The True Role of Advertising in Brand Building

Throughout my career, I’ve had a large number of prospective clients land on my doorstep with the agenda of developing a “branding campaign.” After a bit of questioning, we ascertained that what they had in mind was creating an advertising image campaign.

There is nothing wrong with that, really. There’s no question that your advertisements are powerful telegraphs of your brand positioning and personality. But the tail is wagging the dog when the advertising creative is expected to establish the brand promise.

Advertising has to do a lot for small businesses – generate awareness, drive traffic, create sales inquiries and new business leads and provide air cover to the sales force. It’s also expensive, and the average small business can rarely afford to buy as much as it needs.

So how can the smart brand-builder use advertising effectively?

First, recognize that the advertising is not creating your brand position or story. Your advertising must be developed and put in service to that story. If you don’t know the story yet, do not get an advertising agency started on a brand campaign (unless they can also help you do the underlying discernment and definition work – the brand strategy.)

I’ve watched most of the community banks in my region swap ad agencies and creative campaigns regularly. Lay out any given bank’s ad campaigns from several years and hide the logo. You’d never know what underlying idea was energizing those ads. For your ads to succeed, that underlying idea must be there: it’s the brand strategy.

Second, recognize that your brand strategy and personality must find its way into every ad you run. This is hard. You have to freshen your work periodically. You have to put advertising in service to specific business initiatives – for instance, in the banking world, catalyzing account switchers. Ask yourself with every ad, “Does this ad implicitly and explicitly reflect the core of our brand?” If it does not, you need to go back to the drawing board.

Third, don’t expect your ads to do all the work. The root levels of brand equity are awareness and associations. Those are the levels on which advertising acts. But if your brand can’t behave and deliver at the higher levels of equity creation, (e.g. customer experience) you can’t save it with any amount of advertising.

In their book The Fall of Advertising and the Rise of PR, Al and Laura Ries argue that advertising has become an “art form” that can only be used to defend or support an established brand position – never to create that position. They argue that virtually every one of the power brands developed in recent memory – Microsoft, Walmart, Starbucks, for example – have grown organically, driven primarily by the power of public relations. Indeed, few of these companies even ran much advertising in their early years.

What advertising can do quickly that PR can only do slowly is buy you recognition and awareness. But only a strong hand on the tiller will ensure that your advertising is always working in service to the brand.?