Jonathan Salem Baskin BRANDING ONLY WORKS ON CATTLE

Hot Off The Grill: Episode 5 of Socializing Media

The only no-nonsense, everything's allowed podcast on social media, serving up hot topics, cool trends, and practices both brilliant and foolish.

Listen here, or go to iTunes and subscribe.  You can catch the next broadcast live...our program airs on the second and fourth Thursday of every month on BlogTalkRadio.com at 9:00 a.m. Pacific Time/12:00 Eastern.

If you haven't already tuned in, you're in for a tasty treat: conversations about social media without buzzwords or sales pitches.  My co-hosts are hardcore smart, funny, and just plainly talented:

• Blake Cahill, whose company, Visible Technologies, provides online brand management solutions, is a longtime technology, communications and consumer industries veteran. He is passionate about analyzing and exploiting the intersection of customer experience, brands and technology.
• Steve Hershberger, principal and co-founder of ComBlu, is a leader in community and influencer marketing. Hershberger has spent his career specializing in advocate and influencer-marketing programs, and has been instrumental in a number of important best-practice initiatives for online communities and word-of-mouth marketing.
• Sean O’Driscoll is president and "Ant Advocate" at Ant’s Eye View, a customer-collaboration company. He spent 15 years at Microsoft Corp., where he helped developed social media and community-based support models and led the global Microsoft MVP program, designed to award and recognize individuals in technical communities around the globe.

Each episode is chocked-full of insight and clarity on social media strategy...with myth-busting, best practices, and a generally damn good time thrown in for good measure.  We want to become your first choice for reliable, agnostic information, whether you're a social media expert, or a novice. 

For updates on topics and guests, or to join in the conversation, follow Socializing Media on Twitter, visit the BlogTalkRadio show page, and also search for the hashtag #SocializedMedia for conversations relating to podcast topics.

Related Links:

    * BlogTalkRadio
    * Socializing Media on Twitter
    * Visible Technologies Blog
    * ComBlu Lumenatti Blog
    * Ant’s Eye View Blog 
    * BlogTalk Radio’s Listener Tutorial

Marketing Is A Game

 

Games are being marketed as a great hope for the future of branding.

You can find mainstream consumer products placed in console videogames, as well as ads on virtual billboards and ringtones on virtual mobile phones.  Corporate reps have recurring roles in ARGs (alternate reality games), and everyone from oil brands to non-profits wants to sponsor entire games for consumers to "play the issues."   Games are a way for consumers to engage with brands.  A growing field of utilization is called advergaming, and lots of agencies are telling their corporate clients that brands need to do things with games.

I think they've got it backwards: games need to do things to brands. 

Here's my take:

• Video games are incomprehensibly immersive. Human beings might very well have a genetic predisposition to become very attached to them, something that's just shy of addiction or love.  We’re talking intense involvement here, and the sort of involvement that passes every test of legitimacy. 
• People give video games their time, often lots of it, and over long stretches. They keep coming back, in spite of any number of more important influences in their lives.  They're willing to spend money on video games, from equipment and software to Internet bandwidth and subscriptions.
• We know how to build these things.

And yet we choose to twist games to support our old ideas about brands?  Brands shouldn't use game tactics...rather, shouldn't brand (and business) strategies get configured like games?

Marketers mistakenly see games as a lowest-common-denominator channel, instead of realizing that games are not channels at all, but rather places, like social media, only with a purpose.  Games are models of places where people live, worlds that have rules, roles, expected behaviors, and even dimensions of time. Perhaps most important, video games are places where people go to do things. Games are built upon creative ideas, but they’re experienced with behavior.

The latest branding model for gaming takes none of this into account, any more than it cares about behavior or the particulars of place in the real world. The intense reality of the relationship that players have with games like Halo makes the imaginary relationships we presume people have with consumer brand names seem absurd.

There's a tremendous upside to thinking about games in a new way.

If actions matter, and consumers define brand by their behavior and their communities, games could provide a model for understanding how those behaviors connect. Structuring brands using game components could yield relevance, purpose, sticky involvement, and repeat visits, among other qualities.  It could change everything, from how we map new product launches (never educating or announcing, but rather involving), to customer service (configuring engagement so it's truly rewarding, not just a chore).

Games could get us thinking about brands as behaviors. 

And, in tough economic times like ours, I can't imagine a company contemplating a 2009 branding budget that includes games without considering the implications of behavioral reality.

I explore the implications of the brand is behavior approach in my book, Branding Only Works On Cattle, with a detailed exploration of the specifics of how, when, and why game thinking could make brand and marketing decisions more effective and efficient.   

In a chapter entitled "Games As Purpose, Not Distraction," I look forward at what's possible.  If you'd like to read it, send me an email and I'd be happy to share it with you.

Branding As Business Strategy

You can't talk about branding unless you're an expert. 

You can use it as easy shorthand -- like "the brand did this," or "our branding accomplished that" -- but otherwise you must take it on faith that the experts know better than you. 

Their belief in brands requires no proof.  Branding is so immense that it's everywhere; so important that it affects everything.  It's just true, like a fact of nature.  There's an echo chamber full of experts telling each other so:

• Brands have caused a gazillion dollar bubble on the stock market
• They're neurological flashes on a brain scan
• Brands are engaging stories
• They're funny commercials, online conversations, Internet search terms, and videogames. 

