Full Frontal PR Report
David Feder

During the past decade everyone seemed to be—or pretend to be—in the business of branding. The overwhelming majority of ad agencies, PR firms, Hollywood agents, and management consultants—even a few focus group participants—have jumped on the branding bandwagon en masse.

Every purveyor of fine branding boasts sole proprietorship over the so-called unique methodologies, outstanding insights and talented staff that will transform their client’s product or service into something they can dub larger than life.

Namely, A Great Brand.

After years of spending seven, eight or even nine figures on branding schemes, marketing directors are now coming under increasing pressure to deliver tangible business results, maybe for the first time! A growing number are waking up to the sobering fact that branding as we know it has failed to build great brands.

Most “great” brands weren’t built on branding. In fact, branding and those fantastic brands are made of altogether different stuff. Branding, you see, seeks to create reality through perception. Great brands, meanwhile, create perceptions through reality. Branding seeks to gloss over a lack of differentiation, while great brands are built from the inside out, on differentiation.

Branding aficionados are ever so quick to claim all the credit for the success of Apple, the VW Beetle and Nike, and cite the outstanding logos or ads created for these truly great brands as reasons. A convenient confusion of cause and effect! These brands didn’t become so good because of marketing. Hardly. Unique and differentiated propositions made for good marketing programs. That is, Apple computers are easier to use, VW Beetles look and feel different from any other car on the road, and the world’s greatest athletes actually wear Nike.

Really the best brands make for marvelous communications because they speak for themselves. Not by coincidence, the best ads for VW and Apple feature the product in front of a plain white background. A Beetle or an iPod is unusual—anything else would distract. A Harley can be identified from blocks away by its deep gurgling roar.

Branding will, however, produce clones. Slap a competitor’s logo on most ads and it works as well (or as badly). Having nothing to say for themselves, the “suckers of branding” are addicted to borrowed equity, from babies to breasts, heart-wrenching melodies to really lame jokes, leafy roads to the cliché about that ever-yucky “road of life.”

Does anyone believe that a, ahem, Buick is Tiger’ car of choice, or Celine Dion would choose a, uh, Chrysler Sebring when seeking her one true love?

Marketing directors who are serious about building such brands know that effective brand building means spending time with the product builders: engineers, food scientists, technologists. Their efforts create the differentiation that defines a product in the marketplace. Their collective insight gives focus so your agencies and internal folks to do what they do best: bring differentiation to life through compelling communications that motivate customers to buy.

And motivation is what it’s all about.

David Feder knows a brand when he builds one.