Opening Rant

I’m sick and tired of the B word. Branding.

It has to be the most misused—and least understood—word in the business of . . . well, branding.

Let’s start from the top: unless you’re a cattle rancher, there’s no such thing as “branding.� If you are a marketing professional, you are dealing with a noun, not a verb, a consequence, not an action.

Simply put: you can’t brand something. You can earn that designation, but you can’t just do it. A brand is a prize, an award—one that can only be bestowed upon you by the marketplace.

If I already sound grumpy, here at the very beginning of my book, it’s because the B word, never precisely defined in the first place, has become such a nebulous, fit-everything term that it now essentially has no meaning. Worse, it is regularly abused by marketing people as a means of extracting money from clients and bullying skeptics into silence.

Building a brand is a strategy, not an objective. Sometimes it’s the right strategy, and sometimes it’s not. Let’s stop blindly worshipping the B word. The sooner we marketers demystify this single word, the sooner our business partners will trust us with the car keys.

It is time to get back to first principles, to establish what “brand� is and what it is not, and to restore to the concept the value it might have to someone who actually practices the art of marketing.

So, let’s begin with a true definition of brand.

Whatever you’ve been taught, here’s the truth: You have a thing—a product, service, idea, person (including yourself), place, etc. This something can have an image, a reputation and/or a track record. But it can only be a brand once it reaches a particular destination, and not a minute before. The most interesting feature of that destination is that you don’t know where it is until you get there. No one can give you a schedule, or an estimated time of arrival. You arrive when your audience tells you that you have arrived, when your audience tells you that you have, indeed, built a brand.

No matter what so-called “branding� professionals may tell you, there’s no magic line to cross. There is no line in the sand with “brand� written on one side and “product� on the other. It would be convenient if there were—but real marketing is anything and everything but convenient.

So what the hell is a brand in the first place?

The actual definitions of brand are almost as numerous and varied as the people who are trying to sell their “branding� services to you. My favorite: A brand is emotional shorthand for a wealth of accumulated or assumed information. An even simpler definition is that a brand is present when the value of what a product, service or personality means to its audience is greater than the value of what it does for that audience.

I like these definitions, but there’s still a problem. I can’t even get my own colleagues to agree upon a single definition of brand. And yet your company and thousands of others are being asked to spend billions of dollars each year in pursuit of this nebulous and elusive concept.

So, here is how we will begin. Pick your own definition of brand. But whatever you choose, the important thing is that you always treat that term as a noun. Promise me you will never, ever use it as a verb. From now on, you will look upon brand as the prize at the end of a long road. That road itself comes in many shapes and sizes. It can be short or long, wide or narrow, straight or curved. It can also be well traveled, which helps you to find your way, but it’s the lonely, less traveled roads that carry the greatest long-term potential. And it’s the lonely roads that create the brands we all love to use (with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight) as case studies.

But if brand is forever the noun, what then is the verb? What is the work of marketing?

Positioning.

Marketing is, in short, the art of positioning. And whatever your thing, the marketer’s job is to position an idea of that thing, its emotional shorthand, with sufficient power and consistency over time so that the audience comes to see it as a brand. As salespeople know better than anyone, if you can’t position something, you have no hope of selling it. But salespeople are all about selling, so they’ll shift that position in five minutes if it helps to make the sale. They are masters of in-the-moment positioning. In contrast, marketers need to be masters of positions that can hold up over time, which is a different task altogether.

This means that the real challenge you face—the real work—is not building your brand, but rather in defining, clarifying, targeting, capturing and holding yourposition.

You can start by asking yourself a series of questions:

- How clear is our position? Can our customers explain it?

-  More important, can all of our employees explain it?

-  More important still, do they believe it?

-  How unique is it?

-  Does it create competitive advantage? Can we leverage it?

-  How much cultural currency and momentum does it have?

Whatever it is you are selling, it needs to be reduced to a single idea that can stick in someone’s head. It needs to stand out from all the noise and clutter of the marketplace. It needs to take on an importance inside that customer’s head that outweighs any functional benefit it might provide. Most of all, your position must be an idea that will actually matter.

Many companies, even some we consider strong brands, are basically incapable of presenting their position in a simple, cogent way. Why? For starters, the senior management teams at these companies have a lot more to think about than I do, and the odds are high that none of them got where they are because of their positioning expertise. They all know the B word and that a strong brand has value, but most find the whole discussion nebulous and lacking the specificity of other discussions that go on within their enterprise.

It’s ironic that we tell entrepreneurs that they need to have a short, well thought-out statement of their business, technology and market positioning (the legendary elevator pitch) if they have any hope of obtaining money from venture capitalists. And yet once they secure that money and are underway, it never seems to cross their minds—not for decades, sometimes—that they need to regularly update that pitch in order to obtain money from their current source of cash: customers.