Brands have equity that is at once real, yet wholly intangible, so they're best understood by metaphor or example.  And there's a wizened old expert or up-and-coming guru to tell you so.  Every week, a new book delivers a new riff on the theme, along with new ways to spend money on it. 

So don't worry.  Let the branding experts handle it.

There's only one problem.  It doesn't work.  For all of the parascience and great literature the experts talk about:

• Great brands suffer just like lesser ones (where's the equity when you want to spend it?)
• Loyalty is a thing of the past (in spite of the best creative and most advanced CRM technology)
• Trust in corporations is at an all time low (even after so many "socially responsible" campaigns)
• Popularity is fleeting (today's trend is tomorrow's history)
• Premium margins have all but evaporated (the Internet reveals "how the sausage is made")

Customers are harder to reach, more difficult to convince, and nearly impossible to keep happy.  Price has emerged as the determinant of almost every purchase that we'd once hoped would be prompted by brand affinity. 

For an idea that is so all-encompassing, brands are really only evident in the places where brand marketers look for them.  They are expert at telling one another so.

But nobody else sees what they see.  Consumers don't do what they're supposed to do anymore.  Nobody is buying the old definitions of brands.  Except you.  You're not an expert, so you can't talk about branding.

Until now.

 

My book is about fundamentally changing the very conversation about brands and branding.  It's about shifting it away from the narrow definitions and expertise of marketers, and opening it up to functional, organizational, systems, and other areas of expertise across your entire company.

It's intended to empower every employee, from the top executive to the outsourced part-timer, to collaborate on inventing a new, more proactive and sustainable model for your brand. 

It's not going to cost you more money to implement; rather, Branding Only Works On Cattle is intended to allow you to apply your existing resources, and get more results from them.

Marketing has a role to play in your branding.  So does every other department.  One doesn't come before the other.  Branding Only Works On Cattle is the first branding book that recognizes this fact. 

Successful branding doesn't tell, it sells.  Marketing has lost track of that reality.  It's time for you to reclaim it for your business.

Branding Only Works On Cattle is the only book on branding that will allow you get more out of your brands.  But to do that, you need to start talking about it...because you're not an expert. 

 Start delivering branding for the rest of us. 

On Branding & Reading Minds

There's been a lot of chatter recently about using exotic brain scanning devices to discover the secrets of thought and, more specifically, to uncover how branding influences memory, preference, and behavior.  If there's proof that the esoteric premises of brands attach to neurological mechanisms and triggers buried in human consciousness, then companies should do 1) more branding, and 2) more attaching. 

However, there's another perspective that goes something like this: Why bother?

It's intriguing to ponder the complexity of thought and emotions.  That's why the Greeks wrote plays about it a long time ago. 

But if we're thinking about business, why would we bother boring deeper into the realm of potential and what-if in hopes of finding hints of future behaviors...when we can observe, map, and deliver real behaviors in real-time?

Instead of working harder to uncover the possible relevance of brands as ideas, why not focus on the actions, reactions, and causality of behaviors?  It might be a lot more productive to find brand as the output of what consumers, employees, and third parties do:

More desired behaviors = better brand, and better brand = better sales. 

So skip Freud, and do more Skinner. 

What do fMRI and EEG gizmos reveal, anyway? 

Areas of the brain light up when someone recognizes something.  Aside from some hint at intensity of reaction, unconscious or otherwise, there's no correlation to content, and no indication of the source, or trigger, of the memory.  Coke awareness doesn't flash red and Pepsi blue.  Reactions to a branded product are indistinguishable from those to stains on a carpet.  iPod reactions aren't linked to funny ads, a gift from a loved family member, or the result of a particularly intense dream. 

And there's no casual link to subsequent purchase behavior.  More squiggles on the sensing device broadly correlate with more sales, but the discovery that awareness is better than non-awareness isn't much of a discovery.  Color preference is often a driver, but it's not wholly reliable, and it's also not news.

It is all fascinating stuff, but I don't see how any company looking to sell and build in tough economic times could afford to ignore the behavioral reality of their brand marketing.

I explore the implications of the brand is behavior approach in my book, Branding Only Works On Cattle, with a lot of emphasis on detailed analysis and potential next steps that businesses can start using immediately. 

In an early chapter entitled "Traces in a Cloud Chamber," I look at the latest science people use to support their outdated hopes for branding.  If you'd like to read it, please send me an email (jonathan at baskinbrand dot com) and I'd be happy to share it with you.

The Sock Puppet Blues

Branding Only Works on Cattle is the first business book to come with a soundtrack!

The first single -- The Sock Puppet Blues -- is available for FREE...just click on this link:

Download SPB.mp3.

Also, check out the video on YouTube.

The song tells the sad story of the Sock Puppet, who hangs out at a dead-end bar with all of the other discarded and ignored brand mascots.  Call it a precautionary tale?  Maybe a forecast?  Or perhaps just a jazzy turn at a business strategy problem?

Whatever you want to call it, check it out, and tell me what you think!

Get Your Free Branding

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