Branding

Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance. – Kurt Vonnegut

It amazes me that so many organizations don’t understand branding. They think branding is their logo, their TV ads, mailouts and handshakes for the cameras. Your brand is everything associated with you.

Like the websites you don’t maintain. Like the information you don’t update. Like the branding that is actually unbranding.

There are lots of examples but I’m not going to say or link to specific organizations because they are simply examples of what too many others are also doing – or, rather, not doing.

One site currently has a mention on its home page about a “planned maintenance period.” There are no dates referred to and, to make matters worse, it has been up there for about a year. That’s some long maintenance period!

I’ve tried contacting some organizations (using contact page information that is online). Very few respond, even with an auto-response. I wonder what impact that has on your brand?

One site spoke of a being in the running for 2009 award then linked to a page with information about the 2008 award. Again, what does that tell your customers about you?

I know of a newsletter that had major issues (meaning it was a waste of time and money) but at least had the benefit of taking only about an hour or less to set up and send. Now that it has been “rebranded” it takes eight or more hours to set up, has all kinds of special links to track usage and so on (which replicate a system already in place that does it more easily and quickly) and is primarily made up of old news content and products, products, products.

Utterly useless as an effective newsletter for either the business or its customers, it requires even more work and money than before and it all goes into the digital garbage because the branding is all about looks without substance.

In other words, the branding is really unbranding. It makes the company look bad.

Who dreams up this stuff? Who thinks their web presence isn’t important?

Why do they think that spending oodles of money on revamps and other marketing ventures is more important than maintaining the areas where customers actually go and try to use?

Myself, I would pour the money into anal-retentive people – the kind with obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) – and let them be as nit-picky has they can be about what is out there representing me and making sure it’s accurate, updated and, most important, useful for my customers.

And I’m pretty sure if I did, I’d cut my marketing budget in half.

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“Members of social networks want to spend time with friends, not brands.”

The sentence states the obvious but you have to wonder sometimes if the obvious isn’t the hardest thing to see. It’s from the Randall Stross article in the New York Times, Advertisers Face Hurdles on Social Networking Sites. It brings up a lot of questions about the idea of brands being on sites like Facebook, probably the biggest of which is, what’s the point?

As Seth says in his post, “… big companies are asking precisely the wrong question. They are asking, ‘how can we use these new tools to leverage our existing businesses?’”

Exactly. This isn’t about the online world, it’s about people. Unless someone is specifically looking to buy something, they rarely want to get a sales pitch. This is why so many ads in the various media are about entertaining rather than an overt pitch.

The phrase “social network” is made up of two key words: social and network. Social means people; network means connected.* A brand is not a person. A company is not a person. A company is made up of people but the entity itself is not human, so a personal relationship won’t be created, which is what social networks are about – people and relationships.

So what’s a company to do? I think, before ever beginning to develop ideas and strategies and so on, a change of mindset has to take place. At the AAAA’s 14th Annual Media Conference & Tradeshow (a year or more ago?), the P&G Marketing Chief Jim Stengel spoke. If you watch the video, it certainly sounds as if marketers are getting it.

But pay attention to the language. He refers several times to “consumers.” He says, at one point, “We’re all consumers.” He’s bang on there. But consumers are people. When you refer to people as consumers, you’re essentially saying, “What’s in it for me?” It suggests you only value people to the extent that they can provide you with something. Moreover, it’s the language of depersonalization. It sounds more like a statistical category than flesh and blood. People don’t define themselves as consumers, only marketers do. So if you go into a social network with the mindset that stats indicate consumers fitting the desired demographic can be found there, odds are you won’t connect.

Stross, in his article, quotes Ted McConnell, manager of interactive marketing and innovation at P.& G. (speaking for himself):

“I don’t want to be best friends with a brand,” he said. “It’s just stuff.”

And that’s the point. People want stuff, maybe even the stuff you’re selling, but they don’t want to have a personal relationship with it. For people, as the quote says, brands are “just stuff.” They want to have relationships with people: family, friends, interesting people who could become friends by engaging them in conversations through an interesting topic discussed by an appealing personality.

Online personality will build a brand far better than contests, “fan of” groups or any of the other attempts marketers have tried on social networks. And it’s very, very hard to do because a company inevitably has a struggle between finding that personality (human, an actual person’s name) and protecting the brand. There is a constant tension between the human voice, and what it is saying, and the non-human corporate entity that sees people as “consumers,” a demographic group to be mined. There is a fear of saying the wrong thing – or saying the right thing but the wrong way. So the corporate entity feels a need to control what is being said, and that’s where the personality starts getting removed from the online presence. Even with a name and face to it, the language becomes safe but bland.

It’s almost as if there is an inherent contradiction for marketers where online marketing is concerned: the only way to market is not to market. It does make sense but not intuitively, a least not for marketers.

So I guess the question becomes: How do you market when you are not marketing?

* Social doesn’t necessarily refer to people – animals are social as well. But in the social network context, it means people.

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Mark Ramsey at Hear 2.0 has a good post on picking a name. Researchers have four name categories of which the last two are the ones consumers find more desirable yet more often than not we go for the first two, or so I’ve often found. (See his post for more specifics on this.)

Based on my own gut response as a consumer, I tend to find the ambiguous and unexpected names far more intriguing than the more bland (to me) and descriptive names. (”We Sell Cars,” or “Really Good Italian Food” … not that these are names someone would choose, but I hope you get what I mean.)

Although the Hear 2.0 blog is geared to the radio industry, the post is applicable to any business. I think his last few words are worth quoting (and remembering):

As I have said before, a name is who you are, not what you do.

And a name should be less about where you are than why you are.

It should be anything but common.

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You can spend all the money you want, run all the ads you can, do all the community work that needs doing … and then? This happens:

Tim Hortons rehires fired woman

As you can see by this update on the story (which was originally about an employee being fired for giving away a 16 cent timbit to a child), Tim Hortons is doing some triage to minimize the damage.

One incident, in one of their hundreds of locations in Canada, quickly became a national story. I was amazed that the one linked above, on globeandmail.com, already had 553 comments at the time I’m posting this (usually, I think they might get between 20 and 30 comments, if that).

It’s a good example of how your brand can go sideways – real fast. I think with branding, your most important asset is your product. Next biggest asset is your employees. Third would be the image you try to put out their through ads, community involvement and so on. Yet for many companies, their biggest focus, sometimes their only focus, is that third one. (I’m not saying that’s the case with Tim Hortons. Sometimes s*** just happens.)

I guess all I’m saying is, after your product, your biggest asset is your people. (But even great people will have a hard time selling, and keeping morale up, when the product is crap.)

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