I’ve got a new column up at BusinessWeek, focusing on the process of creating a brand. It’s causing me no small amount of grief trying to serve up functional value in 900 words. Opinions are easy in that amount of space, but functional substance is difficult, unless you spread it over many installations. It’s humbling that in my 3rd year of writing that column, I’m still learning how to work the medium effectively.

My biggest fear is that the column was more interesting to write than it is to read. I’ve had the tremendous privilege of working for the past seven years with two of the best strategic designers in the brand game–Russ Baker and Kenichi Nishiwaki–and learning firsthand just how strategic design can be in crystallizing the value a company provides to its customers, not to mention galvanizing the corporate culture. For so many of the clients we’ve served, the aesthetic process of determining their corporate or product brand was a seminal experience–a rare opportunity for the company to look in the mirror and make critical discoveries about who they are, as well as choices about who they want to be. There’s very little patience for that kind of process these days.

Let me know if the column stands on its own. If not, I’ll push on some the ideas a little more, and maybe even rope Russ and Kenichi into offering some of their own thoughts.

I guess the debate isn’t over. Jennifer Rice at BrandShift is taking up the dialog on the meaning of brand. The crux of Jennifer’s argument is that the definition of "brand" as a tangible symbol that distinguishes one company’s products and services from the competition is too narrow–and too "company-centric". She argues that we should understand "brand as an idea".

Let’s take a fictional character called Joe Shmo. Joe works hard to
cultivate a reputation as a smart, well-connected and savvy business
professional. He believes that these qualities represent his personal
brand. Unfortunately, those who know Joe say he’s overly opinionated,
boorish and irritating. They believe that’s Joe’s brand. Who’s right?
Joe, or those who know Joe?

The answer is, both are right. Christopher would say that others’
opinions represent ‘brand reputation,’ not the actual brand. I say that
a brand is worthless without understanding how the brand is perceived
in the marketplace. A brand is the ultimate co-created corporate asset.

I’d prefer if we started instead with an analogy that is actually a business. One of the posters on this blog, Sage, offered an analog to Jennifer’s example with Enron.

Perceptions change. Brands do not. Want proof? Enron circa 1999 and Enron today. Same brand. Totally different perceptions of the brand.

A tangible definition of brand is the cornerstone that allows us to make distinctions about what adds value to the brand and what does not. I’m not arguing with Jennifer’s ideas about the importance of the customer relationship in developing brand equity, but if the meaning of "brand" is to be understood to encompass everything that influences or increases its value, than the word has no identifiable boundary. Yes, a brand is worthless without understanding how it is perceived in the marketplace (or at least worth less), just like a car is worthless if there’s no gas. But we don’t say gas is the car. It is a distinct, critical component of the system that makes the car useful. Just like brand image–that idea in the mind of the customer–is a critical component of the system that makes a brand valuable.

I think a lot of people reading my posts have come to the conclusion that I’m denying the importance of the customer relationship in building a strong and valuable brand. Nothing could be further from the truth. I am *only* arguing that we have come to a point in the evolution of marketing where our imagination has run headfirst into the brickwall of rational necessity. Marketing exists as a corporate function–if the company stops investing in the marketing budget, the customer is not going to come in and pick up the tab. Companies are increasingly confused by marketing concepts–not because they are wrong or misguided, but because they are poorly communicated, inconsistent and detached from a demonstration of measurable value.

The idea that a brand is an image in the mind of the consumer, that it is co-created with the customer, is a great strategic concept that can help businesses get beyond a product-centric focus that leaves their customers uninspired. We need more of that. But at the same time, we need to understand that just as companies live or die by the satisfaction of their customers, they also live and die by the satisfaction of their investors. Companies are being pressed to wall to demonstrate *how* value is created, and when 10-50% of revenue is going into marketing, they are not going to countenance marketers continuing to say that brand is some ethereal idea that can’t really be pinned down but we think it’s in the mind of the customer.

Company centric? Yes. That’s who pays the bills. The marketers who make real advances in building a customer-centric landscape will be those who understand that fact and are able to keep it in balance. The first step down that path, in my mind, is the kind of professional discipline that insists on semantic clarity so that we can all communicate knowledge and ideas consistently without having to spend most of our energy recalibrating meanings.

If you want to insist that "brand" means more than it has been both traditionally and professionally  defined to mean (AMA)–ie: a symbol–than you need to demonstrate 1) how that meaning is insufficient, and 2) how the existence of related, but distinct concepts, fails to address that insufficiency.

Alright. I can finally start putting the semantic argument over the meaning of brand to bed. My column finally posted on Business Week, after a week’s editorial delay left me twiddling my thumbs. I’m certain there will still be some semantic discussions in the weeks ahead, but I think the foundation is layed and it’s time to move on.

One interesting note on this whole exercise. After digging so relentlessly into the confusion over the meaning of brand, and then stepping back from it, the whole process of how we got to such confusion seems suddenly so clear. Brands as important commercial symbols have been around since ancient history. But an appreciation for the critical value of brand to commercial success really exploded during the rise of mass markets after World War II. At that point, we started developing all kinds of approaches to building value in the brand–from enhancing the relationship between the company and the customer to developing aggressive competitive strategies. So far, so good.

