An Uncomfortable Branding Truth

Sometimes I get an uncomfortable feeling when people ask me what my company does. It is not that I don’t know. I do have an elevator speech and I can evangelize about what we do. For all my creativity, I have yet to be able to fully replace the word advertising withBrandgineering^TM.

I firmly believe that brands are not built by advertising, but by customer service. Sure, you can accidentally build a brand for a short time based on the product or service, but within a short time your business will likely fall apart.

Years ago there was a small film studio that exploded in a niche market. The owner of that brand went on speaking tours telling his story of his success. He was heralded as a genius. Not too many years later he was sitting in bankruptcy court – penniless and suicidal. In his biography, he admitted that his success was largely attributed, not to his product, but that customers were purchasing just about anything in that fad marketplace. He had treated his employees and customers poorly and eventually, his brand quickly deteriorated. He wasn’t smart; he was lucky.

Building a solid business and marketing that business requires a solid relationship with the customer. It is the basis for all your marketing efforts. Leading brands understand that the customer–brand relationship are highly dependent upon relationships. Honesty. Integrity. Value.

I see our primary responsibility with our clients is first helping them build Brand.Relationships^TM with customers. When a customer walks in the door, how are they treated? What contributions does your brand make to the community? How do the leaders at your company treat the staff or team members? Your customer service at all levels has as much to do with your brand as the product or service you offer.

So, when you ask me the first thing I’ll do in our advertising or Brandgineering^TM effort, it will likely be examining your customer service practices – no amount of slick advertising or fancy graphics will benefit your brand unless we make sure the foundation of your business is solid – the customer relationship.

Carl Hartman | www.brandgineering.biz | Denver & Los Angeles

Why "The Who" was the Best Brand Marketed at the Super Bowl

Once again, the music industry, and more specifically The Who, stole the marketing show during Super Bowl XLVI. Why, you ask? Because the entertainment industry understands marketing their brands better than any other industry. The Who, Carrie Underwood and Queen Latifah are probably the only brands that got paid some big bucks to advertise and not the other way around. Plus, they took advantage of the opportunity to make a personal connection with their customers. Smart.

Once again the mega-advertising-agencies stumbled on the most important thing - selling products. The same story plays out each year: huge brands hired overpriced advertising agencies to create some very nice television ads --- and I can't remember what they were advertising. Sure, it could be my ADHD --- OR --- it could be that they've forgotten how to sell.

It seems that, for years, the advertising has attracted "creatives" that think up really cute ideas. Those ideas are supposed to sell products and they often fall short of that goal. Years ago, one of my clients related this story to me as he sat there crying (literally) about the huge amount of money he spent (wasted) on an advertising campaign. It was very creative --- part of it featured a video filled with very sexy camera moves, lit very well, great performances by the on-screen talent, fabulous musical score --- it, however, did nothing to sell his product. The advertising business has almost become the outlet for aspiring artists, musicians, and filmmakers to milk clients for money to live out their creative dreams without regard to their primary job - selling products and marketing brands.

Right off the bat, The Who told the audience to "put down the chicken fingers and turn the television way up!" Then, they hooked the audience with standard Roger Daltrey and Pete Townsend energy. During that time he reached out to his audience in the stadium and the screens at home and left them wanting more. Without any wardrobe malfunctions - short of Townsend’s belly flash - they sucked in the audience and was the most memorable part of the 3 plus hour-long event.

My wager is that overall, The Who will sell more units and get more hits on MySpace this week than any other product that had a commercial during the Super Bowl. I'd love to explain why, but that will be in my new book "Brand.gineering" and the subject of future blogs.

Rock On! --- Carl Hartman, CEO brandgineering.org

What We Haven’t Learned from Television

I grew up in a household that had a black and white television that my dad eventually and reluctantly exchanged for a color television. We had a huge load of LPs on the shelf and a superb tube driven stereo system that my dad built from the ground up. My father even had a Victorola that now sits in my living room and is over 100 years old. We had old tube operated radios and I remember when we got our first, very expensive, solid state radio with a cassette player. I remember disc jockeys in LA lamenting the missing hiss of vinyl when the first CD players came out. The point is that I was around to see major transitions in media delivery.

I was not around when television was invented; I am not that old. But, I do remember the discussions about the fear of people in the film industry that television would eventually destroy cinema. Well, it is more than 50 years since consumers have adopted television en masse and people are paying ten dollars to see films. Television has not killed cinema, it could be argued that television has enhanced cinema, providing additional business models for back-end sales.

Television actually evolved into its own format that is similar to cinema, but different. When television started out, it was highly technical and technical people ran the show. Until the 1980’s it was still required to have a special FCC license to operate a video camera at a network or TV station. Eventually, the storytellers took over and made TV what it is today: a medium for telling compelling stories.

When I worked as an Executive Producer at PBS a small group of us were assigned to a new project developing media for the Internet. My first day on that project involved sitting in a room full of software engineers and people concerned with technical stuff. These people were telling us how to build web sites.

I made enemies quick. I quickly developed the mantra “We don’t allow the people down in Master Control tell us how to make television, why do we allow the people doing the technology tell us how to build web sites?” Media is, after all, a storytelling medium, not a technology platform. Content is king. Eventually, I won a competition against 80 other PBS entities, held by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, to develop Television of Tomorrow. I combined the best of cinema, radio, television, graphic communications, gaming and interactive media to tell compelling stories. – I have to give credit where credit is due, I was helped greatly by two people at Carnegie Mellon University, Randy Pausch and Scott Stephens.

So, what are we doing with these multi-function boxes that allow us to read, listen, and watch? We are still kicking the tires and are only using a fraction of the ability of the medium. Computers have been around as long as television and yet we have not figured out how to effectively use the boxes on our desks to their full potential.

What makes a medium powerful is not the medium, but the application of the medium. It is one of the reasons we use professional screenwriters to develop our copy for web sites. We respect that all mediums are about telling stories, not the technology. I see a lot of cool stuff on the Internet; amazing animated sites with wiz-bang technology. I rarely see compelling stories. Until we compel and move people with what we do, it is simply a meaningless activity.

Stories are what move people. They are the foundation of communication. The message and story should always drive our efforts.