Branding - Theft With Violence or Not Even Yours

Update
I'm not the only one grousing about thois branding stuff. John Moore at Roundourhouse has started something with The language of branding I especially like "These things may be ways of desribing brands but I don't think they capture at all authentically how real brands actually come into being, which is always a far more chaotic or complex process with false starts, blunders, arguments, misunderstandings etc. And the excessive use of such approaches blinds us to the REAL world we're actually dealing with."

Now, resuming the original programme.
Gerry McGovern is back on song (ie, I agree with him), and weighing into the developing meme that there is something rotten in the world of advertising. From his latest email epistle, Web design: never let an ad agency near your website

The average advertising agency fundamentally doesn't get the Web. Saatchi & Saatchi, BBDO Worldwide, J. Walter Thompson and Ogilvy are great advertising agencies. When it comes to managing their own websites, however, they are rank amateurs. They bring their print and TV thinking to the Web with embarrassing results. Yup, see my entry here

I give workshops on content management and web design all over the world. Whenever I talk about the need for simple, clean web design, there is nearly always someone in the audience who raises an objection. I am informed that I don't understand branding.

Branding. I don't know how many times branding has been used as an excuse for awful web design. What's the biggest global brand that has emerged in the last five years? Google. And it's because of its multicolored logo? Or perhaps because it's a great search engine?

While I wholly agree about not letting the marketing/ advertising people near youre site, especially in the design phase, we need to be careful of blindness to cultural factors. A friend was building a site for a Philippine company a while ago and was busy hewing to the simple clean McGovern line. His client had a fit, unless it was well kitted with jazzing, flashing twirling logos, animations and other goodies, said the client, it would be ignored. From his Western European perspective, building a successful site for that client meant starting at cheesy and shoving the whole thing over a cliff. Not all of us see or deal with information in the way that Gerry and I do. Pays to remember.

On the other hand, his comments about branding kicked me off a little cliff as well, and got me started on what exactly this branding stuff is.

In the very old days branding involved rounding up wild animals over which no ownership had been asserted, enclosing them in fences and burning a mark into their flesh with a red hot iron. In other words, assertion of ownership through what we would call animal cruelty and theft from the commons, with violence.

This ownership is generally construed as some highly specific combination of shape, colour and placement such as the typeface, angle and colour of the Coca Cola brand. The right to so brand a product is fiercely defended and anyone daring to use such a combination with only minor changes is asking for trademark trouble.

But brands are not the trademark, they are a whole pile of associations surrounding them. A while ago Telecom NZ tried to patent (copyright? Not sure now) a specific shade of yellow as being so intimately associated with its Yellow Page brand that anyone else else using that shade of yellow in any way would be guilty of trading on their brand, passing off their product.

On the one hand that's absurd, to most of us there would be a range of colours with slight variations that, even at second glance, we would swear were "Yellow Pages" yellow. What's more, being a natural shade of the visual spectrum (we couldn't see it otherwise), it would be insane to try to prevent my brand from being, say, a sunflower, the petals of which are something that you might mistake for "Yellow Pages" yellow. But there they went, asserting ownership of a colour that they didn't invent, create, develop or in any way contribute to, they simply appropriated it from the commons and tried to lock it away. Far from increasing its value, they undermined it.

The brand, as distinct from the trademark however, only exists through the perceptions that we customers have of it, there is no inherently attractive, authoritative, money-loosening "mark" that will encourage people to buy the products attached to it, regardless of what some shills might want you to believe. In other words, the brand doesn't belong to the company at all, it is conferred by the community.

It is the performance of the product or the company that lets the community build the brand, one customer at a time, and while that process is in its early stages, there is real value in not being too prominent or clearly differentiated from its competitors because the company has no credibility or record, so it has no brand.

