I’m working on my next column on brand concepts, sifting through a lot of the complaints that have been leveled at my reductionism (that every instance of brand is, by definition, tangible).

Most of the people passionate enough to send me hate mail complain that I’m oversimplifying the complexity of marketing. Apparently, because I’m arguing that the definition of the word *brand* should be understood in its simplist form, these people make the knee-jerk assumption that I’m cynically tossing out all of the other concepts associated with brand building–like the CFO with horns and a pitch-fork that must be haunting their dreams. Is it possible that the universe can contain one core concept for brand that is concrete, and also accommodate derivative concepts that are *distinct* but arrayed around the core? Heavens no. Everything must be lumped into the vague domain of a single word. It’s like brand has become the magic bag of Felix the Cat–it can be anything you want it to be.

Others, like the letter sent to my editor at BW (the one from Gaurav Bahirvani), go a step further by mounting a defense for the soft subtlety of marketing that defies quantitative analysis:

I disagree with Kenton regarding marketers not being adept at
demonstrating return on investment. Marketing or branding is a
qualitative aspect. It is not a 2+2 sum which will give you a definite
answer. In marketing, you’re playing with emotions and human psyche,
not numbers.

Okay, let’s parse that for just a moment. He disagrees with the notion that marketers aren’t adept at proving ROI. My assumption would be that he would follow that statement by showing how, in fact, marketers are good at proving ROI. But no, he mounts the defense that marketing is about emotions and human psyche, not numbers. Which, I guess, is a proposition that marketers should be immune from having to prove ROI. Why? Because it’s too hard to give a definite answer.

As a businessman, if you’re on my payroll you need to show me why putting a dollar in your budget is a better bet than putting that dollar in the stock market–or in the lottery, for that matter. As long as marketers argue that they are entitled to immunity from quantitative performance review, simply because they’re dealing with something that is hard to measure–and that everyone else should just "get it"–they’re lemmings: they’re apparently ignorant of the tidal wave of marketing metrics and accountability measures that are sweeping through the business world. Sarbanes-Oxley anyone?

Finally, there are those who will accommodate me, grudgingly, as some curious fundamentalist. They’re not quite sure why I’m insisting on this line of argument, but they’ll grant that I’m not entirely wrong even if I’m not entirely right. The most gracious of these is over at hypocritical, which goes into some interesting detail about the mindset of marketers who are arguing against me.

Here’s the thing. He’s not wrong. He just has a different semantic
argument for his definition of the word "brand." It happens to be
completely at odds with my definition. And that, to quote Stuart Smalley, is okay.

My whole point has been that it’s not okay. And this is the heart of the problem. Please understand this. I AM NOT ASKING YOU TO AGREE WITH ~~MY~~ DEFINITION OF BRAND. And I, personally, will not countenance your creation of a NEW definition of brand. Why? I’ll be the *first* to champion a living language in which words can be created, modified, exploded–we didn’t get to 100,000+ plus words in the English language by insisting on stasis. But when you get to the point of MASS CONFUSION, you must stabilize the language you use to communicate and transfer knowledge, or you embrace intellectual oblivion.

The simple fact is that the standard definition of brand, the one that defines a brand as a symbol that sets one company’s products apart from competitors, is entirely serviceable today in 2005, and the attempts to push derivative concepts into the meaning are self-serving, egotistical and misguided–not to mention professionally suicidal.

The heart of the problem, to me, is this: Marketers have creative minds that are able to see many shades of gray. There’s a lot of value in seeing the nuances in life–it allows you to apprehend patterns, to anticipate trends before you see the numbers, to see more than those who can only see black and white. But there comes a time when so much gray becomes impossible to navigate. We talk past each other like a bunch of babbling idiots, each asserting our own spin on the grayness, our own self-congratulatory definitions. At that point it becomes necessary to step pack, to prune the vast overgrown tree and pare it down to the strongest branches.

My entire argument is that that time is now.

I’m still getting a lot of contact on this topic, ranging from encouragement to head scratching–with a few good flames to keep things entertaining. I’ll be moving up a level in brand exploration with a new Business Week column next Tuesday, but in the meantime, Jason Kerr picks up the semantic thread over at Brandlessness, scrutinizing the reduction of "brand" to the foundation of tangible assets.

I intuitively agree with you that
a brand is what it is. A taxonomic
anchor. But which one? You said it’s "your name, your logo, your trade dress.." Well which is it? If a brand is "a
concrete thing," then it’s a concrete thing.  BUT if you define it as
a set of different concrete things that share a common idea, well then…  it’s an abstraction.

