Brand Awareness

Entrepreneur, Sept, 2001 by Chris Penttila

WAKE UP! YOUR BRAND ISN'T YOUR SAVIOR, AND ALL THE CIRCUS ANTICS IN THE WORLD WON'T SAVE YOUR COMPANY. WHAT CAN? WELL... HAVE YOU GIVEN GOOD BUSINESS A TRY?

BRAND. THE HIP, CATCH-ALL WORD of the New Economy. It suggested all a company needed to succeed was awareness. Image, as they say, was everything.

Pat Harpell saw it up close as the CEO of Harpell Inc., an integrated marketing firm in Maynard, Massachusetts. Over the past few years, many entrepreneurs have called on her to create branding programs, and she could see that old-fashioned branding strategies had gone astray. "That's not a branding program; that's a logo," she says. "Basic business principles fell apart."

What ultimately fell apart was the connection between companies and consumers. Branding turned into a game of being seen for the sake of being seen, without giving consumers a reason to buy "There's been a tremendous abuse of branding," says Jeff Dufresne, managing director of BrandStorm, a brand consulting group in Cincinnati. "I think people got confused and thought branding was just throwing some ill-conceived advertising out there to gain awareness."

With the dotcom fallout, companies are relearning the basic lessons of what makes a successful brand--mainly, that you can't live on image alone. Eyeballs don't equal sales, and logos don't create loyalty. Consumers want to know what you're all about and why they should trust you enough to purchase your product. This will never change, no matter how much technology alters our lives.

REMEMBER ME? I'M THE CUSTOMER

Many companies today are refocusing on something they'd all but forgotten: their relationships with customers. After all, if you had a lot of venture capital and a plan to take your company public and sell it in six months, did you really need to spend time figuring out your product's value to consumers? The answer was no for the dotcoms--and the consultants they hired to create their brands--that never did in-depth market analyses.

"There are tremendous number of brand experts and consultants in the world now who know nothing about the product, nothing about the development of information technology that allows you to interact with customers in the marketplace," say Regis McKenna. Chair of The McKenna helped Group, a Silicon Valley-based international consulting firm that work with technology companies, McKenna Intel launch the first microprocessor and worked with Apple to get the first PC to marked with Apple to get the first PC to market. He even designed Apple's famous logo. "When brand becomes abstracted from what [your company does] from day to day, it loses meaning," he says.

Of course, building a brand is still as important as ever. Brands simplify and add comfort to consumers' purchasing decisions. Good brands deliver on a promise. (See "Case Study #1" below.) In fact, it's rare to succeed long term without branding, Dufresne says. "[Brand is] your fundamental relationship with an end user, who is buying your service and creating revenue," he says. "It's what sustains you."

WE JUST DON'T TALK ANYMORE

Nancy Koehn, a business historian at Harvard Business School, researched the lives of six famous entrepreneurs for her new book, Brand New: How Entrepreneurs Earned Consumers' Trust From Wedgwood to Dell (Harvard Business School Press). She learned that those entrepreneurs were obsessed not only with an idea, but with meeting a consumer need. Consider Josiah Wedgwood, an 18th century British potter who saw the average Briton yearning for social status. He positioned his products by targeting the aristocracy, knowing this would attract customers from lower economic brackets as well. His strategy worked, and still works today.

The entrepreneurs also kept their ears to the ground. Estee Lauder constantly updated her skin-care formulas based on what customers told her. Though Howard Schultz of Starbucks initially resisted using skim milk in the company's authentic Italian lattes, he finally gave in after spending time in a Starbucks location listening to customers repeatedly ask for it.

What those entrepreneurs did so well, Koehn says, was create ongoing, two-way dialogues with consumers--and alter their products based on what they heard. Wedgwood met a need for status, Lauder played into the post-with 1940s glamour boom, and Schultz tapped into the need for community in a disconnected world. Along the way, consumers got the branding message: This product is unique, and therefore better. Advertising didn't buy consumers' loyalty. Instead, long-term loyalty came from consistently fulfilling a promise and creating a great customer experience.

It's that dialogue that's been missing lately, Koehn says, and it's essential to any branding strategy. Branding has become a monologye instead of a dialogue. Entrepreneurs need to leave their ivory office towers and talk to people. They need to be responsive to their customers. (see "Case Study #3" at right.) They have to make sure their branding messages are understood by everyone inside the company. "Over the last few years, people [didn't realize] how hard branding really is," Koehn says. "But its rewards are equal to its difficulty"