Branding’s mid-life crisis
By Simon van Wyk
I’ve been on my soapbox for a long time about the need for advertising and marketing to focus on delivering commercial value and not rely on vague concepts like “brand dialogue” (see, for example, my rant on interactive agencies trying to be ad agencies).
While I’ve found a number of pundits who agree with me (check out the enormous amount of heated debate when my rant appeared on mUmBRELLA, I didn’t expect to find one who came from the heart of branding territory. But Jonathan Salem Baskin, former executive at Grey Advertising in New York and Los Angeles, has become, in his words, “a defrocked priest, a turncoat” and is now working as a marketing and strategy consultant, as he puts it, “propagating my heretical views” for the same types of clients for whom he previously produced branding campaigns.
When I read Jonathan’s book “Branding Only Works on Cattle”, which was published late last year, I knew I had to do a HotHouse podcast with him, which we’ve published this month
. The book is a quip-filled expose of branding, and he talks like he writes.
His mantra (which was the original title of his book) is “Branding is dead; long live branding.” He’s not against the concept of branding, but he’s an opponent of where advertising has taken branding during the past 50 years.
Today, when most people think of a brand or branding, they think of value attached to a logo, or a feeling about a company, its product or service. But Jonathon says that’s all wrong, arguing that “Brand is behaviour. It’s an aggregation of what people do in regard to your product. What they think and feel is important, but what they do is paramount.”
“A brand is not a feeling,” he says. “Feeling hungry is not the same as being fed.”
Jonathon traces the decline of branding back to the 1960s. While a generation of advertising pioneers such as David Ogilvy created ads that sold benefits, he writes, “The post-war boomer generation started to come of age, and individuals and society alike became more critical, self-conscious and self-focused.
“A distinction between branding and marketing was codified, and the distance between the two functions grew. Branding took charge of imagery, creative and humour, all in the hope of overcoming consumers’ growing mistrust, while marketing continued communicating product or service benefits.”
Now we have a situation where the advertising industry trumpets the values of brands via annual top 10 lists, but can’t say how that “value” translates into sales and profits. Jonathan says measuring the value of brands is like trying to prove that ghosts exist. “Brands are ghosts that everyone senses, but nobody sees.”
Meanwhile, thanks to the Internet, markets and marketing have changed. “We are the last generation of the mass media market,” he says. As predicted in “The Cluetrain Manifesto”, markets are now conversations, happening both with and without companies involved, and recommendations are trumping traditional advertising.
But, as he points out, this isn’t a revolutionary new development so much as a return to the pre-branding era. “If you take out the technology contexts, it’s like the medieval markets – a return to the way we used to buy. It’s a messy village of communication, a return to the old-fashioned – we need to unlearn the habits of the past 50-60 years.”
According to Jonathan, “People don’t want advertising; they want help to make the right decision.” In the same way, he says, “People don’t want to visit doctors, per se; they just want to feel better.”
He’s not necessarily a big fan of current online marketing trends, pooh-poohing most of the attempts by corporations to use Facebook, Twitter and blogs to build a relationship with their customers. “I don’t want a relationship with you – I want you to buy the damn thing, over and over.”
He encourages his clients to build behavioural models around broad context – “a pathway to buying stuff” – and not around a relationship with the brand.
Just as customers are seeking more practical solutions to their needs and wants, Jonathan Salem Baskin has some very simple, frank advice for marketers and advertisers in the modern marketplace: “Make a declarative statement – ‘Our shit is better than their shit’ – and then deliver on that promise.
“Replace brand image with brand reality. Identify what consumers want – good service, better financing, new features – and go about delivering it to them.”
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