By Kelly O'Keefe, Professor, Creative Brand Management, VCU
For almost all of its history, the art of branding has been centered on creating messages that tell stories about products and services. We congratulate each other at getaways in places like Cannes for how clever we are in crafting these ads, PR stunts and digital experiences, but the truth is that the best brands are more likely to be shaped by the deeper forces at an organization's core than by marketing communications that operate at the surface.
In our competitive marketplace, brands often fail, not because their advertising isn't clever, but because their products are mature and undifferentiated, their customer service is frustrating, even dehumanizing, their retail experiences are forgettable, their employees are downtrodden, their digital experiences are confusing and their corporate direction has all the precision of a chrome ball making its way through a pachinko game.
A company with all these troubles may seem like an anomaly, but personal experience tells us otherwise. Almost everyone reading this has worked for or with a company that lacks any conviction about its brand and lacks any personality in the experience it delivers. We patronize banks that have evolved into bland bureaucracies, buy from indistinguishable doppelgänger drug stores and get our cable television from companies we may well hate. Brands like Kmart, JCPenney, Blackberry and hundreds more are walking dead, shadows of their former selves, stumbling around with no apparent direction and waiting for the final blow to the head. And individual product brands are fading so quickly that P&G just jettisoned half its portfolio in one swirling flush.
Taken as a whole the impact of the bland brands on our economy is devastating. A study by Merrifield Consulting suggests that 80 percent of U.S. businesses are now operating in the kind of mature categories where brands go to die. Even relatively new categories like mobile phones, computers and the Internet are showing early signs of aging. In mobile, giants like Palm, Nokia and Motorola and are dead or on life support. The same goes for PC companies like HP, Compaq and Dell. And we all remember when Internet giants like Yahoo and AOL were the talk of the town.
This brings us back to the real problem we must solve as brand marketers. We must reshape, reinvent and reinvigorate brands, and to do that we must start from their core.
There are few things more liberating to brand leaders than to understand that we not only have permission to become involved in the deeper aspects of brand experience, we have an obligation to help.
A true brand architect, as the term suggests, is more attentive to the foundation and inner workings than just the exterior finishes. They understand that great brands are built on deep convictions not cooked up in focus groups. Such brands strive to bring all employees together around a common purpose and to align every management decision, every action and every experience around that direction.
Now "experience" as a term is nothing new to brand marketers, it's been batted around for decades. However, too many advertising firms see experience design as a digital profession or one that affects activities that are external to the organization, such as events, PR stunts or participatory activities. The interpretation of what constitutes a brand experience is often shallow compared to the reality of what really drives consumers.
Enlightened brand builders understand that internal factors have more impact on brands than external promotions. They are working to reshape the experience of a brand including the nature of the product itself, its packaging, retail architecture and design, the behavior of employees, research and innovation, customer service practices, even decisions about expansion and acquisitions. All these have an immense impact on how brands are perceived. But very few organizations are focused on aligning all these activities to their brand and few advertising firms have a seat at the table when these activities are being discussed.
To make a real difference in new world of brand experiences, brand builders must eradicate the aristocracy of the ad. They must be seekers of truth at a deeper level. They must participate in the articulation and refinement of organizational conviction and help foster an aligned brand through involvement in the core decisions that make up the foundation of brand experience. And once the internal brand is on a solid footing, they must engage consumers through every point of interaction.
None of these things are easy, but the payoff is more than worth it. Because when we re-define our role as helping to build impressive organizations, not just inventive ads, we can shift our profession to one that is equally beneficial to our clients, their consumers the communities they serve and the world we all share.