I was driving home from a client meeting yesterday in the rain. It was one of those spring rains where it’s bright outside, but everything on the road is wrapped in vapor. It’s mesmerizing. You kind of recede into your head, watching the traffic, listening to the radio, but somehow away from it all. What a perfect time to listen to commercials. Really. You can meet them on their own intended wavelength, the frequency of sub-cognitive influence. You can pat the little vignettes of drama or comedy on the head and send them off to play, while welcoming the value proposition and positioning statements for a nice little chat. What is it you’d like to tell me? I’m listening.

So I’m listening to the commercials in this half-hypnotized state, and along comes a message from the accountants at Grant-Thorton. The commercial was unremarkable, it just kind of floated by, but the positioning pulled me out of my reverie. I wondered for a moment if I’d really heard what I thought I heard, but then they kindly repeated it so it left no doubt. Here it is. Remember, this is an accounting firm.

"Grant-Thorton. Passionate about the business of accounting."

Passion. Accounting. D-o-e-s  n-o-t  c-o-m-p-u-t-e. Error. Error. Format C:

I don’t know why it struck me as so absurd. I mean, maybe businesses really do feel they’re missing something with their dour and dispassionate bean-counters. Who needs rigor if it comes with rigor mortis? Maybe what all businesses are clamoring for is Accountants with Passion. Sing to me about my balance sheet, tell me little lies about performance, make love to the numbers you prancing pony. Yeah, that’s the ticket. I can just see the chorus line.

So the whole thing got me thinking of how many times I’ve come across businesses that embrace the notion of differentiation– ~Differentiate or Die~ –but have forgotten about the notion of relevance. It’s good to position yourself in a way that is unique. But it’s a whole lot more effective to position yourself in a way that is uniquely relevant to the goals of the consumer. Grant-Thornton may be the only accounting firm with passion. But in an era of increasing financial scrutiny, new regulations coming down the Sarbanes-Oxley pipeline, and scandal seeming to lurk around every corner, who cares about passion? Give me an accounting firm that knows what it’s doing and doesn’t make mistakes, and I’ll find passion with my wife, thank you very much.

I’m humbled. Exactly a week after pondering the slippery meaning of the word "brand", I picked up a copy of Marketing Management–a peer-reviewed journal put out by the American Marketing Association, and found Heidi Schultz’s clear, concise and imminently practical definition of the brand concept. In two pages she manages to nail down the scope of the word, clear the confusion of "brand ownership" between company and consumer, and take the marketing profession to task for failing to wisely discern the true meaning of customer-centricity.

The article is well worth the cost of the magazine–but getting a copy isn’t easy. The AMA site provides the archives online, but while they let you register for free (with lots of personal information), they don’t tell you until after you’re registered that you need to have a subscription. So, I’m going to try and find a way to get a copy to post without running afoul of the AMA.

The crux of Heidi’s argument is that a brand should be understood as a fairly concrete thing–comprising names, terms, signs, symbols, designs, or combinations of these things, intended to identify the goods and services of one seller and differentiate them from another. There are clear laws that govern the intellectual property rights of a brand owner, bestowing upon the owner the right to sell and license a brand, and protecting those rights against infringement.

Heidi argues that this concrete definition of a brand should not be confused with the associations a consumer attaches to the brand based on their consumer experience. She distinguishes that concept as "brand image", including all the intangibles associated with it: what the brand promises, what it represents, how it makes consumers feel, etc. Clearly a company has an interest in influencing the brand image, but they can’t control it. They can, however, control the brand–their tangible, protected property–and they are empowered by the law to do so.

Her argument takes the concept of brand out of the realm of fuzzy logic and, in so doing, exposes what she sees is a resistance on the part of marketers to submit to this level of clarity because of the accountability such clarity brings:

"Why subject brand budgets to such scrutiny when it’s easier to obscure the issue and state that the brand belongs to the customer and we are simply the stewards? Isn’t it just easier to say we want to measure brand success in communication terms, such as customer awareness, perceptions, and preference–not in actual financial value creation?"

I wish the rest of the Marketing Management magazine were as clear and incisive as this article. Unfortunately, a companion piece on the death of the 4 Ps seems rooted in exactly the kind of muddled marketing Ms. Schultz is arguing against. I’ll be taking that on next week in Business Week.

