Wherefore Art Thou, Brand?

by Jonathan Salem Baskin

Adjusting to marketing's new realities.

Underlying all great math is philosophy . . . only most marketers don’t see it that way.

I’m not sure many marketers have an appreciation for just how profound management science can be. We think philosophy is our exclusive domain. Our answers come from inspired painters, angry musicians, and befuddled poets, whose personal expressions of emotion and feeling are themselves universal truths, in need of no substantiation or repeatability by experiment. Such details are, well, meant for the technicians who work out those sorts of things. People like you.

For those of us who grew up in the liberal-arts world, it’s not surprising that practices of branding and marketing have evolved independently from the waves of massive transformation that have washed over the corporate world for the last hundred years or so. Companies have turned themselves upside down, sometimes repeatedly, in pursuit of ways to do business better and more profitably, yet we marketers have been basically absent from this transformation, keeping definitions and experience of brand an externality or an intangible component of business practice.

So although we talk about brand as a business strategy, it’s often no better than a ghostly apparition in a séance room. You legitimately might want to turn on the lights to see what’s going on, but we marketers want to keep the room dark, because only then can the reality of brand be sensed, however indirectly. And only we can sense it, because while you have the numbers and ratios of your management science, we own the parascience of brand. And never the two shall meet.

Until now.
We’re loath to admit it, but our branding world is in a state of utter disarray. Consumers have more ways to interact with businesses, and they possess more numerous and easy-to-access ways to switch that interaction between providers. Too much detail and too many variables make every interaction unique; life is just inherently complex and messy, and our old presumptions about the power and relevance of branding have a diminishing influence on the when, where, or why of consumption. So consumers have become harder to reach, more difficult to convince, and nearly impossible to keep loyal. Great brands have no easier time delivering results than lesser names. Customer satisfaction is at an all-time low, and soare most corporate reputations. Even our best and brightest inventors haven’t given us the answers to this conundrum.

Worse, we’re ill-equipped to solve the problem on our own. If you’re a non-marketer, you’re intimately familiar with the struggle to figure out how to improve the performance of the gizmos you manufacture, or to come up with a new way to wring minuscule amounts of cost savings from a production line. An experiment in the branding world has different criteria and performance benchmarks; we create ways to prove our a priori beliefs, and then discard the evidence that doesn’t fit. This yields a wacky set of measures, such as awareness, promoter scores, and a variety of gibberish numbers labeled “ROI” that just don’t fit into the math you use to run the rest of the business. In fact, our methods help ensure that the emotional, potential-rich universe of consumer thought stays removed from the rational, statistics-based world of business operations.

In fact, we don’t acknowledge the fundamental dichotomy between the methods behind your pursuit of quality (statistical processes and software tools) and our pursuit of brand (customer perceptions and intent). Brands are just different than everything else the company does, so while you have consistent, agreed-upon criteria by which to practice and measure your work, branding has no such underpinning on which everyone agrees. We’ve just never felt compelled to come up with a competing theology beyond our vague hopes and beliefs. No two of us agree on much of anything save the utter importance of our work. We’re kind of like a loose affiliation of UFO enthusiasts, preferring to find new proofs of what we believe, instead of developing objectively real tools to discover the things we need to know.

Until now.
We need your help to fix branding, because our basic tenets of positioning and communicating don’t fully address our networked, realtime world. Nothing follows a script anymore or, at least, not a static one: There are an infinite number of issues that both customers and would-be customers might experience. This means that the outbound component of branding no longer resides in marketing, sales, or any single department within the organization. The inbound component of customer service isn’t the exclusive domain of a phone or e-mailanswering corporate function, either.

Today’s customers aren’t yours or anybody else’s, and they don’t swear allegiance to brands. Rather, they belong to nobody but themselves, and the behaviors to which your business is privy may have absolutely no connection to their other behaviors, other personas, at other places and times. You get a slice of the consumer, at the moment he or she behaves in a certain way that is relevant to your business goals. And your challenge is to configure your business to maximize those moments, and provide the context and causal direction that make them meaningful to the reality of your bottom line.

Call it branding, or call it Fred. Just don’t use the nomenclature or processes that form the canon of your statistical-controls approach. It’s wrong, just like our branding approach, because both ideologies fail to capture the totality of our shared circumstances. They’re incomplete, inadequate models for dealing with consumer behavior.

Just as customers are not engaged in the contemplation of brand attributes or in having relationships with them, they’re also not residing at the end of a production line or at some imagined “center” of an organization that can “manage” them with software systems.

There is no center to the organization.

Instead, company activities and customer perceptions are intertwined in many ways — communities, dependencies, partnerships, outsourcing, transactions, product or service experiences — and it is in these relationships that brand and business are realized. Any and all operational functions of the business are as important to the brand as anything marketing might do. Brand is the verb of these behaviors made relevant to your bottom line.

It takes a company to establish, interact with, and support the networks of people who constitute a market, an employee base, a supplier and vendor community, and any third-party grouping of friends, critics, or interested others. It takes a company to be the brand, not just talk about it, or sport the same uniforms. Never before has this reality been so obvious, or needed our collaborative attention.

Until now.
I think you need to reach out to marketing with an intervention. Like sparring spouses, or negotiators from opposing sides of a war, the two approaches to corporate purpose — branding on one side, statistical controls on the other — should sit down and together rewrite the rules. Acknowledge that neither methodology captures all of the components, let alone the spirit, of your business goals. Agree that every strategy and activity serves a shared objective: sales. And leave behind your preconceived ideas about how, where, and when those actions should arise from your business or the networks in which it operates and, instead, address the factual, observable reality of behaviors. By bringing brand marketing into the fold, you can together define a workable model that delivers and encourages the behaviors that constitute your branding.

It won’t be easy. And it will require a lot more than the cool, techno-seductive excuses offered in whatever branding tome is currently the rage. There’s a strong case to be made for just tolerating the status quo: You could hire another guru to host sessions wherein your team can assemble polygons of brands, or dip candles of branding, or something else utterly inane. Branding could continue to be some percentage of sales, or a line item that you comfortably write off the balance sheet, and nod with a bemused smile as the marketing people assure you that the “equity” exists somewhere else. Only it’s going to cost you ever more money as consumers continue to walk away from branding. Even if you choose to ignore the impact of consumer behaviors, those actions will continue to negatively impact your business, even as the marketers scramble to find fixes. Behaviors matter, pure and simple, and you can empower your organization to unleash the resources both financial and intellectual to deliver a relevant and measurable new approach. Wherefore art thou, brand? Right in front of you, in your business. There was never a better time to reach out to marketing and begin the process of rapprochement.

Until now.

Jonathan Salem Baskin runs a global branding consultancy, blogs at dimbulb.typepad.com, and is author of Branding Only Works on Cattle: The New Way to Get Known ( and Drive Your Competitors Crazy).