That’s an interesting distinction that could take us deep into semiotics, at which point we might as well just shoot the audience. Let me try framing it like this: all dogs are mammals, but not all mammals are dogs You can certainly say that "mammal" is an abstraction–a title for a group of things that hold a common quality–but you know that every single mammal, whether it’s a dog or a cat or a blue whale, will be tangible. Same thing with brand. A logo is always a brand, but a brand isn’t always a logo. It can also be your name, your trade dress, or one of a number of  touchpoints. But if it’s not a tangible symbol that distinguishes your products and services from all others it’s not an example of brand.

So yes, technically, the word brand signifies concrete things without being concrete itself, and yet, it’s used interchangeably with the concrete things it signifies. If I walked my dog, you wouldn’t correct me if I claimed to be walking a mammal–although in that example, you’d probably think I was a little whacked.

I took the rant on marketing semantics to my Business Week column today. I never imagined such a seemingly simple issue would have such legs, but the resistance I’ve gotten from some quarters–dismissiveness, anger, derision–is unusual. There are a lot of marketers out there who don’t want the boat rocked.

But the struggle over the meaning of Brand is only scratching the surface. There are many concepts in marketing that are equally vague or confused, or conveniently reinterpreted to fit each marketer’s understanding or expertise. Depending on who you’re talking to, Segmentation can mean either market segmentation or segmented pricing. Positioning can refer to a competitive market strategy, a marcom messaging strategy, or even brand image.

In a conversation, the multiple meanings of a word are usually stabiliized by context. If I say "grab the wheel", and we’re sitting in a car, you’ll know I mean the steering wheel. If we’re outside the car changing a flat, you’ll know I mean the tire. Using context, experience and inflection to determine what meaning of the word was intended doesn’t change the meaning of a concrete thing. A tire is still a tire, and a steering wheel is still a steering wheel. But what happens when the word is referring to something that is no more solid than an *idea*? What happens to the idea of segmentation, or positioning, or brand, when, through my own channels of experience–through context, inflection, etc–I interpret the meaning in a way that is different? What happens when I downright confuse one meaning with another, and then transmit that confused meaning to someone else?

In an age of Information, when we make our living as Knowledge Workers, what happens is that we fill our universe with static. Knowledge is shared through the use of language, and if the language isn’t sufficiently clear, it’s like we’re talking to each other over a bad connection. In the short run, it’s merely annoying–your clients or colleagues don’t fully understand what you’re saying. But in the long run it’s destructive. People who are not marketers, but who depend on interacting effectively with marketers, begin to lose confidence in the value of marketing because every conversation is slightly vague, slightly confusing–and more troubling still, the meanings of important concepts seem to change from person to person. That lack of clarity and credibility has become the brand image of marketing, and until we get clear in our communication, we stand little chance of improving it.

If you’re coming in from BusinessWeek, welcome. I’d really like to get more of a dialog going than a rant, so please drop a comment, if you would. Thanks for reading.

My business partner pointed out "Exhibit B" in the ongoing fight over defining the meaning of "Brand". Over at Corante’s blog on branding there’s a discussion going on about the difference between "we companies" vs. "they companies". I’m not going to pick up that thread right now, because there’s something far more important to draw out of this discussion.

One of the blog authors, Jennifer Rice, who apparently has a deep resume in brand consulting for some big companies, and who makes some interesting observations about brand strategy, nevertheless says in an offhanded way what I’ve been arguing is a stake in the heart of the marketing profession. Here it is:

My definition of a brand is an idea in the minds of your customers… and that idea is formed by what you say and what you do.

Before we get to the dreaded ~semantic~ argument that so many marketers want to avoid like the plague, let’s just parse the framing of this definition. It is "My definition". Not "the definition". "My definition". What, exactly is the purpose of a "definition" if its meaning can be determined individually? How do you transfer knowledge about a thing, if the meaning of the thing can be arbitrarily open to interpretation?

To be fair and honest, I can’t throw any rocks at Jennifer Rice’s glass house, because I’m in one myself. I’m fairly certain if you go digging through my writing, you’ll find someplace where I’ve said "my definition of x is…" This isn’t about Jennifer Rice, it’s about marketers as a profession. We MUST stop treating such bedrock professional concepts as a blank page for waxing philosophical about meaning. I’m arguing that this is one of the major reasons why marketing is continuing to lose credibility–because it cannot consistently communicate an idea that is solid and immutable. And this is a profound irony. What is one of the most commonly cited attributes of a strong brand? Consistency across time and medium. Apparently we marketers don’t know how build equity for our brand.

