We’ve Lost That Branding Feeling…
Strong brands.
They make businesses more valuable. CEOs and investors intuitively know it (even if they can’t value them on the balance sheet).
Yet, rather than the means for creating a key strategic asset, branding today seems little more than an afterthought.
Branding has become disconnected from the business value it creates
Think about it.
First, there’s the seemingly endless debate over brand vs performance marketing. Finally, some progress seems to have been made, thanks in no small part to the dogged efforts of Binet & Field’s The Long and the Short of It. But why was it ever a discussion in the first place? If strong brands make businesses more valuable, then clearly we need to invest in both.
Second, the debate itself rather reinforces the idea that branding is largely about advertising and promotion. But advertising is only one part of building and shaping a brand, and in a world where it struggles to gain attention, an ever smaller part. If I think back to the heyday of the 4Ps, Product, Price, and Place were just as important as Promotion. I was heavily involved in all of them.
Today, these are often fragmented across a variety of functions, such as Finance having responsibility for Price. It’s not that marketers need to directly manage these, I just don’t see much evidence that branding still has a significant voice. If strong brands make businesses more valuable, then we need to play a leading role across all the 4Ps.
Third, branding today goes even further. Brands are now defined by the customer’s experience (and the sharing of that experience). Every touch point needs to reinforce the brand we’re trying to build, which gives pretty much every department in the business a role in delivering it. If strong brands make businesses more valuable, then we need to orchestrate a coherent brand experience right across the business (a case of 4Ps and an E!).
Branding should really be stronger than ever. In a world where brands are defined through experience, business and brand are intertwined. Instead, branding has become disconnected from the value it creates for businesses. Only 10% of Fortune 250 CEOs are thought to have any marketing experience, and marketers often don’t even have a seat on the CEO’s executive committee.
Why has this happened?
Some argue that it’s down to marketers not talking the language of business. Maybe. We’re certainly prone to more than our fair share of BS.
However, there’s more to it than that. Under increasing pressure to demonstrate the ROI of what we do, marketers have been trying to adopt the language of business. But in doing so, we’ve disappeared down a rabbit hole of short term performance, since it can be measured and justified more easily. In the process, the bigger picture of building long term business value has been neglected.
Creating value for customers resonates more then branding
So what’s to be done?
The obvious solution is to explain how strong brands create long term value for the business, in language the business can understand. After all, there’s a wealth of evidence to draw on.
But unfortunately, the term brand has something of a branding problem itself. Starting off as a means of identification, it’s become so widely used that even marketers have very different definitions of what brand means. If we can’t agree among ourselves, how are businesses supposed to buy into it?
As CMO, I found it far more effective to sidestep the concept completely, and champion instead creating value for customers. Employees can relate to it far more easily. And when shown how it then creates value for the business, it really resonates, as it just makes so much sense.
Three simple connections can be made:
Creating Value For Customers Drives Business Growth
We create products and services that people want to buy, because they help people achieve their goals, better, easier, or cheaper than equivalent competitor products.
We help people understand what we offer before they enter the market, so that our products immediately come to mind, which makes conversion easier.
We deliver an engaging experience, so that customers are more likely to return and to recommend us to their friends and family, creating more customers.
Creating Value For Customers Increases Business Profitability
Once customers recognize we create value for them, then it boosts our profitability.
Either, because they’re willing to pay more for our products, increasing our margin.
Or, because people buy more of our products, increasing our volume and giving us benefits of scale.
Creating Value For Customers Builds Business Resilience
As customers come to trust that we continually create value for them, then it puts an economic moat around our business.
Our products become an automatic purchase for them, a habit, so they don’t consider or even notice other brands. We all know from personal experience how difficult habits can be to break.
Even if the habit gets broken, they still retain a strong preference for our products.
Regaining that branding feeling
Using the lens of creating value for customers puts branding at the heart of the business. Every activity and investment required can be connected back to one of these key business outcomes. It becomes self evident why marketers should be involved across every aspect of the business (4Ps and an E).
It may not directly use the language of branding, but it keeps the feeling alive…
