BRANDING IS BROKEN:

WHY BUSINESS OWNERS ARE SCEPTICAL

& AN INTRODUCTION TO THE 4 Rs FORMULA

I regularly meet business owners and C suite managers and they seem to fall into two camps. Some understand the power of the brand but many don't, or see it as an endless black-hole of spending.

If you’ve been in business for years or have just started building a personal brand, you will most likely have heard the ‘know, like & trust’ definition of brand.

Many companies claim to measure how they perform on each of these aspects … although all too often the figures and metrics used do not really withstand robust investigation.

But there is also one aspect of an effective brand virtually every organisation I have ever known fails to get a true measure on. It’s the 4th pillar of a stable, growing brand that I rarely see even talked about..?

First let me stick with the first 3 aspects:

Know, Like & Trust

For the purpose of this piece I’m going to propose 3 alternative words that equate to Know, Like and Trust ...?Recognition, Reputation and Reach.??(Although reach maybe a bit of a ‘reach’ here!)

I needed all R’s to make my final introduction of the 4th?word of my formula follow an alliterative theme - and so make it easier for you to remember.?

The missing link, or the fouth R - is the missing leg that some of the best managed brands are using to ensure they are stable, sustainable and successful.

But let’s step back to the first 3 and that Know, Like and Trust definition first.

To be known people need to have encountered you and your brand.?

Depending on whose figures you use, most people generally accept that it takes around 7 ‘contacts’ or interactions before your customer will move from knowing about you to making a purchase from you. ?You have to show up, repeatedly. Move from simply know to liked & win their trust.

Some evidence suggests that the 7 contacts figure is actually growing larger. With our more digitally driven world, and a growing scepticism of much of the information available online, the number of contact point may be growing - but the speed with which they occur may conversely be shrinking.

The 7 contacts theory also assumes that all 7 of those interactions are positive and that no harm has been suffered through a poor experience or encounter.?

Historically, people have also used the know term here to encompass being known for something specific and different to your competition. Leveraging your brands USP if you like until you are commanding a place in the minds of your audience.

Like and Trust are replaced by my alternative R words Recognition & Reputation.?

Many people draw a parallel between brand management and reputation management - some have even suggested that a viable definition of branding is in fact reputation management (although that hugely limits the scope of what a really well defined branding strategy and brand involves).

But both do directly relate to the positivity of feeling in the relationship. Reputation is build by the quality of product, the quality of customer service and in what people hear about you/your brand.?Be that, word of mouth, online presence, social media chatter or simply overhearing a conversation on a train.

And it really doesn’t take much to damage a reputation and we all know that a bad review spread much faster and wider than anything a satisfied customer might say.

A good branding or marketing professional would look to measure these elements of a brand/companies position and performance.?

Many tools have been created to look at different metrics and gain valuable insight from the resulting data. Those specific tools are not the focus of this piece - so I’m not going to address any of them here.

REACH is a word I’d like to add into the formula here, but it is still not the secret source, 4th?R that is missing from many brands data. But we will get to that very soon!??

The idea of Reach is often witnessed more in the marketers remit but I would suggest most modern branding experts are just as concerned with Reach as they are with any other aspect of creating an effective brand.?

The 'how' of engaging the specific target audience, where the brand needs to show up. How it is positioned in relation to the competition and many other aspects of branding, I would argue, could all neatly fit under the of heading ‘brand reach’.

And so to my 4th R word - the big secret reveal, and the one aspect that people do not think about effectively enough in relation to branding is:

REVENUE

What is the bottom line impact? What is the ROI? What is the impact on the ledger sheet? These are the questions that many business leader feel are never properly answered when they are looking at their brand.

Recognition, Reputation, Reach and Revenue creates a much more compelling business case for why it’s important to invest in your brand and also to monitor how that brand is preforming.

I freely admit the various impacts of brand positioning, strategy and branding can be hard to measure.?

What is the financial impact of brand values or a mission statement? Is there a direct correlation to an increase in sales and profit margins?

