Why Branding Makes It Harder to Sell

The big lie of "brand marketing" is that "branding" makes your brand stronger, making it easier to sell the product. In fact, much of the time, "branding" makes a brand weaker and, worst case, can make selling more difficult.

The problem lies in the entire concept. The aim of branding is to associate a certain emotion with a product (or a firm), so that the emotion will create preference for the brand or, best case, the ability to charge a premium price.

That might have worked 20 or 30 years ago, but consumers are rapidly growing more sophisticated than they were back then. Most people over the age of 5 now realize that the claims companies make about themselves and their products simply can't be trusted.

And that's especially true for people in business. For instance, when was the last time YOU took a corporate "branding" claim seriously, without automatically assuming that it was either untrue or (at least) wildly exaggerated?

Let me give you some examples of how branding can make selling a brand more difficult.

A few years ago, Dell asked me to moderate a discussion with SMB computer purchasers to determine how they made decisions about what computer brand to buy. That discussion was backed up with a statistical surveying of the target demographic.

The results of the survey and the discussion were clear: when it came to brand selection, business buyers completely ignored everything that was under the control of Dell's brand marketing: advertising, public relations, brochures, press releases, etc.

The ONLY thing that influenced these computer buyers was the freely-given opinion of their peers.
At the time, Dell was marketing like crazy to the SMB market and the main branding message emphasized the high quality experience of buying from Dell. Unfortunately, the market scuttlebutt -- what the buyers were actually telling each other -- was that Dell had lousy support.

The Dell brand was thus being transformed by the company's inability to deliver a quality customer experience. Meanwhile, Dell's "branding" efforts were counter-productive, because they kept on surfacing the issue of quality, reminding the customers of exactly what was missing in reality.

Furthermore, the delta between the brand message and the brand reality made Dell look out of touch and hypocritical. As such, Dell's branding was actually making the brand MORE difficult to sell.

What's worse, some Dell executives were unable to see that the company had a major product problem (i.e. poor customer support) because they were breathing their own branding exhaust. The branding effort was thus making it MORE difficult for Dell to fix the problem, thereby degrading the brand even further!

Something similar just happened with Toyota. The company's branding messages focused on reliability and attention to manufacturing detail. As such, when the company stumbled in those areas, all that branding simply made the problems more newsworthy.

What's worse, Toyota's management was apparently reluctant to address the problems early on, in part because the problems ran contrary to the company's carefully-constructed brand identity. And that, of course, made the problem worse, and made it EVEN MORE DIFFICULT to sell Toyota products.

By contrast, Honda just had a big recall based upon problems with airbags. But because Honda hasn't touted itself so blatantly as reliable, the news story will disappear in a couple of days. And because Honda wasn't invested in a Potemkin branding effort, they were freer to take action quickly.

Here's another example. According to an article in the New York Times, some hotel chains are up in arms over TripAdvisor's "Top 10 Dirtiest Hotels" list. That list comes from guest reviews that reflect the reality of the product -- in this case the hotels and motels themselves.

Some of the chains that got dinged in the report have apparently complained to Expedia (which owns TripAdvisor) that they are big advertisers and thus should be taken off the list. Thus, rather than actually fixing the problem, they're trying to use marketing clout to hide the problem.

Classic branding in action. And futile, of course, because when a branding message is at odds with brand reality, it always makes a company look stupid.

BUT... suppose the branding really does reflect the product reality (and thus the consequent brand)? Isn't that kind of branding effort a good investment?

Not necessarily.

As a general rule, people are turned off by bragging, which is how that kind of "branding" usually comes off.

Do you remember that guy in high school who was always bragging about his conquests? Or the girl who was always bragging about how much her clothes costs? Seriously, didn't you wish they'd just shut the ____ up?

President Obama made this point rather well a few weeks ago in a speech at the memorial service for Walter Cronkite. After pointing out that Cronkite had been regarded as "the most trusted man in America", Obama noted:

"That title wasn't bestowed upon him by a network. We weren't told to believe it by some advertising campaign. It was earned. It was earned by year after year and decade after decade of painstaking effort; a commitment to fundamental values [and] his belief that the American people were hungry for the truth."

Companies that want to increase sales should focus on "brand" (i.e. emotions created by real customer experience) and not on "branding" (i.e. marketing activities intended to create those emotions.)

Take care of the customer experience, and the brand will take care of itself -- especially in a world where customers share that experience at the speed of light.