Stop me before I brand again!

"I think we marketers have it wrong about brands and it has impeded corporate performance," says Jonathan Salem Baskin, author of Branding Only Works on Cattle. So just why are they "unwilling (or incapable) of seeing the light"?

Billions have been spent on systems intended to strengthen relationships between companies and consumers, endless books have been written about it and you can’t have a conversation at work without mentioning consumers within a few seconds of opening your mouth. It’s politically incorrect to do otherwise. Yet, here in the U.S, the truth is frightening:

• Satisfaction levels are about equal to the ratings reported in 1994 (one out of four consumers are unhappy).
• Satisfaction in many of the industry categories is either flat or down.
• We still can’t track product switches, simmering dissatisfaction or outright resignation

It seems inconceivable that we’re no better at customer service than we were over a decade ago; companies are equipped with the latest technical know-how, not to mention at least a 100 years of management experience. What’s the problem? The easy answer has been “you just aren’t doing CRM right,” but I think that avoids the deeper, more intractable problem: I think we marketers have it wrong about brands and it has impeded corporate performance.

The marketing poets

I’m not sure your average marketer has an appreciation for the profound science and maths that drive operational understanding of customer relationships. We marketers think philosophy is our exclusive domain...our understanding of human behaviour comes from inspired painters, angry musicians and befuddled poets, whose personal expressions of emotion and feeling are themselves universal truths in need of no substantiation or repeatability by experiment. Such details are, well, meant for the technicians who work those sorts of things out. So it’s not surprising that marketing departments have stayed somewhat apart from the massive transformation the corporate world has undergone.

While we marketers have held onto our worldview based on the insubstantiality of brands, all the non-poets have remade industry: not just assembly lines and finance, but also operations, IT, business strategy and sourcing. Even human resources departments have turned themselves upside down, sometimes repeatedly, in pursuit of doing business better and more profitably - all measured by objective facts, events and the statistical tools that run the enterprise overall. We marketers have been all but absent from this transformation, keeping our definitions and experience of brand an externality; an intangible component of business practice.

In fact, we fundamentally don’t acknowledge the dichotomy between the pursuit of quality (statistical processes and software tools) and the pursuit of brand (customer perceptions and intent). We don’t even have a competing theology to counter it. Many of the management approaches (Six Sigma, ISO standards, ERP, CRM) have consistent, agreed-upon criteria by which to practice and measure their work. Branding has no such underpinning to which everyone agrees. We’re kind of like a loose affiliation of UFO enthusiasts - the self-help cult EST had more organisation than the branding community. And for the past 50 years, all we’ve done is find new experts with ever-stranger, wackier ideas, instead of developing objectively real, agreed-upon principles.

Yet, the reality of consumer and customer experience today is much more sensible to the statistical controls of operations. For every qualitative survey of intent or mental states, there are more objective and reliable ways to understand and predict behaviour. Perceptions of products and services are no longer the purview of creative marketers, but rather embedded in the context of ongoing existence. Everyone in the business - and every action the business undertakes - contributes to branding in real-time, and without much filtering or control.

Reality engagement

Marketing is, in many ways, distributed throughout the enterprise, as well as outsourced to third parties and communities. In fact, CRM could be seen as a subset of a much larger strategy of reality engagement and management. The opportunities to exploit it as such are absolutely immense. But it’ll never happen until marketing gets an intervention.

Just read any marketing trade publication and you’ll see that we’re unwilling (or incapable) of seeing the light ourselves. Every new media toy affords us another opportunity to spin our ideas of brand even further into the cosmos and we talk to one another in an echo-chamber that still, to this day, declares that our problem is that our associates and clients don’t understand branding. We will continue to pursue our failed ideals until somebody stops us. I’m not talking about a meeting. We need to shake up the entire deal and challenge the very precepts that drive branding:

• Brands aren’t promises, hints, mental images or flashes of lightening from the staves of the gods, but rather explicit behaviors.
• Brands have limits and boundaries, and can’t be associated with anything our creative hearts imagine. It’s as important to define what your business won’t deliver as what it could (think how this very though might crimp the next image ad).
• Customer satisfaction is not a function of sales, nor does it arise from mental states. Rather, it’s an outcome of a true, ongoing two-way relationships.

Our consumers and customers won’t be satisfied until we satisfactorily resolve the dichotomy between marketing and the rest of the organisation. And only then will companies have the opportunity to explore the true nature and value of customer relationships, and realise the full potential for CRM.