Branding Starts With The Customer

Having difficulty knowing where to start when it comes to branding? 

Here's my take on it from an article I wrote for The Hub on AllAboutBusiness.ie

My customers sometimes tell me that the thing they find most difficult about branding is knowing where to start. And I know exactly what they mean.

When we look at the big brands, the celebrity brands, the ones that make the headlines, it seems that they ooze a power and charisma that’s way beyond the reach of a mere mortal brand. Our own efforts can appear grey and mundane by comparison and we can despair of ever finding something remarkable to say about what it is we do for our customer.

But for most of us, life isn’t a glamorous whirl of parties and high society, and just as I don’t look to the celebrities of cinema and sport for clues on how to lead my own life, I don’t recommend that you look to celebrity brands for guidance on how to build your own brand.

Instead, I suggest that you start with your customer and the problems they face and work from there. All business begins when somebody has something to sell that solves a problem for someone else. This is the basis of your brand, the reason why a customer will choose what you have to offer over what’s for sale elsewhere. The purpose of a brand is to make this obvious to your customer, so that they naturally and easily choose you as their favourite supplier.

So the first question we must ask when we brand is: What problem does my product (or service) solve for someone else?

Too often, we don’t even get that far. We’re so proud of what we have to offer that we don’t bother to ask why that should matter enough to someone else that they would be prompted to pay for it. If we don’t make it obvious to our prospective customer that we will help them to fix something in their lives that’s broken, or replace something that’s missing, then our product won’t attract their attention or win them over.

When we make it clear what problem we fix for our customers, then we can go on to say how we do it in a way that’s better than how our competitors do it.

So how does this work in practice?

Say, for example, that you’re an accountant offering the usual mix of financial services. You’re surrounded by other accountants, most of whom have studied at the same institute as you and have the same qualifications. Now look at the situation from the point of view of the difficulty facing your prospective customer. Their problem is not in finding a suitably qualified accountant. They’re spoiled for choice. You’re going to have to work a little harder if you’re going to stand out from the crowd.

Say that you get talking to that prospective customer and you learn that they find meeting their accountant to review annual accounts a frustrating and demoralising experience. They tell you that this has nothing to do with the actual accounts, just the whole experience of looking at numbers that they don’t really understand.

For them, this is the real problem. It’s also an opportunity for you. You might determine that you will be an accountant who helps your customer get on top of the numbers. Now you have a real problem to fix for your customer and a real basis for branding, a reason why prospective customers might choose you over other accountants.

So when my customers tell me that they don’t know where to start when it comes to branding, I tell them to start at the very beginning. Start with your customer and ask them what problems they face in their lives. When you’ve identified a problem that you can help them fix, you have the basis for your brand.

Book Review: Branding Only Works On Cattle

This book on branding is a peculiar animal.

Argumentative, poorly organised and with a distracting number of typing errors, it makes for a difficult read. Which is a real pity because author Jonathan Salem Baskin has a number of very useful things to say about the world of branding. But he’s the annoying boy in class, the show-off who’s so determined to make the rest of us sit up and listen that we’re in danger in missing out on many of the sharper observations he has to offer.

Baskin begins by announcing a shift in the world of branding, a new heresy to the established orthodoxy, and declares himself its high priest. However, for much of the early part of the book, it seems that the orthodoxy he’s challenging is ‘advertising-as-branding’ as practised by large agencies, rather than branding itself, which can distract from the value of much of what he has to say.

But the real challenge is his assertion, repeated throughout, that his represents a brave new world of thinking. I’m not so certain that much of his thinking is new; it’s just that those who ply their trade in the great shop-windows of the world largely ignore it. For many business-owners, much of what Baskin has to write will seem common sense.

After dismissing most of what passes for branding as useless (aha! he thought that might get your attention), Baskin proposes a new behaviour-based model instead. He argues that most branding activity is geared towards achieving results that have little to do with sales and suggests that, “corporations ask nothing of branding other than glorified name recognition”.

He accuses branding professionals of failing to distinguish between communications success and commercial failure and of resisting the only measures that truly matter for branding: behaviours that lead to sales. For Baskin, “the starting point of branding, should be the end-point of your business strategy: selling stuff”. This makes great sense, but it’s hardly new.

What is more novel is Baskin’s suggestion that “maybe branding is a structural approach to the enterprise as a sustainable, adaptable one-room branding and marketing machine”. He goes on to liken the successful brand to a swarm of bees or hive of ants “consciously alert and buzzing with behaviours”.

Now this is very interesting stuff indeed. Because he sees branding as being based around a series of events that make or break the enterprise, Baskin suggests that brands must adapt to the experiences of their customers in the same way that certain insects respond to changes in their environment. Apparently, bees and ants don’t communicate in a ‘let me tell you what I’ve just learned’ sort of way; instead, they react to the behaviours of others in their group and adapt their own behaviours accordingly. Baskin says that brand-managers must move beyond telling their customers what to think and behave instead in ways that lead to measurable outcomes.

Baskin then produces his trump card and suggests that the best way in which to interact with customers through the brand is to adopt the models used by the gamers who make and play alternative reality games. These game-plans have five elements that he thinks are relevant to brand management: Goals (or payoff), Context, Narrative Flow, Tools and Winners & Losers. He believes that successful companies are already using these one way or another and argues that for them “branding is experience, and the behaviours look a lot more like playing a game than engaging with any traditional branding campaign”.

Finally, Baskin puts down the failure of brands in the twenty-first century to the shortening of what he describes as a “brand interlude”, the period between expectations and experience. Back in the old days of traditional brand-management (which Baskin likes to compare to a séance where branding clairvoyants called out to the ether for signs that their diversions were working), it took much longer for woolly assertions to be found out. Now, thanks to the speeding up of communications, this interlude has grown shorter and shorter, meaning that brands that promise one thing and don’t deliver on it get found out much more quickly.

If only Baskin had taken his own advice and produced a book that made it easier for his readers to get to the good ideas and take action on them. As it is, this book is a struggle to read and only a few hardy souls who are prepared to see past Baskin’s clever-boy routine will make it through to the finish.

Branding Only Works on Cattle: The New Way to Get Known (and drive your competitors crazy) by Jonathan Salem Baskin

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

ISBN: 978-0470742570

(This review first appeared in Marketing Age, the magazine of the Marketing Institute of Ireland).