Good branding is, after all, essentially about playing the long game. It can be highly complex to properly map and measure the customer journey. Deciphering where key points, such as the purchase decision point, occurs and what factors influenced that decision, is a complex ask - but it is not impossible.?

Marketing results are always easier to define. Which is why businesses are often more comfortable with marketing as a concept - and with investing in marketing activity than in brand building.

Here I need to state a caveat. Too many businesses also do not look at their marketing figures as forensically as they ought to either. Many take ‘last-touch’ figures as proof of the effectiveness of a particular action. They do not ask the hard questions of the data presented.??

For example, they’ll state that 32% of their new customers come via social media or 26% directly through their website.??Without a robust interrogation of the data this may seem correct … but the social media post that initiated the customers response may simply represent the ‘last touch’ of that individual customers journey.??All the pre-action touches might all have been via the same social media platform too - but it’s unlikely.

It’s far more probable that the customer has had various nudges on their journey to engage. Most likely they have encountered that brand on various SM platforms, maybe through direct email, visited the website, read articles, heard good things through friends or colleagues, seen adverts, visited a physical shop (or whatever physical form the brand my hold), plus many other potential contact points which have affected their willingness to do business with the brand.?

If they are a repeat customer then there are another set of metrics that can be looked at, and another set of brand interaction points to be considered. For example: How the sales staff handled their purchase, their attitude whilst doing so, the helpfulness, politeness and actions of the customer service team (if needed), the quality, effectiveness, design of the product or service itself, and various other insights can be gained that all contribute to how the business is perceived by the customer.

These factors are often outside the realm of marketing but do fit firmly within the remit of the brand.

Branding is by nature a holistic process. It incorporates every customer interaction point with the company or organisation. Everything needs to align and work together to reflect the overarching vision and mission.

BUT it also needs to translate to a benefit to the business. And it should be the branding professionals who make that benefit palpable. Far too often those benefits seem ill defined and ‘wooly’. This is an oft heard criticism from business leaders about branding activities. Which explains why some find the idea of brand investment problematic.?

We’ve all heard the well-worn adage “What gets measured gets managed”.??If we accept this as true then that means that if it’s not measured it goes unmanaged - and all too often this is true in terms of branding.

Another well used definition of branding is that it's the gut feeling someone has about a company. There is a lot of truth in that definition - and the problem is that feelings are notoriously hard to measure too.

However, tools and methodologies do exist to look at the various aspects of brand impact - and not doing so, I would argue, is only doing half the job when it comes to branding.?

Seeing how brand investment translates to increased revenue, in as quantifiable a way as possible, is surely what all businesses need to know. Without such data, branding remains a ‘dark art’ that for many is akin to alchemy.?

They see a never ending ‘spend’ that they believe comes back in ‘added value’ but are rarely, if ever, shown evidence in the way that the accounts department would like.?

I have often said that a large part of my job when working with a companies management team is helping the CMO and the CFO speak to each other in terms that both understand - without mis-communication and confusion.

When branding can be presented in a more cause and effect formula, we start to see it embraced much more readily at the board level. We also understand what the different levers do - and what levers to pull.??

The future of the branding industry is, in my view, the marriage of creativity and data.

There has been a great deal written about creativity (especially with the rise of AI - but that is also not the focus of this piece). All I would say here is that real creativity – the application of imagination, creating something new and unexpected, is the heart of the design, brand, and advertising.

These areas are all constantly evolving and changing and it’s true AI will definitely impact the more everyday activities and?more run-of-the-mill expressions.

But true imagination and creativity will still hold it’s own - from strategy through to advertising campaigns and marketing items. Magic happens here – and always will, which is why some will always see these activities somewhat as alchemy.

But the branding industry needs to address the concerns of those in the business world who want to see hard and fast figures or they will always be fighting a battle to educate business owners of the value and impact of brand building.

Branding does need to be on the mind of most business leaders - and brand professionals needs to make the business case for brand investment.

Coupled along-side Recognition, Reputation and Reach, Revenue is the missing link.

This is the 4 R formula. Use it wisely and you will see Results.