NEW COMPANIES.
NEW THINKERS.
NEW MODELS.
NEW MEDIA.

BEYOND THE BRAND Marketers are now beginning to treat ad agencies as partners in this process – the brain cells, rather than the muscles in the strategy.

Given the fact that 80% of all new products never make it, there is a lot of questioning going on about the way to design and market a brand. Advertising agencies, the earliest proponents of branding and brand image now have to do more than defend their ability to nurture brands.

So it was no surprise when the WPP group (parent of Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide and JWT) merged with Young and Rubicam group in May last year, and rolled out a division called Y&R Branding. Many other ad agencies are once again staking out the brand territory. But it is not the kind of branding that revolves around logos and cutesy slogans. Indeed today’s brand stewards look beyond image creation at processes that are more accountable.

Brand consciousness outside image marketing was not something that had to be forced on the ad industry. Y&R has always been at the forefront of brand research surveying 90,000 consumers and 13,000 brands across 30 countries since 1993. FutureBrand is another global brand consultancy that is part of The Interpublic Group of Companies (parent of McCann Erickson). Its core competencies are brand building, strategy, design and measurement. Following on its heels was Fallon Worldwide, a much younger agency. Fallon’s Brand Consulting Division uses metrics such as the Brand Blueprint, Internal Values and Culture audit. The company states that traditional media planning is an outdated mode, because it is based on rating points and impressions. So it uses its own discipline called ‘Connection Planning’ that chooses the media for the brands, based on extensive brand research –as opposed to media research. Then there is the mother-of-all brand consultancies, Interbrand, better known for brand valuation and an annual brand survey it has been conducting for thirteen years.

Markets are Conversations
Regis McKenna, the modern equivalent of David Ogilvy, has seen the rise and fall of branding over the last thirty years. McKenna worked on such powerful brands such as Intel, Apple and Microsoft so his acerbic observations that the concept of branding is obsolete, cannot be taken lightly. "Branding isn’t awareness", he claims. "You can only build brand awareness if you have first built a distribution infrastructure". Instead of building a brand and then researching how it performs, he believes that the ‘sensing organization’ will have to constantly monitor, feed, query and adjust to the shifting customer experience with the brand. In this sense, McKenna sees brand management as far too important to be left to the marketing people. This thinking is not entirely heretical.

Branding, after all is a product of the industrial era. To create a brand was to create trust. It was supposed to reduce or eliminate the need to find out about the product before buying it. It assumes you can build enough equity to create customer loyalty. But advertising as brand communication was designed for the mass media. A one-way message meant to be broadcast not narrowcast. But brand communication is being eclipsed by consumer communication and integrated marketing communication. Word-of-mouth, reputations built in an aggressive media climate, and of course the Internet. What’s frivolously referred to as ‘word of mouse’ communication is making the manufacturer-to-consumer channel look obsolete. The Internet, among other things, is a huge knowledge base. A global chat-room. Here people can comparison shop, swap opinions, and make personal recommendations that can carry much more weight than a well-crafted piece of copy. Customers suddenly have a chance to talk to customers, so why listen to the brochure-speak of corporations?

Philip Kotler who practically laid the foundation of modern marketing, also reminds us that the marketing process has seen a fundamental shift -- the customer is not at the end of the value chain. Marketers, he says have to enlist customers, rather than entice them. "They will need to involve their customers in the act of co-designing their desired products," he says. A few years after this prescient observation, John Updike allowed visitors at Amazon.com to contribute paragraphs that would advance a plot in a short story. Nike, took it even further, allowing visitors to a Web site to edit their own Nike commercials! Nine years ago, even Tom Peters alerted us in ‘Liberation Management’ that "the bottom line in commercial life is the sum total of conjured-up dramas created by our customers."

In the information era, hi-tech marketing introduced the importance of ‘hi-touch’. The 2-way dialogue that the new media permits, gives the customer the upper hand. "Markets are conversations" proclaim the new breed of marketing communicators. Branding is suddenly about dialogue, not monologue. In this context ‘image-mongering’ as a form of brand marketing fails.

A New Currency
Today given the density of brands, image alone isn't enough to sustain a product or service. In 1980 there were some 88 brands of cereal in the market. By 1990 there were 205! They were all brands in search of a relationship. But with so many competing for shelf space and mental space, the currency of imagery was being devalued.

The eight hundred pound brand gorilla Proctor & Gamble had a sense of brand erosion even before the force of e-Commerce hit. The year was 1997, and the marketer had 110 brands, very many of them under-performing. For instance, it had 35 versions of a fabric softener called Bounce and 30 varieties of Head and Shoulders shampoo! Sure, these were all ‘brands’, but they were being defined by the marketer, not the consumer. The company decided to overhaul its brand strategy, slash 20% of its line, even selling off soaps and pain relievers that made no sense. Then last year, P&G took another bold step and pushed its agencies to seek 'holistic, media-neutral marketing', and not be dependent on traditional media. Coca-Cola knows when the old currency of imagery has been devalued. Having exhausted every niche within the traditional media, the company just announced a far-reaching alliance with SFX entertainment that will give the brand access to major entertainment and sports-based venues in some 40 countries, many of them live events.

Many advertising practitioners say that a big problem facing advertising agencies is in their attempting to define their role in terms of traditional media norms. Branding through ‘frequency’ and ‘reach’ sounds attractive to the marketer. But in doing this, it sets up too many limitations for the customer experience. Branding in media-centric marketing was the old currency. But in the customer century it gives way to something new.