Branding, Schmanding: A Myth Debunked Marketing is not creativity, branding, or design. It’s salesmanship. Many marketing people, and the ad agencies who serve them, have lost track of what’s important in their marketing programs. The only goal of your marketing program is to generate sales. This is defined as the generation of inquiries converted to sales by your company’s sales reps, or direct sales from a marketing project. The talismans of modern marketing-speak: “Brand recognition,” “reader scores,” or “mindshare” do not generate sales for your company. Salesmanship in marketing does. The “branding” myth: Branding is a bad idea that has moved from the big-money world of major consumer products advertisers into the world of trade and business-to-business marketers. The need for branding and brand reinforcement generally applies only to that small handful of Fortune 500 corporations who need (and who can afford) to pour hundreds of millions of dollars into saturation advertising campaigns to promote widely-used consumer products, fighting over a few market share points each year with their competition in the market for toothpaste, automobiles, or laundry detergent. In their work with small and mid-sized business trade advertisers, many ad agency types attempt to replicate the same promotional carpet-bombing techniques used by these consumer product mega-marketers. The end result is grossly over-produced, irrelevant, and ultimately ineffective advertising, and an obscene waste of money for clients. The Internet “Dot-Com” boom and bust of 1998-2000 was the most recent example of the use of advertising as an attempt to buy “branding” for several high-profile (now defunct) companies, by throwing millions of dollars into saturation advertising campaigns. An effort to produce advertising to “brand” a company’s product, instead of advertising that informs and persuades the reader, has an even greater likelihood of failure when used to sell high-technology-related products or services in vertical trade and industry markets. Companies selling complex products or services have an even greater need to make their advertising simple, plain-spoken and salesmanlike, by breaking down their products’ benefits, features, and applications into language that can be grasped quickly by readers in their markets. All these readers want to know is what the company’s product is, what it does, and what it can do for them. The misapplication of branding strategy to marketing for trade and business-to-business advertisers is a misunderstanding of the true meaning of branding. The positive regard a customer has for your product, expressed by brand awareness and brand loyalty, can only be accomplished by a long-term history of selling an excellent product, using honest business practices and providing excellent customer service. No matter how much money you spend, branding can’t be bought on the cheap with a three-month ad campaign. It’s the by-product of years of selling excellent products, and treating customers as you would want to be treated. Your Market Wants Reality, Not Someone’s Idea of Creativity Other unfortunate ideas have corrupted the world of advertising in the past 25 years, such as the notion that advertising must be especially "creative," or generate an “emotional response,” that determines how your potential customer “feels” about your product. Creativity and the other side aspects of advertising and marketing—graphic design, layout, and copywriting—are tools used in the service of salesmanship in advertising and marketing projects. Creativity, in itself, will not sell your company’s product or service. All of us are creative, more or less, and to some degree. While creativity does play a role in the “downstream” process of developing an ad campaign or other marketing project, you must focus on the reality of your company’s products in the initial stages of developing sales copy and layouts for marketing deliverables. This means focusing on the benefits, features, and applications of your product, and how they can be described in a way that persuades the prospect to initiate an action that starts the selling process: Calling your company’s toll-free number, going to your company’s Web site, filling out a coupon, or calling a dealer or distributor. Your Enthusiasm Sells Products As any top salesman will tell you, having a genuine enthusiasm for a product, an enthusiasm that infuses every aspect of his or her sales presentation, is often the decisive element in making a sale. Enthusiasm is contagious. A salesman who is genuinely fired up about his company’s product line imparts a sense of enthusiasm to his sales prospects, which always has a positive influence on their view of the salesman, and of the products he represents. But enthusiasm is not limited to face-to-face encounters. Your prospects can sense enthusiasm in your advertising and marketing programs by the sales copy they read, and in all of your company’s marketing programs. Before you sketch out your outline and notes for any marketing project, take a few minutes to whip up a sense of enthusiasm in your mind for the product or service you’re preparing to write about. Once you develop that inner fire, that boiled-over compulsion to tell another human being that he really needs to use your company’s products, the rest of the job—answering the reasons why he needs your products, suddenly becomes much easier. The only response you want from your advertising is to generate sales. All other considerations are irrelevant and, at worst, can be fatal to your company’s marketing program. (excerpted from The Marketing Manager's Handbook, published by Internet Media, 2003)