But Is It Any Good? Why Branding Should Always Play Second Fiddle

“Branding,” that buzz word of marketing- and ad-speak, is the reigning King of Concern for everyone from the small farmer to the seller of high-end gold clubs, but whether or not “branding” should be the basket where you put all your eggs is open to debate. As a concept, branding brings to mind logos, packaging, letterhead, websites, jingles and all the accoutrements that get attached to a product or service, but is a brand really what a customer is buying?

It’ s popular in some circles to believe that a brand is the thing being sold to a consumer, and while branding is of incredible importance to a marketing campaign and particularly fascinating to those wanting to study consumer behavior, it should never be confused with the product, service or company it’s representing. Just as the Buddha encouraged his followers to think of him as “A finger pointing to the moon and not the moon itself,” a brand should point to the product or service it represents.

What Is a Brand, Really?

A brand is the conglomerate of identifying marks, sounds, features, taglines and more that customers and potential customers associate with your company and what it does. In other words, your brand is whatever comes to mind when someone hears or sees anything about your business or products. In essence though, you brand is the promise you make to yourcustomer. As with all promises, your brand is only a good one if that promise is delivered. When a company looks to brand itself, what it’s doing—hopefully—is undergoing a process of self-discovery that asks and seeks to answer the following questions:

• What do we make or provide?
• What is our mission in that making?
• What are the benefits to choosing our products or services?
• What do we want customers to believe about us?
• What will we do to make sure we deserve that belief?

Brands are about setting up and managing expectations. Because of this, they are best when they come along after a product or service has been made and offered so that the expectations they generate are based in reality. A good brand seeks to embody the relational expectations that exist between a company and the people who buy into what that company offers.Lies, misrepresentation, obfuscation—these ensure that your brand will suffer when the smoke finally clears.

How the Brand-Consumer Relationship Is Changing

For consumers, brands can hold a wealth of emotions. From the effects of advertisingto the effects of a customer’s real experience regarding a product’s performance, brands get outfitted with some heavy—be it positive or negative—emotion. When it comes to doing business, it’s common for companies to spend just as much, or more, money on their branding and marketing efforts as they do on product development, quality control and the like, and consumers are getting wise to that dichotomy. If your company isn’t up to snuff, if your products aren’t passing muster, you can be sure that today’s savvier consumer, armed with the Internet, is going to find out about it. Brands are only as good as consumers believe they are, and increasingly, consumers are much more interested in the product than they are in the story around the product or the way that product is packaged.

How Branding Fails

The most obvious and common way a brand fails is when it leads the customer to believe something that isn’t true about the product or service being sold. While there are certainly occasions of branding that were intentionally misleading, for the most part, a brand’s failure to properly convey the product, service or company it represents is due to other factors, like:

• Inaccurate product quality representation
• Incorrectly assigned emotional value
• Misunderstanding the target audience
• Forgetting the customer’s experience
• Having a branding campaign that’s better than the product or service offered
• Having a branding campaign that isn’t about the product or service offered

 

Brand development and strategy is still a very important part of the consumer landscape. From connecting with potential customers to generating stories, a solid brand and brand campaign are still a necessary part of doing business, but if you’re in the business of leading with your brand and not with the high-quality product or service your company offers, it’s only a matter of time until your brand—and your business—end up tarnished.