Without rehashing all of the arguments about why Rice’s definition is derivitive (you can find one of the posts on this topic here) I’ll summarize the argument, stolen from Heidi Schultz, this way: There is a legal definition, and legal status for the concept of a brand. You own it. You can buy it and sell it. There are laws to protect it. Not one of these commercial facts applies to the concept of "an idea in the mind of your customer". Your brand is your logo, your name, your trade dress. Everything going on in the mind of your customer is derivitive and distinct. Call it brand image. Call it brand reputation. It is not your brand.

As an oversimplified analogy, someone might say "that Ferrari is my pride and joy". Is the Ferarri *really* an emotion? Of course not. You understand that without having to parse it. A Ferrari is a tangible object. It may influence your emotions. It may make you happy and proud to drive it. But your emotions are distinct entities that are influenced by other things too.

Same with a brand. You create a brand. You cultivate brand image and reputation. There are many things that effect brand image and reputation but that do not flow directly from your brand. There are social currents, historical events, cultural attitudes, economic trends–I’m sure someone, somewhere has drawn up an exhaustive list–that also have an impact on your brand image and reputation independent of any action you take. That’s why it’s useful and meaningful to consider them distinctly. If you require one single word, "brand", to carry the weight of a thousand ideas, it quickly loses its ability to convey anything of value. And if marketers today are in need of anything, it’s an ability to convey clear ideas with real value.

You can have a big marketing budget, a big name spokesperson, a big event with huge publicity and emotional appeal, but if you’ve got a junky product, it won’t improve your sales. Witness today’s report of the Pontiac G6 debacle. Oprah Winfrey gave away 276 of these cars on a tear-jerking show that set the marketing world on fire. But, sales have dropped through the floor.

Art Spinella, an industry observer and marketer, summed it pretty succinctly:

Spinella said neither GM’s marketing department nor Winfrey can be blamed for the market performance of the G6.

"It’s one thing to have that kind of a major marketing coup, but you
need to back it up," said Spinella, who said he believes that the
vehicle is an underwhelming package in a competitive marketplace.

Here is Exhibit A of the problem I’m addressing with the confused meaning of "Brand". A "marketing innovator" who posts a blog but doesn’t identify himself, takes issue with my support of a tangible definition for the meaning of brand.

Christopher
Kenton of Marketonomy wants
to reclaim the term "brand" for the advertising realm.

I’d be curious to know on what basis that judgement is made, since nothing could be further from the truth. I want to reclaim the term "brand" for the rational realm, and distinguish it from the other derivative brand concepts that are important but *different*.

He’s argument is
well-thought-out but wrong. It is meaningful to distinguish between
‘brand image’ and ‘brand experience’ but in the end, a company has to
live more in the derivative world of brand consequences than in the
artistic world of brand impressions. Speaking as someone who’s worked
for many companies where the advertising was at devastating odds with
the real experience of customers in the company, I think we stand to
gain more as marketers by insisting that ‘brand’ = the total customer
experience based on encounters with the company.

It’s funny, because I used to argue the same thing. In fact, if you look at my theory on Touchpoint Mapping, the whole premise was that the only way to try and bring the entire breadth of the brand experience into the realm of the tangible was to understand the practical meaning of brand to be the entire array of Touchpoints a company uses to create a relationship between the company and the customer. Brand Experience is *critically* imortant to the success of any company. BUT IT IS NOT BRAND. You own your brand. You do not own your customer’s experience. One is something you create. The other is something you cultivate.

It blows my mind that so many marketers refuse to accept such a basic semantic necessity as clarifying words and meanings so that we don’t confuse each other by talking in circles about what a Brand is. It’s a relationship. No. It’s a bond. No. It’s an experience. No It’s an image. No. It’s a promise.

What marketers stand to gain from most is Clarity.

I’ve had my feet held to the fire today over my column on the meaning of brand–which
is as it should be. Don’t ever take the word of a marketer at face
value. Some of my critics took issue with the fact that I was flogging
a ~semantic~ argument. Semantic apparently meaning "unworthy of
consideration", rather than "a useful exploration of meanings".

But some of the criticisms were useful. One of the more interesting discussions took place via email with
Justin Mink, a brand marketer from USATODAY.com. With his permission, I’m
posting the dialog here. 

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