Tie Your Brand to the Mast

As companies get battered by the current economic storm, the question arises, “Does your brand need to get battered also?” With brand program dollars quickly dwindling to nothing, how do you maintain the levels of brand awareness, preference and loyalty that you’ve worked so hard to build?

Economic storms are scary events, but a couple of bad quarters may not mean it’s time to jettison your brand. When ship captains found themselves in a horrendous squall in the old days, they used to tie their most prized possession, their wife or mistress, to the base of the mast to ensure her safety. If you have a brand worth saving in this economic storm, tie it to the mast. Now is the time to look at how you are communicating your brand at all of your touchpoints, and make sure you are delivering a clear, consistent brand promise. It doesn’t cost anything to be consistent.

The banks who are jacking up credit card interest rates for their long-time customers are telling their customers, “We’re there for you when things are going well for us, but right now we need to really stick it to you.” If MacDonalds were to cut back on staff to help offset slow sales, service and maintenance would suffer, and they would not deliver on their brand promise of a clean, friendly place to eat.

Eventually this storm will pass, and if you have consistently delivered on your brand promise throughout the storm, you won’t have to build a new brand. You’ll have a loyal group of customers who know what to expect from you…in good weather and raging storms.

Living the Google Brand…Wait, What Brand?

Three years ago the Silicon Valley Brand Forum had Doug Edwards, director of brand and communications at Google, on a panel for a forum at Cisco. Doug (who has since moved on from Google) explained that Google “does not really do branding.” He said that their brand was their culture, and employees were expected to live the core values, especially the well-known “do no evil” tenet.

It is not unusual in Silicon Valley to hear a company play down the importance of brand management when they have the hottest products in a relatively new market. Too many technology companies believe that innovation is their brand, and that will always be their differentiator. 

Chris Taylor, in his blog on the Business 2.0 site, opines that we are seeing the beginning of the Google backlash. The market is finally maturing, and they are starting to face real challenges that could impact their status as the golden boy of the technology world. He cites several omens, including Congress’ upcoming hearings on the DoubleClick acquisition, which has already been held up for four months, and a German conglomerate that includes Bertelsmann and SAP, who just received a $166 million grant from the German government to develop a search engine. And, of course, the question of when YouTube is ever going to start making money for Google.

In the 80s and 90s, Tandem Computers did not care about branding because they were virtually alone in the fault tolerant computing space. They were able to charge a premium for huge servers that were 99.99999% reliable. As the market matured, HP started running ads that said, “Why pay a premium for 5 decimal points when you can get 4 decimal points for half the price?” Tandem servers quickly became a commodity, and they were no match for HP’s marketing muscle. Tandem is now the NonStop division of HP.

It will be interesting to see if Google shows signs of building a strong brand over the next few years, or if “do no evil” is enough of a brand attribute to create preference in a mature marketplace. Do you think Google has a strong brand in spite of itself? Are they consciously building a brand by living their core values?

We Dare Not Use the “B” Word

by Kevin Heney

At the recent brand forum held at Adobe, the topic of communicating the value of brand management to the CEO came up, as it invariably does. A collective sigh permeated the room, and we proceeded to share alternative phrases to replace the word “brand.” It was suggested that the CEO might respond well to the word “reputation,” or “awareness,” or possibly “strategic marketing,” rather than risk one’s career by blurting out the “B” word.

Six years ago, we had the same conversation at a brand forum at AMD, and years later we had déjà vu all over again at a forum at Symantec. After the forum at AMD and again at Adobe, I was approached by marketers from companies east of the Mississippi who told me they were astonished at the tone of the discussion. They were shocked that so many executives in Silicon Valley didn’t “get” branding.

So, it’s a regional thing, and probably more of a high tech and B2B thing. What’s surprising is that things haven’t changed much over the last decade. We, the brand managers and brand consultants of the Bay Area, know that “brand” is a good word. We know that even innovative companies can become roadkill if they don’t pay attention to their brand. We’re the ones who are supposed to educate the CEO’s, and turn them into brand evangelists. If we do our job well, we may even keep our jobs, and visitors from the eastern states won’t be so shocked next time they attend a Silicon Valley Brand Forum.

Related articles of interest:

Fixing the Marketing-CEO Disconnet by Sean Silverthorne, HBSJ

Lights, Camera, Action: CEO in the Spotlight by Edwin Collyer, BrandChannel