The confusion arises when we start to believe that activities that *add value to the brand* are in fact *creating brand*. At that point, we can start to make the argument–as so many marketers do today–that *any* activity that adds value to a brand is really producing the brand. And since so many activities that add value to the brand produce so many disparate things, each of those things suddenly becomes invested with the title of brand, and we no longer have any clarity. It only gets worse when you realize that many of those activities are owned by competing camps within marketing (advertising, direct mail, interactive, design, etc.), and each has a vested interest in staking their claim to the role of Brand Creator.

Well, I’ve made my argument. In many ways, it’s less about the meaning of brand than it is about the future of marketing. Do we have the capability to sort through the confusion we’ve created and clarify the concepts that define our profession so that businesses understand the value we provide? Do we have the ability to even recognize there’s a problem at all? Or will we wind up pushing a shopping cart down the halls of corporate America babbling on to ourselves about how important we are while everyone looks at us with a mixture of sadness and disgust? Really, it’s an unkind metaphor, but that’s what’s at stake.

I just got off the phone with John Winsor. We had a great conversation about brands and marketing, and we’re essentially on the same page. He posts his own response to my comments here. I have to say what I appreciate about the whole experience is finding a thread online that leads to an open and engaging discussion, less about "what’s wrong" with marketing per se than about how marketing can be done more effectively.

John’s focus is on the development of *real* interaction between marketers and their customers, rather than the relationship-by-proxy that happens through agencies, focus-groups, surveys, etc. He talks about going Beyond the Brand (ie: the hype of branding) by changing the one-way flow of marketing communication–the broadcasting of a pre-fab message–to a two-way dialog with customers. I can’t argue with that–in fact, I’m looking forward to more of a dialog with John in the future.

This is unreal. Over at Corante’s BrandShift blog, John Winsor is arguing that the word brand has become too stale to be useful, and that we need to come up with some *new* special word that infuses new life into what it is that marketing does.

The word brand has started to loose it’s magic through overuse. Is
there another word that captures the same concepts? If so, what is it?

Is this really the face of marketing today? Is this the best we can do? Apparently, the way to solve marketing’s shortcomings is not to dig deep in order to understand how we are failing to provide real value and how we can improve; the solution is to just toss away the old paradigm and create something new and shiny. A new word will solve all our problems and make it all magical again. 

*This* is exactly what I’ve been ranting about for the past few weeks. I am extending an invitation to John Winsor–and anyone at Corante–to dialog on this topic and explain their point of view. I’ll keep you posted on whether or not we can get something going to get to the bottom of this.

–Update–
I should have mentioned in the post that Winsor was picking up the call for a new word for Brand from a William Safire column  that makes the same case: "brand" is bland, let’s have something new. That doesn’t change my position–I could add to it by saying marketers probably shouldn’t be taking professional cues from William Safire–but the original column is relevant to the discussion.

Out of the frying pan and into the fire. I posted my final Business Week column on the meaning of brand–I’ll post a link here when it goes live–wrapping up my argument for a concrete definition, while unavoidably opening another can of worms. If a Brand is a tangible symbol that distinguishes one company’s products from all competitors, what is Branding?

A couple of years back, when The Industry Standard was still a 150-page print magazine (remember that?), I had an animated discussion with one of the editors about "branding". They had done a special section on the topic, and every single one of the articles was on advertising. At the time, my company was heavily engaged in interactive development, and I was making the argument that the creation of an online experience was every bit as important a branding activity as advertising–in fact, for some companies, it’s the most important activity. Yahoo, eBay and Google all became household names because of the experience they delivered, not their snappy ads–which didn’t even begin until after they had made their mark.

I’ll still make the same argument today–although I no longer try to claim that the experience you create *is* your brand. Your brand is still the symbol, but the experience enhances the value of the symbol, both for you and your customer. In fact, all of the activities that a company engages in to maximize the value of the company/customer relationship, in my mind, fall in some way under the category of branding. Take Customer Service as an example. To some degree, Customer Service is just Customer Service–it’s providing accountability for a product according to the service contract. But to the extent the company realizes Customer Service is a critical touchpoint with valued customers, and invests in going beyond basic accountability to try and influence the customer’s perception of the company–by having intelligent operators answer the phone, by offering a replacement product, whatever–any returns on that investment accrue to the brand.

So, what is the definition of "branding"? No help from the AMA here, they don’t have it in their dictionary. If you use Google’s helpful "define:" command, you come up with a reasonable grabbag of definitions –many of which simply revert to "brand". But building on the original cowboy definition of brand as the symbol, and branding as the act of applying the symbol, we could follow the same approach in business:

Branding is the set of activities that serve to create or build the brand.

As most companies know today, the relationship with the customer permeates far more of the company’s operations than just marketing, sales and service. For some companies, the way you answer the phone is key, for others, it’s the way you drive your trucks. For some companies it’s your Web site experience that influences customers most, for others it’s the fact that you invest some of your profits in charity. While some activities are pure acts of branding–like advertising–others may be more subtle but equally important. Whatever the activity is, to the extent you go beyond the function of the activity itself to try and improve your relationship with customers and prospects, it is, I would propose, branding–the activity is designed to add value to your brand.

I can already hear the mail coming. If you know of a solid and authoritative definition of branding, please let me know and I’ll post it. If you have a good argument for why branding should be more limited, or more expansive, likewise. There’s a lot of ground to cover…