Branding for Cows and Companies
The silly title of “Branding Only Works on Cattle” stopped me from opening it for quite a while. But once I did, I was impressed. Author Jonathan Salem Baskin is lucid and cutting, thoughtful and funny, and he has a way of pushing past the truisms of branding.
He writes that
Branding is based on an outdated and invalid desire to manipulate and control consumers’ unconscious. It looks good and feels good to the people who produce it, but it has little to no effect on consumer behavior. And if and when it does, there’s no good way to know for sure. Companies do it mostly out of habit and hope, and most consumers endure it out of routine and indulgence.
This is a strong theme, but Baskin backs it up. He skewers the idea that we can use neuroscience to do better branding — “who cares if brain waves flutter but nobody buys?” He puts search advertising in perspective, saying “search these days isn’t about consumers finding products, but rather products finding consumers.” In fact, he argues that today’s vaunted search advertising, which he dubs the anti-brand, is “in the Gilligan’s Island phase of content relevance.” Which is to say it’s a lowest-common denominator approach, not one that leads to real usefulness. He tells the truth about online communities, noting that for the most part they aren’t communities at all, but “places where people go do to something.” In the end, it’s hard to argue with him when he calls brands “the business corollary to buying a lottery ticket.”
His chapters on search, social media, gaming and the rise of consumer-driven content approach brilliance. Anyone who is involved in branding, advertising and marketing needs to read these and be able to counter him or be prepared to change strategy.
Another brilliant thing in his book is the format — he uses what are in effect call-out quotes set off from the text by a different typeface and formatting to highlight what he’s talking about. As someone not overly interested in branding, I could use these as a form of hyperlinks — when I saw one that caught my eye, I could plunge in and read until I ran into something I found less interesting (I ended up reading most of the book pretty closely).
He has his numbered lists of things companies need to do to keep their brand useful. His ultimate goal in this book is to save companies from themselves, which prove “how imperfect and vulnerable (they) can be” by “allocating some random number to waste on branding each year.”
He does not completely take a hatchet to branding, either. He includes examples of what he considers effective branding, and companies that have done a good job with their brand (at least some of them appear not to be his clients, either). He cites the IBM InnovationJam as a good, if unintentional, example of branding because it was well-targeted, influenced behavior and spread on its own.
Baskin believes that most branding “doesn’t build brand equity, but rather spends it.” (italics his). He certainly makes a strong case for this.
He does lapse into the same flippancy the title suggests, but push it aside. His observations on the future of branding are worth it.