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Museo Rufino Tamayo - Mexico

The view that you can build brands with advertising has always been a myth. This a point that I made in an article published in 2005 reviewed by @karllong here the original has moved to here. The producer of  MEDIA@SAfm had dug this out and invited Brett Morris group creative director at DraftFCB and I to discussed it on this sundays show.

It was surprise when I saw the article lying on the host Ashraf Garda’s desk but I thought that it was really cool, firstly to see how consistent I have been in my views of how marketing works, and although I am into social media and stuff now its still the same philosophy, its just that the tools have become more powerful.

The point is that brands were always built by the experience customers have of the brand, advertising can create expectations but its the real experience that determines the brand. What changes now is the speed at which people can share experiences through their connections and  social networks on the internet and on mobile phones. So the expereinces that they share are even more likely to be real than what the advertiser tells them they should be.

Not that there isn’t a role for Advertising in the future – there is but its a different one.

This is the space in which I launch the new PiKE | The integrated new marketing agency in January.

PiKE Thinking at altconference Jhb thanks ZA5 for photo

At the alt conference in Joburg I spoke about the way we think about social media and marketing and the disconnect.

The key impact of the Internet is a social one. We really cant look at the changes brought about and see it in either technology, SEM or traditional marketing terms.

Branding works because we believe can build brands by strategically adding performance, image and emotional associations to a product or service offering, and if we do it often enough and convincingly enough through our advertising our brand will gather a loyal following.

Advertising thinks about how to effectively interrupt people by producing advertising that is RELEVANT (or else it has no purpose) ORIGINAL (or else it wont be noticed) and IMPACTFUL (or else it will make no lasting impression)

Search engine marketing (SEM) especially SEO (search engine optimisation) is concerned about building a road map so people can find your site, and driving as many people as possible to that site.

Brands only exist in the minds of consumers, and branding as a strategy can only work if brand owners can manipulate perceptions. In an environment where the power which comes from the control of information has evaporated as consumers have almost unlimited access to brand and product information the brand building process is in the hands of the consumer, its now their experiences and the experiences of their “friends” that build the brand legend.

The power of social media are aptly demonstrated by the role of twitter in the Iran elections, the shootings in Mumbai and the earthquake in China. These demonstrate that the links between people are more important than the channels, one way in the case of traditional media or even two way in the Web 2.0 sense.

To be successful, I suggest, we need to think of the internet as the most efficient disseminator of stories, of word of mouth (to give it a label) ever invented and to engage with the market in the way we would build relationships in the local pub. Until a century or so ago we all lived in villages, tightly knit communities and we had those skills. Industrialisation robbed us of them and now the technology has allowed us to revert to our natural state.

The world is once again a village, we all talk to each other and we all know each other as people.

To understand how to market in this “New” world we need understand how we marketed in the “Old” world. That this is nothing to do with technology that has recreated the village nor branding nor marketing its about society and social dynamics.

To market in the new world we have to give the market the tools to build our brands for us.

Thanks Paul for setting up #altconf

One of the assumptions underlying traditional brand management is that you can control the brand. That through advertising, brand associations and other brand tools you can manage perceptions. It was probably always a tenuous assumption at any time, but in digital marketing even more so.

Firstly Brands exist only in the minds of customers and are influenced by many forces, this has always been true and is in the final analysis determined by the customer experience, the actual interaction between the brand and its customers.

The lady in the picture Viviane Castro certainly had no permission to have President Obama’s likeness on her left thigh at the Rio Carnival this year.

What did that do to his brand?

When you put your brand into the hands of  the customer you have to accept that they will interpret it in the way they want to, do you find that scary?

Not at all that’s what they have always done – brands only exist in the minds of customers. Customers control the brand you don’t.

You don’t brand anything, you earn your brand.

Has there ever been a topic less well understood than Brands and Branding? I read about Brands all the time and am always amazed just how badly. The only term less understood is marketing – which is not the same as advertising by the way.

A brand is a simple concept. It is nothing more or less than a product, service, company, or person’s reputation, invariably it is linked to a device (logo) which becomes a mnemonic for the values the consumer associates with it.

The process of brand management is making sure that the associations people have with the brand are consistent with that reputation. So like you would manage your reputation by not getting into a position of getting arrested in a brothel, you manage your brand by making sure it is consistent. Its the same process.

You need to understand that;

• Brands exist ONLY in the minds of people (customers).
• Brands are built mostly by the experience people have of the product or service.
• Brands have an emotional and a performance component.

Brands are not the possessions of companies, they are the possessions of consumers.

In the article Branding Desperately Needs to Rebrand Itself the authors refer to the fact that branding is fast becoming a dirty word in the boardrooms of Europe. Branding has not delivered. In itself its not really surprising as marketers have attempted to do the impossible, and they said that they could, Some still believe that they can.

Branding lost its way when the marketing profession decided that they could manage perceptions. Its a delusion that you can do so to any great extent for any extended period. As Abraham Lincoln said “You may fool all the people some of the time, you can even fool some of the people all of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all the time.” In the end the brand is formed, like any reputation, by the performance of the product or service.

AND

Now in the connected age customers have all the bull dust filters they need and can easily access the opinions of experts and others through online networks and blogs. Now you can fool even less of the people much less of the time.

Future marketers and brand experts need to understand that as they lost control of the flow of information and that control moved into the hands of connected customers so too they lost any hope of building brands except by consistently delivering value.

It’s a huge threat to the old ways and a massive boost to customers and good marketers.

Do you agree?