On Brandformance, Branded Cattle and Cluelessness.

I’ve been told that I sometimes come off as cranky, abrupt and strong minded in workshops or public speaking gigs. It’s not that I’m impolite. I know I’m not. It’s just the way I sometimes shut down questions that stem from what I consider half-knowledge or being too much on the Kool-Aid. I guess I must plead guilty on this one. I do it on purpose. I hope that people understand that I come from a positive place, that I’m trying to pass on genuine and reliable information and kill mis-information at the root. The one that usually gets my feathers ruffled the most is how people define “branding” and how it connects with overall communication performance.

Brandformance! Big Woop!

Forgive me if I cringe every time I hear about brandformance, lately. I think it’s a great example of the state of the industry and the state of marketing as a whole. Don’t get me wrong. I like the term. I like the sentiment. I like the train of thought and where it leads to. One of the earliest proponents, in my personal experience at least, of the term was Google. The idea behind it is that you shouldn’t focus solely on securing sales, online or otherwise, from customers that were anyway very close to buying your brand or looking for a product in your segment. The idea is that you can also affect demand, create the need and, ideally, follow these prospective consumers throughout their customer journey, gently nudging them, gently swatting away possible competition along the way. The idea — and my experience from our client campaigns — is that this further optimizes the budget spent, leading to higher return on investment as a whole. It’s kind of a soft spin to “Blue Ocean Strategy”. Instead of competing for the same click on Google Search, why not create a prospect and convert it without ever getting into the radar of your competition, or create branded, specific demand for your product or service, so that when the consumer pops up on Search, it will be easier and cheaper to secure the sale against any other competitor. Likewise, it makes perfect sense for Google, since it allows them to push products like YouTube or Google Display Network even to smaller advertisers, whose lack of marketing understanding leads them to a tunnel vision focused only on last click conversions or on Google Search impression share.

But… isn’t that how marketing fundamentally works?

Yup.

Then, why the big fuss for something so basic? Why get excited or cringe? It’s like getting mad with the ABCs. Well, it’s a bit more complicated than that. You need to understand how Performance Marketing came to be and the background of the people running it or the people buying it. The term began as marketing lingo to describe Affiliate Marketing and then expanded to incorporate a wider media offering, but kept its single-mindedness with cost per action, be it sale, lead or whatever. Everyone understands fulfilling demand with low advertising cost. Creating that demand? Not so much. That’s someone else’s job. So, when Google started pushing the term, I jumped on the bandwagon hard. It was a doorway to common marketing sense and an opportunity to do better work, across the customer journey. But the opportunity is problematic. It still relies on the fact that “brand owners” can understand the fundamentals of branding and communication. Well, you’d be surprised how often they don’t. So, when this “brandformance” term deteriorates to a media approach, with complete disregard for content, or how branding works, I cringe. “Sure, Mr. Client, we’ll use Google Display & Video 360 and it’s DMP capabilities to follow and influence consumers along their purchase journey. But, won’t we need to develop a brand story? What does your brand stand for? What does it mean? Why should people gravitate to it, beyond the product range you offer? What’s that? We’ll simply use your product catalog photos on Google Creator Studio to turn them into videos? Excellent idea, sir. Perhaps we’re not the agency you were looking for, sir. Best of luck to you, sir. Sorry, I forgot to bring my business cards, no need to have my contact details, we’ll both be fine without communicating in the future, sir.”

Branding Cattle

This occurred to be a few weeks back. It may be obvious to you. It wasn’t to me and now I can’t “un-see” it. What is the literal meaning of the word branding? What’s the origin? What does it actually mean? It comes from raising cattle, doesn’t it? You create a doodle or put your farm’s initials on iron, you heat that iron and then you stick it on a cow’s or horse’s buttocks to mark it as your own, to make stealing easier to track. Marking an animal’s butt with searing hot iron. That’s it. That is where one of the pivotal concepts of modern marketing comes from. Cow butts.

As time progressed, the markings came to mean something more. They came to indicate quality or specific unique traits of a farm’s animals, that made them distinctly different to other animals. Or it evolved as a means for quality control or customer service. “I know whose animal this is. They are supposed to be great breeders, I’ll go ask them for advice to help me breed their bull with my cows, because, despite the fame preceding their animals, the magic just doesn’t seem to be happening here.” It’s still cow butts, but you can see why the term stuck, right?

