Burning Platform, Anybody?

August 29, 2008

A guest column by Jonathan Salem Baskin, author of Branding Only Works on Cattle.

There’s more bad news for marketers in every morning’s newspaper or splatter of news on the Internet: companies large and small are lowering sales forecasts for 2009.

In general, that means marketing budgets are going to get cut. It’s a particularly foreboding outlook for those of us who make our living in the branding racket.

And it’s playing out like a kabuki drama.

Tougher markets mean it’s harder and more costly to win every sale. Job losses, credit pressures, and other factors weigh both directly and indirectly on people (whether they get fired or go bankrupt, or simply worry about such things in the abstract). Company budgets get squeezed, and difficult decisions get made.

But it’s not so difficult to cut stuff that doesn’t address the present circumstances. And, since many branding budgets are based on broad, qualitative assumptions, if not simply benign neglect — “It must do something for us, but I couldn’t tell you what, exactly” — those funds are among the first to evaporate.

What’s our reaction?

We marketers tell one another that everyone else is stupid; that we need to do a better job of educating our fellow execs and clients on the errors of their ways. And we go about doing what we always do, only trying to find ever-more creative ways to do it with ever-less budgets…and valiantly making our case as the marketplace continues to deteriorate around us.

It’s as if the reason that everyone else can’t quite learn to risk their jobs on the vast, long-term benefits of branding isn’t because there’s no immediate evidence that they should, but rather that we’ve just done a bad job of branding branding. If others don’t understand why, it’s simply their failure of vision. Challenge our preconceptions and, well, you just don’t get it.

Only what if we’re the ones who’ve got it wrong?

Why aren’t alarms being sounded? Where’s the soul-searching about the very foundations of how we define brands? How come we keep trying to resurrect in social media, games, and other tools of technology the tenets of brands that were invented in strange, distantly different times (i.e. the Dark Ages of the mid-20th Century)?

For that matter, where’s something like Brandweek’s Manhattan Project on inventing a way to objectively measure brands, once and for all? Why isn’t our trade abuzz with working groups and committees and industry conclaves finally creating metrics that are dependable, and that have real meaning across industry categories, not just as nice color-commentary within them?

Instead, we make sure that there’s no shortage of newfangled ideas, mostly centered on the idea of distracting consumers instead of interrupting them. The Big Idea in branding is even further removed from selling anything.

Most blogs are happy to blather on about some latest gimmick to waste consumers’ time, even though the real problem is that they’re more difficult to find, harder to keep, and nearly impossible to focus on buying anything. We’re happy to talk to one another about our creativity, and the boldness of our commitment to challenging employers and clients to do branding in spite of their almost instinctual, visceral disbelief.

And so it plays out like a kabuki drama.

As it stands now, 2009 will not be a banner year for the branding business. Budgets will be smaller. Patience will be shorter. Trust will become even a rarer commodity. Marketers will spend more time talking — participating in more conversations with consumers — yet reputations, purchases, and loyalty won’t necessarily follow.

We’ll learn little new, other than a few revised ways to excuse brandings’ shortcomings, or explain away its outright failures.

Instead of finding new ways to do the same old stuff, you’d think somebody would be advocating doing something truly new. If there’s never been before today a burning platform for actually changing the branding game, we’ve sure got one now. Don’t we need to do things differently?

I don’t presume to have the answer. But why aren’t more people asking the question?

Jonathan Salem Baskin has 26+ years of experience working with some of the largest brand names in the world. He writes a bi-weekly column on marketing leadership for Advertising Age, and blogs daily on Dim Bulb. His new book, Branding Only Works on Cattle, declares a radical, new way to look at brands, and will be published in the U.S. in mid-September by Business Plus.

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