Canadian Marketing Blog

2008 - "The Return of the Brand as King"

Yes I know, it’s a poor word play on the final installment of Tolkien’s famous trilogy, but I couldn’t help myself...

Every New Year brings with it lists of glorious predictions for the upcoming 12 months and an equally glorious set of lists recapping the trends that defined the outgoing year. The pundits are abounding with opinion; there is some interesting stuff out there. I’ve posted a few good links at the end of this entry, enjoy at your leisure.

Some common themes for 2008 cited by the experts are social media, all things digital and the morphing of various disciplines (media and creative, advertising and marketing etc.)

It is now accepted as a universal truth that advertising/marketing is a permanently dynamic practice. There is no single best practices hand book to help us navigate this progressive new world, just the one that is being rewritten in real time, as we all learn from experience.

But you already knew this. Unless you have been living under a rock for the past 3 or so years, none of this is new anymore. It is all that we have been hearing about, and consequently agencies and clients alike are responding, slowly but surely.

But how much during the past 3 years have you heard about branding?* Especially branding as it relates to today’s environment where consumers are exposed to thousands of messages a day and a new media outlet is created roughly every 7 seconds?

Well no matter how much you have already heard, I don’t think it is enough. 2008 should be the year where all we hear about and discuss is the brand. It is no longer about media (gasp, I can’t believe I just wrote that), technology or even the consumer for that matter. It is about the brand and media, the brand and technology, the brand and the consumer and most importantly the brand and long term strategy.**

The landscape has shifted so radically, most of us are so busy trying to keep up with the changes and the impact of these changes on our businesses that we are failing to see the forest from the trees. Former Adage Publisher Scott Donaton coined a great term, which epitomizes the situation, GMOOT- short for Get Me One of Those. It refers to a “…phenomenon that helps explain why there are so many lousy viral videos and half assed new media initiatives out there. They’re not the result of a real end strategy, but are done for the sake of doing something…”

It is time to step back and take a holistic view of our business – a 50,000 foot view if you will.

I think what we will find is that many of the fundamentals of branding still apply. Brand strategy is still the key to success, and your brand’s core values, the essence, the DNA, must remain static. We as marketers have never been in charge of our brands, this notion of consumer control is nothing new – a brand has always resided with the individual because a brand is a gut feeling*** of how a person feels about a product, service or organization. We as Marketer’s have always provided a framework for how we wish our brand to be perceived but we have never been able to control the end result of how it is finally internalized by the individual. The difference is that in today's WEB 2.0 era, we are now forced to hear what individuals really think and feel about our brands – and I say forced because this happens, whether you like it or not. Embrace it, factor it into your brand strategy. Now more than ever we must do as we say.

In 2008 watch for “The Return of the Brand as King.” Interestingly enough a sequel is already rumored to be in the works, the working title is “Brand Strategy leading Business Strategy…”

Some notes:

* The CMA put on a great conference 2007 entitled “Branding in a Sea of Change.” The follow up conference in June 2008 is one to mark on your calendar from now

**A great article in the July/August issue of Harvard Business Review, titled, If Brands Are Built over Years, Why Are They Managed over Quarters?, provides great support to the seemingly forgotten notion of long term brand planning.

***Marty Neumeier thoughts, a good read.

Links:

The Pundits - Media In Canada

Marian Salzman - EVP/CMO JWT Worldwide – especially insightful, the mention of radical transparency and cooperative consumption.

Sunni Boot – President/CEO Zenith Optimedia

Scott Goodson – CEO StrawberryFrog - mentions QR codes, a few campaigns have been executed in Canada using this technology but it is still far from mainstream. Semacode is a great Canadian company that has been involved with using the technology since 2003.

Maggie Fox – Founding Partner Social Media Group. Kudos to Maggie about being more optimistic than I am on the state of the nation. See “What surprised you this year.”

Bruce Claassen – CEO Genesis Vizeum

Tony Chapman – CEO Capital C

An Aggregation of great digital and internet prediction lists, a must view!

No one can dispute that brand has been the fastest growing segment of corporate valuation over the last 25 years, but I believe that we have yet to see social capital (i.e. the resources embedded in social networks, like social media, etc.) emerge as the force that it will be. We definitely have not fully evolved related best practices, so the area will continue to command practioners' attention, even if disproportionally so.

I talked to a half dozen senior execs from a number of leading agencies at a recent CMA event and received reports that social media assignments are only accounting for about 25% of new business - but they note that this 25% is leading to the remaining 75%.

Brand is king. So is TV. But there is a new marketing/communications mix that can not be ignored.

I agree with this post. I think that far too often people find the medium to convey the message prior to defining their brand. The GMOOT effect, as you put it.

However, what I find interesting is the fact that the new trends/mediums (such as social networking) are allowing new brands with compelling stories to be built from scratch over a very short period of time. Like Vitamin Water. It just created a cool brand story and through PR, viral popularity and strategic partnerships, it just got sold for millions.

Indeed brand has been somewhat lost by some marketers as they race to be where everybody else is. I think as important in the "brand' dialogue is the insight dialogue.

You mention the fact that consumers own brands, as they are a "gut feeling" how a person feels about a product or service. Then the elephant in the room is how do marketers really know how consumers and customers guts are feeling.

Do we really believe asking rational questions (quant or qual) will give us anything but rational responses. Is it any surprise so many brands feel the same and FEW are really differentiated no matter what the content or distribution method is.

No way near enough discussion has gone into the initial piece of hay that creates the haystack - the insight the strategy>idea>content>distribution was built from. If as you say a brand is the gut feel of consumers, then why are so few marketers and marcom agencies uncovering insights from the heart of consumers/customers. It has become so easy to just take the qual report from someone as gospel and then run out and build a haystack from it. No wonder so many haystacks look the same.