I’ve been writing in my column for Business Week about the changing nature of business valuation and its impact on the practice of marketing. In my discussions with Jonathan Knowles from Brand Finance, we got into an interesting sidetrack on the slippery meanings of "brand".

The branding meme has had a major revival over the past few years, due in part to the rise of the Internet and the entirely new medium in which brands can be built. There have been endless pontifications on the importance of brands, the meaning of brands, the value of brands. Some of it is enlightening; too much of it is snake oil. Everyone needs a brand. Everyone is a brand. Brand… Is.

The whole dialog is as close as marketers come to a philosophy about their work–the meaning of marketing as an endeavor–and I think they get a little light headed. Yes, marketing has a fascinating psycho-social component, but in the end, marketers are paid to create value. What they forget is that value in business has a bottom-line metric–ie: I’m glad you find your work culturally significant, but what are you doing for my cashflow?

What I appreciate about Knowles is that he is both insightful and grounded in pragmatics. Knowles asserts that the goal of a brand is to create more successful businesses. Somehow I think that point is too often missed in actual practice. Specfically, he says, the creation of customer value is what gives brands the opportunity to create financial value–or what marketers call the price premium that well-branded products can command. But what does that tell us about what the word "brand" really means?

Historically, marketers have often defined brand as a promise of quality–something created by a company and handed over to the customer. Advertisers came along and tweaked that idea, calling brand a set of associations in the mind of the consumer–something owned by the consumer and shaped through manipulation. When the Internet took off, we started hearing about brand as an experience, something more than just a promise or a set of associations, something more alive. But when you push on any one of these concepts they get a little squishy.

Okay, brand is a promise, an association, an experience, a reputation even. But how do you invest a million dollars in a promise? How do you measure the equity of an experience? The truth is, you’re investing in something that implies a promise, or builds a reputation, and all of those things–whether you’re talking about customer service, or equipment, or intellectual property–those things have their own names; you wouldn’t call them brands. And, as Knowles is showing in his work on brand valuation, you don’t directly measure a brand as much as you measure the effects of a brand–how much you invest in activities that build brand, for example, or how much of a premium people are willing to pay. The actual thing itself, brand, is still slipping out of our grasp.

If you start with the earliest meanings of the concept, its advent is the notion of ownership. "I own this." But even here there are some interesting shadings. Why be so interested in asserting ownership? It could be a statement of territory, "this is mine", or of creation; "I made this", or even of responsibility "I am accountable for this". In the simplest terms, when you go back to cowboys burning a mark on their cattle, it’s really a clerical purpose. When the big cattle drives inevitibly mixed together, you had to be able to tell which animals were yours.

The point is that the brand is not the creator, and it is not the created. It’s a tangible symbol of the relationship between the creator and the created. Okay, that’s easy enough, if a little pedantic. What’s interesting to me is how the meaning evolves once you move away from the utility of the concept to the ripples of effect that mark any transaction between a creator and a consumer by way of an object. Now it is the experience of the consumer that adds a new layer of meaning to the concept of brand. In a sense, the product is now a proxy for the relationship between the creator and the consumer–"this product is the distillation of my value to you"–and the brand is… What?

Well, the product isn’t the brand, the creator isn’t the brand, and the brand is no longer just a tangible symbol of the relationship between the creator and the created, it’s now a "container" for the experience of the consumer. And this is pretty much where I sit at this point. This is a really clunky way to say it, and I need to work on this, but to me, a brand is a conceptual container that emanates, planned or not, from the creation of something of value that is transferred from its creator to a consumer. The container is shaped by the creator, but the contents of the container are created by the consumer. And at the end of the day, the value of the container is a function of both its shape–it’s ability to invite, suggest, contain and label the experience of the consumer, especially as unique from other experiences–and its contents, which is the experiences and associations consumers actually accrue to the container. The container must be created in a way to maximize its potential contents, as well as the ability to transfer contents from one consumer to other–ie: providing a container that’s already partially filled.

Is this a penetrating glimpse into the mundane, or does it have any incisive value? You tell me. I’ll say one thing, I wish I could take this grammar school class today. It might resolve a lot of my questions.