Protector or Coercer:
What do people experience with your brand?
Let’s be clear: Don’t mistake what your brand is for what you think it should be in the marketplace.
In your mind, your brand might be a powerful fighting machine that frees people from the tyranny of their current situations.
In the mind of the marketplace, your brand might be a powerful fighting machine that violently shakes their houses and tosses glass jars off of shelves as it rolls down their streets, then unloads heavily armed people who don’t speak their language and push them and their young, scared and crying children around at the point of a gun.
A brand is the perception people have based on actual mental and emotional experiences, influences from others, and their own imagination. People range in their acceptance of anything, from being open-minded, to cautious and protective, all the way to being downright suspicious. Since their perceptions can cover the whole range, your brand covers the whole range, regardless of the words in your “branding statement.”
That perception is heavily influenced when they interact with the personnel of your company. And for many of you, you are the sole driver of the vehicle they experience: you are the brand.
Brands started as the logo mark seared into the backsides of livestock to identify their owners. The owner of the Gentleman’s Ranch thinks his brand stands for “happy, contented cows delivering superior food experiences at reasonable prices.”
Meanwhile, you take a happy, contented Sunday drive in the countryside and, in your mind where brands are really determined, you experience one of their marked cows and have one of these seared into the backside of your thoughts and feelings:
- “The Gentleman’s Ranch has gentle, smelly, fly-infested cows.” Or maybe,
- “Darned tootin’, those are mean, unpredictable, crazy cows. I’ll be careful approaching them again — they’ll likely charge and stomp me without warning.”
And so one little unfortunate incident by a frustrated cow ruins the brand for you: “Gentleman’s Ranch All-Natural Cheddar. From cows out to kill me.”
On a bigger scale, one little unfortunate incident can spark a firestorm that can quickly incinerate your company:
- the 1982 cyanide poisoning of the Tylenol brand of pain reliever (and the widely admired Johnson & Johnson crisis management and recovery over the next several years)
- the loss of confidence in the creditworthiness of an investment bank, instantly stopping their vital artery flow of day-to-day credit and eventually erasing the entire industry, or
- the tipping point that mobilizes mobs that roam and rule the streets, overthrowing tyrannies of 18th century monarchies and 21st century dictatorships.
So, as you roll your tanks to win the hearts and minds of the marketplace, just remember:
Once you get inside and shut the secure hatch, all they experience is your tank. Drive carefully.
So what do you think: Is modern branding a bunch of hogwash invented by ad agencies so they could produce feel-good public relations rather than stand in front of the firing range and be held accountable for producing revenue? Does branding even apply to a small or extremely small business? What interesting, odd, or even horrid brand experiences have you had, as business owner/manager or as customer? Comment below now:
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{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
Branding is a great idea and necessary for larger companies with deep marketing budgets. For us little guys, finding a way to move up on the google list, eventually to the front page, is a major accomplishment done by branding our names on a smaller scale. The bigger the brand, the tougher the consequences for mistakes….and mistakes do happen all the time. You just hope it doesn’t happen to you. If we little ones mess up, damage control is usually direct and personal and without the multi-million dollar recovery plan. Take for example the Michael Richards case or Don Imus’s debacle with the Rutgers Girl Basketball team. Talk about a firestorm! Not that I would, but should I drop a few bombs like they did, I can guarantee you it wouldn’t cost as much in dollars or in career as it did those fellows. Perhaps branding has been shed upon us by the Ad industry which is a self fueling engine. Develop brand loyalty, but don’t get pigeon holed into a corner with the wrong branding. More budget, focus groups and a new campaign to better position the brand vs. competition. It could be matter of time when somebody somewhere simply screws up. Now go into damage control with a huge campaign, then huddle up and protect it with another campaign should the unfortunate happen to you. I think you might call that getting you coming or going. That’s my take on the “B” word for tonight.
Roger,
Thanks kindly for your well thought out comment.
You bring up an important point on branding and screwups “for us little guys:”
damage control is ”direct and personal”. Because of this, “little guys” often can respond quickly and effectively to contain the fire and extinguish the flames because the business relationships are direct and personal – such as with a handful of sincere phone calls. It’s less likely that international news wires or even the local news will find your screwup and broadcast it, and you find yourself holding a press conference where you shed some carefully crafted alligator tears of apology and rescue your brand.
Bill: As a large company, that begs the question “What do you really get out of Branding”? Are you another widget in the myriad of products that do the same thing and is it worth it to differntiate yourself in that way at such a high cost? Customer service is still the best way to differentiate…service to the communites, businesses and consumers you serve. All equal, how does your company exist in the global marketplace and what value do you bring to the world? Sounds far fetched, but really, if you are to “Brand” yourself, why not do it as a good corporate citizen to our world rather than outperforming the competition? It is a new perception of our up and coming generations and the apologies may be farther and fewer in between as this generation may be more forgiving for possible mistakes.
Roger:
If branding is solving the problem of “cutting through the communication clutter,” or differentiation, I think many have put the branding cart before the product or service horse. That reflects people’s general behavior of treating symptoms or appearances rather than the underlying conditions: branding becomes a band-aid quick fix and is easier than consistently offering quality and value.
Your suggestion (“customer service is still the best way to differentiate”) is fantastic and addresses the causes. I don’t think that “good citizenship” is far-fetched as a branding strategy. True leaders have always done it by demonstrating their integrity through actions consistent with their words, by serving others. Servant leadership.
Some businesses are guided by an internal compass to do the right thing, although most seem to still slap a band-aid appearance based on what they learn their market wants. So you end up with extremes of companies that sincerely re-engineer their processes to be green (leadership) while others launch green initiatives backed by branding campaigns solely for profit (giving the customer what he or she wants).