Branding

This is one of the weakest elements of the typical manufacturing supplier's marketing strategy. Companies create a logo, pick out a paint colour and call the job done. If they want to get really fancy, they name their product line after some kind of ferocious wildlife (viper, tiger, wolverine). They have a vague idea that their brand can create an impression in the buyer's mind about the product, but they don't really believe it could ever influence someone's buying decision. They are engineers selling to engineers — surely the only thing that matters is the product specs, right? Branding, indeed all marketing, is seen as window dressing designed to attract attention to the product's good points and divert attention away from the weak points. There is a whiff of dishonesty about the whole thing that they would prefer to keep at arms length.

The best illustration I have seen for the power of branding comes from Ken Wong, a professor at the Queen's School of Business in Kingston, Ont. I was at a seminar of his where he held up the remote for his laptop and asked the audience to call out descriptions of the device just based on what they saw.

"It's black."
"It's made of plastic."
"It has buttons."
"It looks electronic."

Then Wong clicked the remote and the Fisher Price logo came up on the screen behind him. "Now," he said, "what if I told you it was made by this company?"

"It's durable."
"It's easy to use."
"It's cheap."
"It's for kids."

Those impressions, those assumptions about the product, were made instantly, by everyone in the room, the moment they saw the logo. Fisher Price had not had to spend an additional cent or print an additional word to communicate those facts; the message was conveyed simply by the sight of its logo. How long, Wong asked, would it take a salesman to convince a client his product possessed those qualities? And how long do salesmen typically get in front of a client?

Branding capitalizes a company's past investments in quality, service and communications, turning them into an asset the company can deploy again and again. Once these investments become capital, they can be used to leverage the acquisition of more capital. The marketer does not have to waste the audience's attention (which is currency, for marketers) reiterating basic facts about the product, he can turn their attention to a message about how the product will benefit them directly, or how it is better than the competition. Brands can and do work this way, but the company must make the initial investment to build the brand.

When equipment and supply manufacturers go back to their customers again and again with a chart full of specs, it is as if they are taking the time and money spent getting the customer's attention the previous times and flushing it down the toilet. Is the customer going to remember what spindle RPM your machine has from one visit to the next? Nope. Will he remember the colour? Maybe. Will he remember if you told him it was the best thing to come out of Germany since the BMW M class? Probably. He might even start thinking about your machine in terms of German engineering, German quality...German price. All's fair in love and branding, and borrowing from the hard work German auto manufacturers have done to build up their brands is just one of the weapons in the brand marketer's arsenal. Having established that brand impression, the next time the customer sees the product, he'll say "Oh yeah, the BMW machine," and move on to hearing more with those assumptions backing up his thought process.

That's an example of borrowing a brand, but a far better approach is to build an original, proprietary brand. This takes work, time and investment and is much more involved than just developing some fancy packaging. It starts with a real examination of what makes the company and product unique. This could be anything; brands have been built around where the product is made, the owner's moustache, catchphrases. The important this is to remember the meaning of the word unique. Saying a product is high quality and low price is a waste of oxygen. It has to be high quality and low price or no one is going to consider buying it at all. Every single competitor is making the same claim. A brand can choose to claim it is the highest quality or lowest price of anyone in the market, but it has to be able to back that up against myriad competitors vying for the same space. Many equipment and supply marketers opt to claim best value for the dollar, but this claim is toothless because it is muddied by so many variables. Value propositions must be clear and unambiguous: if you give me X, you will get Y.

Defining a brand calls for creativity and honest evaluation. It is as much a process of deciding who you are not going to sell to as to whom you are. Equipment and supply marketers often seem terrified of not appearing to be everything to every buyer. The result is bland, homogenous marketing campaigns that drive about as much demand as the Yellow Pages. Mad Men's Don Draper said it best: "Success is related to standing out, not fitting in." Companies should ask themselves why they decided to offer a particular product in the first place. Did it just seem like a good idea at the time? Or is there some real reason why you thought you could sell this thing? If the latter, tell people about it!

And, once you have told people, tell them again. And again. People have to see messages over and over, preferably from different sources, before they will absorb them. Building a new brand means shouting the same basic element of the brand over and over until everyone is ready to barf if they hear it again. Then it means toning down the first message gradually while using it to leverage the next shouted message. After shouting that for a while, briefly reinforce the original message, then start phasing in the third message; and so on until the whole brand concept has been communicated. Then a new campaign aimed more directly at driving sales and countering the competition starts, but the branding messages continue as a low-level background hum in the media forever. Have Coke and Microsoft established their brands? Just a bit. Have they stopped promoting and advertising them? Nope.

I think I'll be doing this a lot in the blog, but I have to apologize for offering what will seem to many to be Marketing 101-level comments. I have never, ever, seen an industrial supplier embark on the kind of branding campaign I've outlined above. If there are good reasons for this, I'd love to hear them.