Relying on Brand Awareness Has Become Marketing Fool's Gold

That's the opening principle in Scott Bedbury's A New Brand World. I'm re-skimming portions of the book preparing for the More Space essay (see last post). I love this book and by way of introduction, Bedbury was senior vice president of marketing at Starbucks froom 1995 to 1998 and prior to that he was head of advertising for Nike during the 'Just Do It' era.

Almost every brand in existence today can be reduced to the status of a commodity if it fails to effectively evolve both its products and its marketing communications. You can't do just one or the other.

[....]

At one point AT&T was spending more than a billion dollars per year on marketing, mainly to mitigate the negative effects of its bottom line from disloyal-customer "churn," an outgrowth of the widely available and heavily discounted offerings by competitors. Just as computer chips and sneaker once were no-frills items, phone service has become a commodity. Rather than reinvent the commodity, however, most phone companies opted to do what they had done since deregulation first hit in the mid-eighties. They plowed more and more money into traditional marketing schemes, nearly all of them complicated and sometimes deceptive promotions and dial-around services with myriad 800 numbers that connect callers to discounted long-distance providers.

I strongly suspect that most of these companies assumed that outlandish promotional budgets would help strengthen their brands, but in reality such excessive expenditures may have had a reverse effect. Nearly all of that high-cost telecom advertising delivered one brand-fatal message: the only factor that matters when it comes to phone service is price. Not service, not new technology, not friendly customer support, customer relations, or the quality of the people behind the brand. Any market where the only critical factor is price is by definition a commodity market. - A New Brand World, by Scott Bedbury

Although we're all aware of AT&T (I haven't been a customer for years) that certainly did not halt their demise. Musing about the Superbowl ads, I wonder how much scoring well on "brand awareness" or being voted the "cleverest ad" matters.

I notice in conversations and online forums that most bloggers are keen to find out more about "promoting and publicizing" their blogs. When I visit their sites, I usually note they are putting the cart way before the horse. The primary attention should be put on the product (in this case, their content), on what Bedbury calls your brand "foundation" or the brand's "genetic structure" (in this case, their voice) and engaging within the community as a peer, not a salesperson.

The world will not beat a path to your door simply because it is now aware that your door exists.

After the 2000 Super Bowl ad fiasco, a writer from USA Today interviews Bedbury. "You made it all look so easy," the reporter observed. "They think that all you have to do to create a great brand is to hire a hot ad agency, tell them they want 'Nike advertising' and 'spend lots of money.'"

The best brands never start out with the intent of building a great brand. They focus on building a great - and profitable - product product or service and an organization that can sustain it. Once that has been accomplished, you can slam your foot on the marketing accelerator and let the whole world know about it. But get ready to meet the demand created by that marketing or you will destroy your brand before it ever gets off the ground. - A New Brand World, by Scott Bedbury

Comments

[Diego from metacool]

I love Bedbury's emphasis on building. Building something that A) is great, and B) meets real human needs in a way that the marketplace can accept (i.e., it's profitable). The phrase "building a brand" really means "building all the myriad elements that build up to an experience that we can call "brand".

Great stuff.

[sam parker]

Scoring well on brand awareness and clever ads are important issues but their ultimate measure of success is sales results.

It all works together.

Value creation certainly comes first. But, the world will not beat a path to your door simply because you have a good product either.

Thanks, Evelyn.