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Branding for a Post 9-11/Enron World
A Talk for
the American Marketing Association/San Francisco Chapter
April 17, 2003
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Article Excerpt
One day about 4 years ago,
I took my then 12 year-old daughter shopping
for sneakers. I was in more of a hurry than
she was, and hoping to move the process along,
I picked up a pair in her favorite color from
what I thought was her favorite brand, Nike,
and asked her if she wanted to try them on.
Her response was as lashing as can only come from a pre-teen
with a truly clueless parent. She said to me “How can
you think I’d buy Nike after what they’re doing
to those poor kids in Indonesia.”
My reaction was shock,
she’d heard of Indonesia!
I had to take this seriously.
Carolyn, my daughter, was absolutely disgusted that I wasn’t
getting the connection between Nike’s misdeeds and
the brand. Her brand choices were being made on behalf of
her taste, sure, but also her community,
her support of global youth. Overnight, what had been a virtually
flawless brand, a brand that embodied all the good things
about America, had become the embodiment of evil.
Over the
last 20 years, I’ve prided myself on being
at the cutting edge of branding. In the early 80s, I was
launching two information age brands, MCI and FedEx’s
ZapMail, when my first boss told me that I was wasting my
time focusing on service businesses, that the heart of advertising
was packaged goods. I laughed in my sleeve – what did
he know? The P&Gs of the world were pushing product features
and benefits , while I was lucky enough to work on brands
that differentiated themselves on personality. So much more
interesting. That first evolution, when brands ceased to be
rooted in product and became personified, complete with values
and
personality traits — what an exciting step. All of
a sudden brand was about relationships. Relationships are
good for brands — we all know that loyal customers
are 5 or 6 times more profitable than new ones, and that
brand evangelists, those core loyalists, are the key to lasting
success.
Now, brand relationships have become so valuable
that we’ve
pushed them as far as we can, treating our brands as if they
were real people in real conversations with customers. We
practitioners decided that brand actually resided in the
customer, not with the marketer. Branding was all about establishing
trust with customers, about getting inside their heads, understanding
their deepest desires and fulfilling those desires.
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