Forget promises
Most consumers aren't persuaded any more by fancy words and images. After all, they see thousands of them every day and have learned to tune most of them out -- quite rightly because most of them are just "noise." With a little patience, a dash of daring and a website, any business can look and talk like a brand; it just takes a smart name, some cut-and-paste text, good graphics and a few stock photos.
What makes the difference now is delivery, not promises -- it's not what a brand says, but what it does. A brand's products earn a brand permission to ask for a slice of consumers' time, attention or money.
Of course, a brand and its products sometimes dance hand in hand, as the Apple suite of products does. But don't forget that from the late '80s to the late '90s, Apple was a formerly great brand sinking under the weight of mediocre products. It took a return to great products -- iMac, iTunes, iPod, iPhone -- to make the brand powerful again.
The point is not that brands are dead or dying, it's that the relationship between products and brands is changing, with product becoming a more crucial part of the equation.
This doesn't sound earth-shattering at first. It's just counterintuitive to anyone who has based his or her career on the idea that it's brands that connect consumers to corporations. It may even be offensive to those of us who have spent years of our lives, and billions of clients' dollars, yakking, "Brand, brand and more brand." But it's revolutionary when you consider the vast amounts of money, time and energy spent on creating, sustaining and updating brand halos, to say nothing of what's spent in the never-ending quest for big brand ideas. And it means that it will no longer be business as usual for marketing professionals and communications agencies.
On both the PR and the marketing sides, we have to rethink the way we operate. The pace of change today requires constant product news. Brand news is no longer interesting -- it's just wallpaper unless it has some real substance to justify it. Product news is what drives trial and interest, buzz and sales.
With the rise of hyperconnectivity and interactivity, standout product performance creates more buzz, which, in turn, creates more sales. Ultimately, product functionality is a bigger sales driver than any abstract, feel-good brand halo; at best, a solid brand halo makes consumers more likely to trust a company's claims and try its products.
Consumers want compelling demonstrations and credible recommendations -- and with today's rapidly proliferating social networks and specialist blogs, they have no trouble finding them. To get onto consumers' radars, a brand needs striking products that get people talking. This means enormous opportunity for the smartest marketing and public relations agencies -- agencies that recognize that the savviest consumers pay more attention to the tangibles (products) than to the intangibles (brands).
It's no wonder that we in the business have it confused -- we've been immersed in brand-speak for so long. For more than a century, advertising has been increasingly about the brand. Marketers have focused on the production and consumption of "intangibles" -- concepts that could be distributed and consumed via the mass media. And now many of the smartest people we know still argue that the brand is the product -- which is why building brands is still such a big business. The thinking is that building a powerful brand pays off with the loyalty of brand fans. But while brands still rule, the landscape is changing.
Thank "brand sluts."