However, we evolved and expanded on the concept, didn’t we? As marketeers, we took control of the narrative, we created elaborate stories, we found ways to dictate the flow of information. It’s no longer up to the audience to decide what the brand means or stands for. It’s not up for debate what the unique attributes or the important information are. We craft and distribute a complete, specific, deliberate brand story to the market, building brand identity and familiarity, pursuing top of mind awareness and consideration, funneling that into actual purchase and hopefully, nurturing it into brand loyalty and advocacy. At the center of it all, there is a carefully crafted, episodic story. The brand name and the meaning it implies, the logo and what it conveys, the design, look and feel of the product or service, the experience in the retail store, the big volume, high concept above the line materials we put out or the small scale “micromoments” (jargon alert, here) we nurture in social media or in a tactical SMS. They all work to expand on that same concept. That brand on the proverbial cow’s butt has come to be so much more, to mean so much more.

It’s still baffling to me how many “big” brands just don’t get it, how many people holding senior marketing positions just don’t see the connection, how much success is the result of pure luck, fortunate timing or simply being able to pour more money into something than anybody else and hoping for the best. “I’m selling well, don’t I?” That’s the logic behind it. Why are you selling? Do you guess, or do you know? Why do people buy your brand and not the other? Having a logo ISN’T branding. Doing a product photoshoot ISN’T branding. Doing a Facebook post about Black Friday ISN’T branding. Aesthetics ISN’T branding. Trying to say something to everyone, ISN’T branding. Doing something because that’s what the competition did or that’s what the market is like, ISN’T branding. If you’re commoditizing your own product, if all you understand is price and following market trends, how are you affecting your brand? What about creating market trends, instead of just adjusting to them? If all you have to say to your consumer is “get one now and get another one free” or “50% off, buy now”, why are you so surprised that your margins are dwindling? That’s the job branding is supposed to do. Build trust and consistency, empower self-expression, inspire, take a stance for something that matters, create an emotional connection. Each layer provides added value to your product or service. If all the “branding” you do is a logo and the aesthetics of your retail store or packaging, if your idea for “branding” is a video with the tech specs of your newest phone or the photoshoot of your latest clothing collection, good luck. You are a sitting duck. Someone who gets it will put you out of business with a lot less money than you spent to get where you are. Someone will provide consumers with added value through brand storytelling, when all you’ve been doing is commoditizing your own product. Brands, usually, aren’t built in a day. The brand that will kill your business may already be out there, coming for your customers.

It’s Those Damn Silos Again

Which leads to the problem of complexity and specialization. This is some hard stuff, requiring a lot of specialization to pull off. Coming up with a brand name is a science into itself. Creating a logo is equally hard. Let alone crafting and implementing a complete, long term brand strategy. So many moving parts, so many components. From the product or service, to the communication material, to the Media needed, to the way data are gathered and effectiveness is measured, each component is as complex, demanding and important as the next. This leads to a lot of specialized service providers, that a marketeer is called upon to orchestrate. That also creates silos, making the marketeer’s job harder. The designer who made the logo may have had one thing in mind, but the creative director that did the brand campaign envisioned something else entirely, while the developer that created the brand website had a third thing in mind. In the best of cases, if the marketeer is good at their job, he or she is the one safeguarding the brand’s core values and consistency. They know how to write a proper brief, they have a clear vision of how things fit together and they make sure everyone is on the same picture. In most cases, that is hard to do. And if the marketeer isn’t very competent or top management simply doesn’t “get” how marketing works, it then comes down to spotty stuff here and there, because someone had an “idea” that was “good”.

I don’t see why that’s an inevitability, though. Even big, global agencies and major brands are trying to tackle this in what, seems to me, is not the right way. This complexity has become too much for big brands, who are now pushing for agencies to incorporate everything under one roof. The same people that pushed for specialization and diversification of services are now in remorse for the Frankenstein they helped create. But this is not a bid to simplify things. It’s simply an attempt to push things under the rug. It’s a push for agencies to undertake and absorb this complexity and make it invisible to brands. Not make it go away. No. Just deal with it in a way that advertisers don’t need to worry about it. Oh, and do it on a lower fee, because that’s how economies of scale work, isn’t it? If one agency is handling the work that used to be done by 4–5 specialists, then the fees incurred should be that of one agency, not 4–5 times that. It’s a matter of how many people are doing the billing, not what the services rendered are. Right?

