of course branding has a purpose and as I said above, you need to reach levels of income to justify spending money on brand advertising instead of direct marketing to customers.
I come from a strong anti-branding background and ethos. So much bullshit has poured from the mouths of so many marketeers about how brand was everything that I nearly lost it. The pinnacle of my loathing of brand was when my former employer, at the time Ask Jeeves, thought it a great idea to spend massive amounts of money making a balloon of the Jeeves character that would be inflated once a year for the Macy’s Day Parade.
Before that, a company in which I was there to open the doors, Direct Hit (eventually bought by Ask Jeeves) provided syndicated search results to numerous other search engines: Lycos, MSN, HotBot, and many, many others — a great business model which some fool decided would be great to mess up by branding as “Direct Hit”. One great idea: a $100,000 sweepstakes just to get people to come to the site. Hey, great idea! Compete with your customers by giving away your money. Doh!
So it is with a certain amount of reticence that I humbly disagree that branding is utterly worthless. My current company was at its inception a subsidiary of TripAdvisor. When I started there, no one knew anything about them — not me, no one. They absolutely ruled the SERPs, and still do. This is a brilliantly managed company, run by brilliant people. And they realized a few years ago that branding was necessary, and they spent a reasonable part of their money doing a branding effort. No balloons for the Macy’s Day Parade, no million dollar giveaways, no Superbowl ads, just common sense brand marketing. And now, you know about TripAdvisor. If you don’t, a friend will tell you.
And to me, THAT is branding. Make a name and look that is strong and consistent and memorable, and that friends will tell others about. And by friends, I mean people that will link to the best travel site on the web, TripAdvisor, just because they had a great experience.
Branding is mostly pure stupidity. But not all.
Tom
I’m going to both agree and disagree with you. I think there is a strong argument that creating a valuable, memorable product or service is, in and of itself, a form of branding. The moment you begin that creation or implementation of an idea into a company or product, you’re branding. But that doesn’t necessarily you’re doing it well.
The term ‘branding’ seems one of those ambiguous terms that gets tossed around a lot, with varying opinions on what it truly is. I think a lot of the case studies and products that Godin cites in “Small is the New Big” are, for their mere existence, a form of branding.
let’s say you’re a fast-food joint, and you create a much better work experience and benefits than other fast-food joints. That choice to change the experience of your workers is, in and of itself, a form of branding. Word will get out. That’s the kind of branding that’s difficult for a company to ‘control.’ It just sort of evolves. If you have billions of dollars, you’re likely to leverage this further into some sort of campaign. But the campaign alone isn’t what your story is about.
You can also exert influence over your brand perception through marketing means. I would say this is where I’m with you–a small start-up could see a ridiculous chunk of change go down the drain if they hire an agency for a campaign. Instead, they could read a Godin book, or another marketing related book, and likely find ways to substantially improve both their word of mouth marketing and conversion rates through a series of small, but meaningful steps. The key is the product or service really needs to be worth talking about.
If you’re trying to sell a piece of crap, you’re probably going to need to either be A) a brilliant marketer yourself, B) have Paris Hilton endorse it or C) spend gobs of money convincing people that your crap doesn’t stink and indeed, smells like roses. But if your product or service is, as Godin likes to say, remarkable–you’ve won more than half the battle.
Paris’ rates have gone up recently. Before anyone with a camera would get a show. Now that she has the street cred from doing hard time (a month?) I hear her rates have gone up.
Better get back to writing good content!
i agree, branding is hard especially for a small start up or a home base business, if you dont have people coming to your site whats is the point of branding?
I’m coming around to the branding school of thought, but there are three man points in my mind.
1. Pepsi buying ads so coke can’t
2. Cool logo, design, and great customer service (which can be done on a guerrilla marketing budget)
3. A great excuse for ad agencies to justify huge spends on flashy award winning ads that don’t necessarily generate profit.
Now your brand is only as good as what people and your google results say about you. It doesn’t take millions to keep that positive.
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