If you haven’t fully thought out your positioning and viewed it through your customers’ eyes, you are already in a dangerous and vulnerable position. Forget “branding�; you need to sit down with your team right now and ponder just who you are . . . and then make sure that the result is congruent with your current business strategy.

Positioning happens. That’s a given. But if you don’t assert your position very forcibly, others (particularly competitors) are only too happy to do it for you.

This will help: A great position is a simple yet compelling idea that represents an area of differentiated advantage. It establishes what it is that makes you different from your competitors, and does it in a way that creates a competitive advantage in the eyes of the customers or consumers you serve. Think of your position as the front door to your house. Inside that house is everything you do, and you’re justifiably proud of it. But you first need to get me inside your front door to appreciate what you’ve got. So what’s the idea that will pull me through your door and away from someone else’s house? What’s the one idea for which you want to become famous?

There are many things you must do well to succeed. Some are absolutely critical to that success. But which of them represent real differences? Of those that are truly unique, which can be made to define you in a way that will work to your competitive advantage? Be ruthless with yourself—be brutally honest in your self-appraisal—and you’ll find the idea that can come to represent you in a way that creates differentiated advantage.

In practical terms, a position is really a distilled and concise representation of a marketing strategy. At the heart of any good marketing strategy is the creation of differentiated advantage. The words of a positioning idea therefore represent the most compressed articulation of that strategy of differentiated advantage.

Ideally, this position also represents a strong, even provocative, point of view. A point of view you could write on a whiteboard and not be laughed out of the room—one around which you could actually write an interesting white paper. Ideally, this statement is one that would inspire your fellow employees to nod and say, “Yeah, that’s us,� and cause your competitors to cover their mouths and whisper, “Oh, shit . . .�

But it is not enough to be merely clever or insightful. Positioning has nothing to do with communication. A successful position must be built on what you do, not on what you say. If everyone in the room reads your position statement and thinks, “That’s not us,� or “God, if that were only true,� you have failed the brutal honesty test and no amount of creative communication can help you.

In other words, unless you can be it, don’t say it—especially in this age of digital transparency. A true position is an asset that drives internal behavior throughout the organization. Ideally, it is a lodestar for your company: it gives the organization a sense of purpose and direction—and then, by extension, transmits that same sense of purpose to your audience. If your positioning isn’t guiding the product development people, no amount of clever marketing can credibly convey it to your customers. Ducks that talk like swans are nothing more than well-spoken ducks.

Further, your position must be built upon a set of pillars or filters that help the position properly channel and guide behavior. If the position doesn’t guide and inspire the organization—the entire organization—it has no hope of guiding and inspiring the consumer. As Gandhi said, “be the change you wish to see in the world.� Positioning is the attainable change you wish to see in your enterprise.

“Okay,� some of you may be saying, “but hold on a minute.� Branding? Positioning? Isn’t the difference between the two terms just a matter of semantics?

Yes—but no! Because of the attitudes and behaviors they drive, these terms are more different than everyday language suggests. Although this opening rant is an attack on the idea of “branding,� brands are real. Their value can be measured. Brands are initiatives that have built value over and above function. Strong brands sell more than similarly priced weak brands. Strong brands are more profitable than weak brands. Strong brands recruit better employees. Strong brands hold their stock price better than weak brands. And strong brands can be astonishingly resilient. (Just ask Apple.)

To repeat (something people tend to do in books and in rants): A strong brand is a marketplace response, not a marketer’s stimulus. It’s the prize. I’ll continue to use the word brand throughout this book, because that prize is an incredibly valuable asset and we’ve all grown up using this moniker to describe it. But I solemnly swear to never utter the B word again as a verb—unless I’m still ranting against it.

Marketers do stuff. If your stuff is more compelling and fresh than your competitor’s stuff, you will sell more in the short run. If your stuff stays compelling and fresh and is held together by a consistent position over time, you will sell a lot more in the long term.

Positioning is hard work. Positioning is process. And positioning never stands in isolation. It can only exist within a marketing strategy.

When expressed externally to your target audience, positioning must travel through the very complex medium of the human mind. And only if you really understand that medium can you possibly hope to create a stimulus (expression) that can both navigate it and still get the desired response (the position). This medium is always changing and it contains both competitors and friends—along with their differing perspectives, hopes, fears and secrets. It also holds both true and false “facts.� Positioning is part art, part science and part psychology, and that’s why marketing strategy is a lot harder than it looks, especially if you actually want to win.

So while we continue to appreciate great brands and their architects, let’s stop talking about “branding.� Instead, let’s focus the discussion on positioning and execution. Let’s focus on the stimulus and not the response. Let’s focus on the work required, rather than the prize awarded, because it’s the work that we marketers toil over day in and day out. Let’s reduce the mystique and bullshit surrounding the notion of “branding� and instead build a more practical guide to positioning and execution.

Austin McGhie, President, Sterling Brands Strategy

Want to know more? Check out Brand is a Four Letter Word on Amazon