Over at Beth Harte's blog The Harte of Marketing, there is a good debate about brand versus brand relationships, and about the whole notion of a brand.
I'm far from knowledgeable on this topic, but I have been reading avidly and putting things in the context of the whole shift to and impact of social media, and in relation to buyer behavior and the way brands must now behave in the social media.
Here's what I wrote, you will have to read the full blog post first in order to place the people quoted below:
I'm confused myself, but I have formed opinions lately after researching the relationships between brands and social media, and observing the trends in buyer behaviour and their reaction to "traditional" advertising and marketing.
OK I'm confused, and I am also biased. I'm biased because I believe that marketing today is often synonymous with managing marketing campaigns - promoting stuff rather than helping an organisation manage the whole brand experience.
To me, sending out the "messages" is branding, and branding I think is dead since social media doesn't need or respond to "messages" and positioning. It's because of this thought that I can't find myself agreeing with Scott that "managing brand perception is as much about public relations". I think that is trying to "manage" the unmanageable - it's potentially fake and pushing messages which aren't going to hit fertile ground in the social media.
Of course "brand" is alive, and is very well in many companies.
But what is brand? You gave two sets of characteristics, or hierachies, and they are both useful. I think they overlap in various ways, and as you noted also useful frameworks for thinking about relationships in the social media in general.
I'm preferring to think of "brand" as simply "brand behavior" - holistically, as Kim states. That need to operationalize the brand also fits in with what some of Craig says. And if I am interpreting Craig correctly, translated into my mindset, brand is defined by customers' experience which is "what THEY say" about how the brand behaves.
Craig also says "if message doesn’t match perception and experience, we’re in trouble, and we’ve lost ownership right there". Brand does have signals and presence. "Messages" I am not so keen on as a term - it smacks of marketer and PR push. But for sure when the ads and the brand behavior don't gel then we have zero "brand depth". Personally, this lack of brand depth has reached plague proportions in say the airline industry and sections of the retail industry in my opinion.
Scott also says "the best brand managers are those who nurture relationships with consumers to help influence those perceptions in a positive way" and that makes sense to me. I put that into "brand" not "branding" because it is not sending "messages" in a marketing or PR sense. It is being part of the behavior - participating and contributing - that's exactly what we talk about in social media isn't it.
So this is where I have reached, my perhaps uninformed summary:
- Brand is brand behavior; Brand promise is the expectation of brand behavior;
- Therefore brand has to be managed across all touch points, holistically, and this has to be well operationalized;
- Therefore, where social media is part of the brand behavior it also has to be planned and managed across all touch points, holistically, and this also has to be well operationalized;
- Most "marketing managers" "marketers" and "marketing" is simply promotion, bankrupt promise, same fake ads, and a complete disconnect from (a) the rest of the organisation, (b) the holistic brand behavior, and (c) brand.
- Buyers now don't like the marketing of (4), don't trust it, don't believe it, and immediately sense its incongruence with brand behavior and REPORT on this in the social media. That is why I say "branding" a la (4) is dead - and those marketers, the majority, have a big problem as a "profession".
- Marketing and brand management, done "properly" in the big picture holistic way as a guardian of brand value, through assuring brand behavior, has a bigger role than ever given the advent of social media.
- But marketing as branding is the walking dead.
Do I have the right end or the wrong end of this brand stick?
By the way, the opportunity for marketers is to reinvent themselves "back to the future" - back to their bigger purpose of governing brand behavior.
