There’s always something to howl about.

What Is A Brand?

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.