At the other end of the scale the brand disappears again, back into the language. Like this
Band-Aids - plastic bandages
Chapstick - lip balm
Jell-O - gelatin dessert
Kleenex - facial tissues
Q-Tips - cotton swabs
Scotch Tape - cellophane tape
Styrofoam - plastic foam
Teflon - nonstick coating
Vaseline - petroleum jelly
Velcro - hook and loop fastener
Walkman - portable cassette player with headphones
Xerox - photocopier

On the Internet a brand behaves the same way, but can now be applied to a much wider range of concepts. A person like Gerry, or Joi ito or Vint Cerf or Linus Torvalds is branded through the interactions with that their ideas, products or inventions. When someone becomes "a Vint Cerf", that's a brand, we Google up some information, that's one on the way out again. If you have read this far, you have contributed something to my brand, what you do or say next will decide whether that is good or bad for me, if you haven't read this far, bad for me whatever you say or do because you are less likely to come back.

So I seem to have argued my way to saying that you may own your trademark, but you don't own your brand or in Gerry's words, "Branding on the Web is about successful task completion, not fancy images, or heaven forbid, Flash".

Exactly.

I'm a New Zealander and I've had some associations with the Maori community, among whom there is something called Mana. It acts like a brand, people who have it get benefits, deference and are able to exercise authority. It does not however, belong to them at all. In fact, if ever once you assert your Mana, you lose it. Those who assert their brand run the same risk, especially in this highly connected environment.

Such as these people. Software giant threatens mikerowesoft Apparently MS thinks that its customers are illiterate, or stupid. Right now though, that story is busily undermining their brand as it zips through the blogosphere. Actually, just checked young Mike's site. Its been crashed with traffic, 250,000 visitors to be precise and he's had to shift to a new server, he's also set up a paypal defense fund and one for his hosting and if this was a marketing strategy he would be King of the Hill right now.

Forgive me, but this cracked me up. "I received an email from Smart & Biggar, Microsoft's Canadian lawyers". That cannot be true, surely.

Comments

[Marc Orchant]

Earl: Excellent analysis. My company spent a year (just prior to my coming on board) thrashing about its "brand" and even commissioning a "brand architecture" study. Fortunately, it's a really smart group of people and sensibility won over styling. We recognize that every interaction we have in which we (not just meet but) exceed the need or desire of our customer contributes to our brand. If we drop the ball and fail to deliver, we chip away at what we're building (I choose tense carefully here). And, like your Maori lesson, we know the price of "spending" our brand equity.

[amos]

As a point of correction: it is now recognized in law that a particular color can be trademarked if it is distinctive. However, the color (or word, for that matter) can only restrict usage on those products or services that may cause confusion with the product or services offered by the trademark owner.

I think you weaken your argument with the example of livestock branding, though I understand the connection you're making.

Trademarks were initially a way for producers to tell consumers that they were getting the real deal and not a shoddy knock-off. In other words, trademarks were used to signify quality. Branding is using a trademark to transfer credibility to other products which have not established a reputation. If ABC makes good widgets, then they must make good foobars.

The examples you site are not a loss of branding, they are a loss of a trademark to the public domain. It could be argued that the branding effort is increased, because no matter what brand of tissue you buy, you're buying Kleenex.

[Earl Mardle]

Amos, good points all.

The licensing of a colour and the extent of confusion created still strikes me as daft and leads to exactly the kind of silliness between MS and Mike Rowe. The possibility of confusion is hijacked for illegitimate purposes and loses its own credibility.

Again, the widgets to foobars brand transfer might have worked when the information assymetry was very high, it also created a moral hazard, (see the opposite of Schmology above). As the search and aggregation costs fall and as customer loyalty falls away, I think the whole concept needs to be rethought. Once again, its misuse to encourage consumer confidence in shoddy products or services perpetrated on their customers by greedy companies is undermining the process. Like so many other concepts, it feels broken by the changes in the information environment.

Loss of trademark/ branding, I disagree insofar as the brand/ trademark is assumed to benefit its "owner" and if every paper tissue I buy is a "kleenex", then kleenex no longer gains a benefit from being Kleenex and has also lost the ability to brand anything with that name or any idea of its value. Lets see them, for example, transfer the brand value to a line of batteries.