Did You Say Branding Was Dead?

Okay, okay. I took some heat for this but I'm standing pat. But I will help by explaining myself. I promise I'm not completely insane.

Transparent

Branding as your primary arsenal or as a pure marketing function is dead. The market place will not accept average products with extremely innovative marketing campaigns. In fact, if it isn't already, that will soon be the worst thing a company can do. Fancy marketing without any substance will not only cost bigger money but it will also cost reputation if the messaging promise and the reality of the product [including services] don't match. People will cut you to shreds like an infomercial on the Ginsu Knife. What will work is being a totally transparent company telling people about incredible products that will help improve their lives. The product or service as a remarkable brand is not dead. Creating a brand not based in reality is most certainly dead. Confused yet?

Break Through the Clutter

With the difficulty of owning the media because of the literally thousands of choices truthful marketing is becoming the only way to break the clutter. Breaking through the clutter is happening on the web, precisely where clutter is at it's highest. Why the web? Because this is where you can establish a one to one relationship based specifically on your product niche, and you can do that for free. Real, great and honest help break the clutter and they do it well.

Time As A Currency

Once someone is kind enough to buy your information with their time you can begin delivering your brand. Your brand, of course, is merely an extension of you, if it isn't you all together. What is more transparent than giving your customers you. Branding your customer, once you've worked with them in some capacity, is most certainly a great practice but don't think that it's the branding of ten years ago.

If you are a new age company or trying to roll with times in the belief you can survive, change and come out on the other side a great success, then you will embrace getting to know your customers, providing them with quality and won't waste their time. If you do, then you will fail. If you feel that you can merely do what you were doing, which is to say "advertising", then you will bleed to death.

New Branding

So how do you build your brand. If you are already bleeding to death you probably won't want to hear this. You build it one relationship at a time and you build it over time. There are no quick fixes. Here is a list of things you must do to establish a new brand in the hearts of today's consumers:

• Provide them copious amounts of bite sized information pieces
  
• Provide that information in only a relevant format. Relevant to them and not you. They don't care about you. They care about them.
• Ask them if you can continue to talk to them. Get their permission to delve deeper. Only continue to go deeper if they have agreed to hear more.
  
• Provide places for them to ask questions, rant, comment and seek your expertise but not on your terms...on theirs. [Most companies that understand this use blogs but voice mail that you answer, a 24 hr help desk, email of th actual CEO etc. are other examples of "on their terms".]

For those mired in doing things the old way this will seem crazy and costly. For those embracing the new market place this will seem inexpensive. Why? Old marketers will think they have to add labour to their bottom line. New marketers will think all they have to do is use more cost effective avenues to be excited about their fantastic products. New marketers will also realize that customer service is the top of the pyramid. How cheap. New marketers tend to already be excited about their great products, while old marketers are still trying to explain features and benefits [of mostly average products] that we already know about. It is great versus Goliath and as in the story, Goliath takes a beating.

Fight me if you want but the bottom line is this:

Branding in the hopes of building a great image for your product is most certainly dead. Ask Budweiser T.V. if branding works? $40,000,000 for a little bit of traffic. Letting your customers find out about you, learn about you, find your product incredible and then help build you and/or your company as necessary. This will ultimately build your brand and this will be how a brand is built. Probably the way it always should have been. But were human so we are slow.

What To Do?

So the answer to what you need to do is perfectly simple:

Go build incredible products and services. Simple right?

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