Is Branding Really All It is Made Up to Be?

Does branding play a meaningful role in marketing strategy? Conventional wisdom suggests it does for companies that are already established in their markets. Ronald MacDonald, the Budweiser Clydesdales, and the Marlborough Man are three examples of companies with established brands emotionally connecting prospects to their products without saying a word about features or benefits.

The problem with branding comes when a business asks it to do more than it can do. And increasingly, that is what is happening: more and more people who call themselves brand marketers are making claims about branding that beg for snake-oil comparisons.

“If You Build It, They Will Come”

“Field of Dreams” was an entertaining movie, but as a marketing strategy its premise – build a baseball diamond in the middle of a farm field to attract not only past players but current fans – is insane. Yet that movie’s signature mantra seems to be underlying much of what I read online from people who call themselves brand strategists.

The most troubling trend is the idea that branding is more important than having a great product or service. That having a “consistent look and feel,” “building awareness,” and “website authority” are what need to be done first. This puts the traditional method of building brand loyalty - consistently giving customers compelling value, great customer service, and excellent support, then letting them be your early brand ambassadors – in reverse.

What made me think more about this was when during some online research I came across an article in Forbes Magazine, “Everything You Know About Branding Is Wrong.” But when I read the article, it struck me that its author’s own ideas about branding were suspect, based on his demonstrably incorrect analysis of a “product” with which I have long familiarity: the University of Oregon “Ducks” football team.

Getting It All Backwards is not Branding

The gist of the Forbes article was this: “There is a new reality in branding.” This new reality means:

• “Business today doesn’t come down to what you sell or what you do.”
• “The simple truth is that a brand isn’t a logo, an advertisement, or a poster hung on the wall in a corporate office. It’s a gut feeling about a company… and it all starts with an understanding of why a company matters. Who are you? Why do you matter? Finding the answers and building connections to them with an integrated, holistic approach is what ultimately creates a stronger, more meaningful brand.”

I disagree with the first premise on its face. If your business isn’t all about what you sell or do, you won’t be in business for long and no fancy logo, catchy jingle, SEO optimization tool, or public virtue-signaling campaign will save you.

The article’s second premise is an expression of the problem I wrote about in my last LinkedIn article – “echelons above reality.” Some people try to make branding sound more important than it really is by muddying it up with abstract language and acronyms, hoping readers will be impressed by their show of intellect. Reading them reminds me of the “Musashi’s Book of Five Rings” fad that swept through business management back in the 1980s, as if a translated 17th Century text on Samurai sword-fighting could double as a marketing treatise. It didn’t. But a lot of business executives got fooled into slogging through it anyway and pretended to find meaning in it, because they bought into the hype.

But what drove me to the keyboard here was when the Forbes article’s author dragged in the U of O football team to support his claims. And that’s where he went off the rails.

The author claimed, “You can’t chalk up Oregon’s recent success to boosters or Phil Knight alone… they’ve embraced branding as a central way of thinking. Their why is change, and they’ve built it into everything… in other words, people don’t watch the team because they’re good – they’re good because people watch.”

To which my considered response, as someone who has watched the Ducks play football since the late 1960s is… bullcrap.

Before “Uncle Phil” Knight of Nike fame donated tens of millions of dollars to the Ducks’ football program, the University of Oregon and its sister school Oregon State University usually competed for last place in their conference. Schools like Washington, UCLA and USC would schedule their homecoming games around one of the Oregon teams to guarantee a win for the occasion.

What Uncle Phil bought with his money wasn’t some fru-fru idea of “Their why is change.” His money paid for world-class football facilities, better coaches, and a better stadium for players and fans. Those, in turn, attracted better players. Better coaches and better players won more games, soon leading to winning season records, and even post-season bowl appearances. In short… Duck Football became fun to watch because the program received a massive infusion of money that purchased change, not from some “We gotta change” muttering that losers say in every locker room after every loss.

Branding had nothing to do with it.

And this passage deserves a second mention, because of how completely, irredeemably, Bizarro-world wrong it is:

“…people don’t watch the team because they’re good – they’re good because people watch.”

In other words, “If people would only watch us, we’d become worth watching.” Or, “We have no baseline standards of our own to motivate us to perform at a winning level, so how we play depends on how we feel about our audience size.”

Does that sound like a team anyone wants to see, in any human endeavor? If musicians followed this branding philosophy, then the cozier the venue the worse they’d sound. Then they’d turn around and blame their lackluster, half-hearted performance on the audience. They’d also wonder why they can’t get big audiences anymore…

The truth is, fans endured the Ducks’ poor gameplay through all those miserable years in the 1960s and 1970s, and they never became good no matter who was or wasn’t watching. Without Uncle Phil’s largess to put them on the athletic recruiting map, today the Ducks might still be sacrificial lambs for other schools’ homecomings. To say otherwise is ridiculous: ask fans of the Oregon State University football program, which didn’t receive Uncle Phil’s bounty. They’re still right where they were in the bad old days. The team even changed its logo a few years ago, but alas, that wasn’t enough “why” to attract better players, win more games, or become fun to watch.

Branding: It Helps, But Don’t Oversell It

One lesson I remember from the University of Oregon journalism school was that media coverage and analysis does not change opinions; it reinforces them. In a way, it’s the same with branding. If you have no product or service, or if your product or service is new, building a feel-good branding strategy may not hurt you but it probably won’t help much, either – not until the court of the marketplace renders at least a preliminary verdict on your business.

Instead, the most effective brand strategies I have seen have one thing in common: big companies with established brands use them to reinforce their brands. This is in part because those big companies can afford marketing and advertising budgets to sustain branding strategies that can’t deliver objectively measurable results in terms of sales but can help keep existing customers.

If I had to offer brand strategy advice to a new company, instead of navel-gazing platitudes like the Forbes article I’d suggest watching the Al Pacino version of, “Scarface.” To paraphrase the main character’s formula for success, brand strategy comes in three stages: “First you deliver value, then you get the loyal customers, then you work on reinforcing the brand with them.”

Some of what I have written here runs counter to what increasingly appears to be conventional wisdom about branding and brand strategy. But when you have been around for as long as I have, you have seen fashionable marketing trends come and go. If branding wasn’t important, then the large companies that are its most conspicuous advocates would not spend the money on it that they do. So we can stipulate that it has a place in marketing strategy. But do you agree or disagree that branding is best used only as a reinforcement device instead of a foundational one? Let me know in the comments.