Attention Economy

It’s all about that new, dreaded resource, the all-powerful attention span of the average consumer. We are bombarded by messages in a volume that dwarfs any other time in human history. Our social media feed alone exposes us to more information in a few minutes than what we used to get by reading a Sunday newspaper (Remember those? I used to work for one.) cover to cover. We thumb through the height of Big Ben every day in our phones on Facebook and that’s only one of the multiple sources that shower us with messages. Our attention span is shorter than a goldfish, a study that keeps popping up in advertising conferences seems to suggest. Google is preaching going beyond the zero moment of truth and that a customer journey is unique to everyone and has exponentially more information touch points. You need to be “always on” with your brand, you need to speak to your consumers constantly. If you don’t, someone else will. People are looking for information. People are ready to engage. Won’t you be present?

Does anyone stop and think the obvious? What will you say? What do you need to say? Does it matter? It’s easy to fill a content calendar with stuff. Super easy, actually. Fill it to the brim with all the content in the world, make sure that you have something for every “micromoment” (jargon alert, again). Does it matter, though? Does it make a difference? We, agencies, are partly to blame for this. We naturally gravitate towards “more is better”. More stuff, mean more deliverables, so we can charge our clients more money, right? Clients are not innocent in this. They frequently belong to one of two extremes. They either have under-cooked marketing teams (sometimes going as far as letting a junior person handle it or letting the owner handle it), or they have overcooked marketing teams, with armies of people handling small portions of their overall communications. If the budget if big, then we need to split it into smaller portions and have an army of clerks handle it. And that creates the same problem. More is better, otherwise, what’s the use for all those clerks? We’ll do a print catalog and a social media carousel and an app and in-store and a thousand more, interconnected things, because we have specialized teams for everything and they need to justify their presence within the company.

Risk Aversion and Goldfish

You know what is hard? Creating a small content calendar. Don’t say a thousand things. Say three or four. Say one. That is what is hard. Betting all your chips on one number.

That is also what seems like common sense to me. Maybe it’s the fact that I’m relatively new at this, that I can’t think like an advertising guy, that I’m hardwired to think like a client, a brand manager. Maybe it’s my lack of imagination, or too much of it. Maybe it’s because I’m used to working with smaller, 3–4 member teams (although the company I’m currently running is over 30 people and growing). The only answer against the mounting complexity of the modern advertising ecosystem that makes sense to me is to say less.

We shouldn’t wait for the goldfish study to reach this conclusion. We should’ve instinctively known that we’ve been on the Kool-Aid for too long. We’re so in love with the stuff we do that we don’t take pause to think. Does any of this matter? The answer to “thumb stopping power” isn’t a more engaging advertising format or better audience targeting. The answer should be to have something important, meaningful, useful to say, or say nothing at all. Consumers can’t remember the advertising they’ve been exposed to because they simply don’t care. The message was weak and / or irrelevant. I’m not going to click on your 50% off banner. I’m not going to remember it. I’m not even going to register it in my mind. You’re telling me something that YOU care about, not something I care about.

Is It Safe?

It is risky business. I’ll grant you that. It’s scary. It’s sometimes an unconscious process that leads you to commoditize your product or service. It seems safer. You see the market need, you see a demand and you meet it. Pure and simple. Sell to everyone who is willing to buy. There too much risk in the alternative. There is too much risk to pick your consumers, to stand for something and hope that people connect. Or is there? If you don’t, what will protect you from competitors that will undercut your price? There is always someone willing to sell the same thing a bit cheaper, isn’t there? What will protect you when your dwindling margins force you to lower your quality? What will protect you when your competitors balloon from 20 to 2.000, if your market becomes too attractive for investment? What will protect you when someone with the same type of products opens a store next to yours?

The trick is, you’re not selling to everyone anyhow. Your brand stands for something. The people who are buying it, who are using it, assign attributes to it. If you don’t provide added value through branding in fear not to lose current customers, you’re missing the point. As for the complexity? Don’t do a thousand things. Do a dozen. Map out your optimal customer journey and experience and make it happen. It’s risky for agencies too. What happens if you put all your eggs in one basket but it doesn’t pan out? Who has the balls to take that responsibility? Instead of playing it safe, fail hard and fail faster. That way, you can build something that will work and last.

Otherwise, it’s all just a mark on a cow’s butt.

Disclaimer: Simply stating the obvious… The views and opinions expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect or represent the position of any of the companies I’ve worked for. I’m simply venting my brain through this writing exercise. If you like what you read, please feel free to start a conversation in the comments below (I’d tell you to come back for more, but I’m not going to commit to a specific frequency, so I don’t know when the next one will be).