For various reasons, the amorphous animal known as a ‘brand
campaign’ is the subject of today’s post.
Now to my mind, brand campaigns are the most miss-understood
activity in the ad game. The first warning sign is a brief that says ‘brand
campaign’. The immediate reaction to receiving a brief so titled should be to
return it to sender with a note attached reading ‘please revise thoroughly’.
Because of course there is no such thing in the ad game as a
‘brand campaign’, there is only a ‘brand
(re)positioning campaign’, which is quite a different thing – the addition
of the ‘additional’ word serving to focus the mind as to exactly what one is
trying to achieve with a campaign
such as this.
Often when a client asks you for a brand campaign what they
are trying to say is that they want to make some noise about their company,
what they do and why they are good at it. There is not necessarily any harm in
this, though it’s really more of a corporate campaign, but it must remembered
that there is a big difference between patting yourself on the back/blowing
your own trumpet and building a brand.
The point of a brand campaign is to position a brand. This
word position is one of the most important technical terms in the realm of
advertising, yet it is unfortunately also one of the most ignored and least
understood.
I’ve said this before (I think), and I ill say it again and
again and again: a brand is a proactively
constructed set of feelings, thoughts, memories, beliefs, experiences and
associations towards a particular product, service, company, institution or
person. The key word here is proactively – and in many ways the whole point of
advertising is to create the thoughts/feelings/ associations that people file
away in their minds under ‘your brand’.
Remember that the minute that you put yourself ‘out there’,
people will immediately begin to build up a file on you in their minds,
therefore the key issue is whether or not what they are ‘filing’ is what you
want them to be ‘filing’.
The truth of the matter is that there are a lot of products
and services and companies in this town that have all the accoutrements of a
brand – logos, colours, fonts, packaging – but which are not actually brands. This is because it is not ultimately the
accoutrements that make a brand (these are just expressions), it is the
pre-determined taking of a position in the consumers minds that makes a brand.
To put it in very plain English, building a brand
essentially involves telling people what
to think about a particular product/service/company. It does sound somehow
ruthless, but fundamentally this is what advertising is all about – telling
people, in the nicest possible way of course, exactly what you need them to think/believe about a
thing – and until you understand this about the ad game, you are not playing
the ad game, you are playing the layout game, or the word-play game, or the
negotiate an extra 5% discount from the media house game, but most certainly
not the ad game.
Remember that the point of advertising is to build a brand,
this is the alpha and omega of every ad you ever run, every script you ever
write, every experience you ever design and every POS material you ever
produce.
Now since a brand is simply a product or service about which
people think that which you have
decided to tell them to think, it obviously follows that the crux of the matter
is knowing what to tell people to think,
which is nowhere near as simple as it may sound. Where so many supposed brands
fail in this town is that they (the ‘custodians’) do not know what they want people to think about their brand, and
if you do not know what you want people to think about your brand, you are in
no position to tell them what to think about it, which means that you will
leave them to decide for themselves
(horror) what to think about your brand, which means that you do not have a
brand, you have an accident. Now of
course accidents can be both for the better and for the worse, but a brand can
only be for the better, because you so designed it to be…
So the next time that you have to dream up a ‘brand
campaign’, remember the key question that you have to ask yourself – what do
you want people to think/believe
about the brand? The great joy of advertising (or one of them), and this is
what is essentially ‘creative’ about the business, is that you can get people
to think/believe pretty much anything about a thing, provided that you are
genuinely convincing, and that your ‘pitch’ is not manifestly countered by the
experience of reality – as for example, were you to try and sell Coca Cola as
the taste of Oranges, though please note that Fanta has done exactly that with
no small success despite the fact that it bears little or no relationship to
the oranges that grow on trees here on planet earth.
Remember please further that ‘what you want people to
think/believe’ is actually ‘what you
want people to think/believe in order for your business to meet it’s
objectives’. I cannot stress this enough – a
brand is a mental construct in the collective consciousness that creates a
psychologically-enabling environment within which a business can sell to its
optimal level.
In a small market such as ours, many businesses make money
almost by default, by being the only provider of a particular product/service,
or by being one of only a few providers, or by being one of the cheaper
providers… but our market will not be small for ever, and it is getting more
competitive by the day, and as the market gets more competitive, you need to up
your game, and there is no better way to up your game (Kaizen perhaps excluded)
than to start to build a brand…
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