Yesterday morning I read the lead article in RISMEDIA’s enews entitled: “Nine Things Consumers Won’t Care About in the New Year.” The list was developed by Jimmy Vee and Travis Miller, two “marketing experts” who blah blah blah.
Item 7 on the list of things consumers won’t care about was: “Your Brand. They only care that the experience of doing business with you is sensational.”
Are they kidding? Did they really mean that? If so, they hit the nail on the head regarding one monumental marketing misconception: that Brand means Name Recognition. Name recognition is only one part of your Brand. It’s the foot in the door part. It’s the part that matters most if you only want to do business with someone once. Thinking that name recognition is your Brand is like thinking that you are your makeup, or the car you drive. Those things might impress but they don’t define. Unless, of course, you live in L.A.
Name recognition is the part of your Brand that the ad agencies love most because name awareness campaigns are easy to sell (for lots of money), hard to connect to your bottom line results and thereby make the agencies unaccountable for tangible results. For ad agencies, it’s a gig made in heaven.
Here’s a fact. The kind of experience people have in doing business with you IS an integral piece of your Brand. To believe that your Brand is about name recognition alone is a costly and dangerous misstep. It could cause you to spend lots of money, tons of time and get no return on your investment.
If we define Brand solely as the strength of your name, consider some people and entities with great name recognition: Osama bin Laden; Enron; O.J. Simpson; Blackwater. Would you want the expectation of the experience of dealing with them as the motivator for doing business with you?
I believe your Brand is a widely held set of beliefs and expectations about what you deliver and how you deliver it. That applies whether you’re an individual or a multi-national organization. Your Brand is strengthened or weakened by every person in your organization and every function performed that directly or indirectly touches anyone. It embraces things like (and this is not an all-inclusive list):
- Name recognition
- Expectations held by the vast majority of people who will or might do business with you about what they can expect from you.
- The experience(s) that people have when they deal with you. Do those experiences exceed, meet or fall below their expectations.
- The consistency of many experiences.
- How you deal with people after the sale: customer service and how you solve problems.
- How and how well you maintain continuity of relationships with customers and potential customers.
- The perceived value received for the price paid.
How do your experiences either coincide with or contradict this definition? I’d love to hear your stories and observations.
Russell Shaw says:
I totally agree. Well said. Our brand is factually the “shelf space” we occupy (or not) in the mind of the consumer. It is the total package of what they think.
The only thing I take issue with was you only took up point 7 of what Jimmy & Travis wrote, when pretty much everything they had to say was crap. 🙂
December 14, 2007 — 12:30 pm
Bill Leider says:
Russell,
Point 7 hit me between the eyes and my blood pressure went up 100 points when I read it because I’ve done a lot of consulting work in the area of defining and building the strength of one’s Brand. We obviously use a much more holistic approach. Thanks for your comment.
December 14, 2007 — 1:02 pm
Ken Montville says:
Disclaimer: I didn’t read the entire RISMedia article. I just read the post.
This brings a lot of stuff up for me but I’ll try to be brief.
Branding is important. It used to be called “the neighborhood expert”. You know, the Realtor with lots of signs in the yards, lots of postcards in the mailbox, etc. Now, it’s the Realtor with the recognizable logo, the Realtor at the top of the search page when you type in “anywhere usa real estate”.
Sure, sensational experience is wonderful…it’ll get you a referral. It may get you repeat business in the average seven years it takes for someone to decide to move. But if you want to attract someone in order to provide them with sensational experience you need to have a brand. I’m guessing (just a guess) that’s why the RE/MAXs and Coldwell Bankers, and Long and Fosters spend so much money on branding.
Unfortunately, real estate is not like a department store where there is an exceptional experiential difference between Wal-Mart and Neiman-Marcus — one that I would take advantage of again and again in a relatively short period of time.
OK. I’m off my soapbox now.
December 14, 2007 — 3:21 pm
Broker Bryant says:
Bill, as you know, I am a oneman operation in a small niche market where I have been for 14 years. My barnd is my company name, my name and my reputation for getting the job done. The srtonger of these three is my reputation. Without the other barnding is worthless. So I concure.
December 16, 2007 — 2:24 pm
Broker Bryant says:
Bill, as you know, I am a one man operation in a small niche market where I have been for 14 years. My barnd is my company name, my name and my reputation for getting the job done. The srtonger of these three is my reputation. Without the other barnding is worthless. So I concure.
December 16, 2007 — 2:25 pm
Jeanne Breault says:
I’m a little late in commenting on this, but I do have something to say!
I think in it’s simplest, most useful form brand simplifies decision-making for all the reasons Bill outlined.
While it may be true that consumers THINK they don’t “care” about brand, they aren’t necessarily AWARE of the influence brand has on them. I think they DO care BECAUSE it makes decisions easier. In these days of multiple choices in an extremely fast-paced society with a consistent barrage of media messages, brand is huge.
In a word, brand implies quality: good or bad. How many of us have heard (or maybe said), “I’d never buy a Chevy/Ford/Mazda…” or “I always buy Apple/Microsoft/HP…” or “I’ll never use ReMax/Coldwell Banker/Assist 2 Sell…” Brand contributes to the “this/not that” of decision-making.
Consumers don’t care about our brand? Bah, humbug!
December 28, 2007 — 3:23 pm