BrandDigital | BrandSimple: The Blog

Consumers pledge allegiance to brands. When a brand has problems, no matter what the root cause, the brand organization suffers financially. While a growing number of Americans have made a pledge to eat healthier, no single spinach grower is going to suffer unduly as a result of the recent outbreak of E. Coli. Why? Spinach is a vegetable, not a brand. Any allegiance we have to spinach is to the vitamins on the inside, not the name on the plastic bag outside. While spinach growers and distributors will definitely take a financial hit from this very unfortunate situation, no single brand will be held liable. It will cut across the industry, mitigating the effect. This is not like the Tylenol package tampering scare where a specific brand bore the brunt of the headache. In that case we were able to turn to other remedies for our own headaches. (In that case, Tylenol’s parent company, Johnson & Johnson, set the standard for appropriate brand behavior in a crisis. It took the company time to recover but, as a result of its actions, respect for and loyalty to the brand soared. For those too young to remember, check your brand management textbooks.) If you’re looking for an excuse not to eat your spinach, baby, you don’t have much time left. As soon as science gets to the root cause of the problem and the media gives us the okay, spinach will be back in the produce section. While we won’t necessarily look for any one brand, the industry will recover, as a whole. We’ll be free to sauté, toss, and make our spanikopita. And, in your case Popeye, you can just chug the stuff.

Bill Clinton is back in the news ? big time. There he is reaching across the ideological aisle to join in tsunami relief with President Bush the elder. There he is with the wife of the current President Bush during the recent events at the United Nations in New York. There he is applauding a speech given by his own wife with an adoring Chelsea by his side. And, yes, there he is with none other than Sir Richard Branson as Sir Richard announced a pledge of $3 billion during a meeting of the Clinton Global Initiative, a major new force in the philanthropic world. Bill Clinton is powerful. More to the point, Bill Clinton is a powerful brand. (If you don’t think people can be brands, ask Oprah, Donald or Martha.) What does former President Clinton know that all powerful brands know? While it’s one thing for a brand to establish itself by representing something different, yet relevant, the difficult part is to stay relevant. And, what could possibly be more relevant than worldwide efforts in the name of AIDS relief efforts, global warming, and human rights? While Bill Clinton may have made a few egregious errors along the way (which is not the premise of this piece), he was a strong and charismatic leader. These leadership qualities are at the core of his brand. In fact they define his difference. He knows this, and is re-channeling these qualities in ways that are relevant to the health and well-being of millions of people. Other former presidents may build libraries to further the social and ideological causes they espouse. Bill Clinton is building his brand to do the same. Exhale, Bill. It’s working.

Once upon a time, long, long ago, let’s say the mid-to-late 1990’s, there was a simple brand called AOL. The initials AOL stood for “America Online.” That’s what the brand was all about. AOL was the brand known for getting America online. It was lucky enough to have what’s referred to as first-mover advantage. It was among a handful of companies that offered access to the Internet, but its appeal was to the practical, no-nonsense everyday folks. And there were millions of them. While companies like CompuServe catered to the techy types, AOL had found a gap in the market and filled it quickly by catering to the less technologically proficient who found its service both useful and easy to use. AOL offered something that was different and very relevant to a vast new audience. The fact that there was a monthly fee was irrelevant. People didn’t know any better. (Hold on – I’m getting to this.)

In my book, BrandSimple, I explain that brand success is due, in good part, to offering something that people consider different from what they’ve experienced before, and that they find relevant to their needs. Difference and relevance are two of the pillars of brand strength, the foundation of its equity. And—as if you couldn’t tell from the book’s eponymous title—brand success is also due to the fact that whatever it is that makes the brand relevantly different is simple for people to understand. In a world where brands and brand promises are multiplying like rabbits, this is critical.

Back then, AOL got it right on both counts. It offered an Internet access service that was both different and relevant (actually, it was sort of unique and relevant.), and it was easy for people to understand what this meant to them. It was a strong brand. People flocked to AOL because it made getting online and picking up email easy. This is the simple idea on which AOL built its brand equity. In fact, the brand organization used its tagline as the internal driver of all its branding behaviors, “So easy to use, no matter we’re number one.”

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While all my blogs will relate to brands in the news, this first one is about a brand literally in the news. Katie Couric (Yes, people can definitely be brands, Madonna, J Lo, Martha, the Donald, A-Rod, and Oprah all being good examples. We have very specific feelings about these individuals as brands, and their existence as brands creates lots of profit for lots of people.) Before I get to Katie, let me give you the BrandSimple context for what I’m about to talk about.Quick starting point. A brand is something that exists in your mind. It’s an image or a feeling. In the book, I liken it to a sort of mental computer desktop file folder. Branding, as I said, is the process of creating the things that get us to feel one way or another about a brand. The stuff inside the mental desktop file folders. Branding is not just marketing — far from it. It’s any interaction or experience we have with a brand, from customer service, to product design, to the functionality of its Web site, to the Web sites on which it posts advertising. When a brand is based on a simple idea, its branding is far more effective and efficient because the people responsible for the branding can better understand what it means to create brand-appropriate expressions. Their branding efforts become intuitive, authentic to the brand and, as a result, brilliant.

This being said, once a mental brand file is created and certain feelings about a brand have been “saved as,” it’s pretty hard to delete them. This is generally a good thing because it’s what makes for brand loyalty. What happens, however, when, for any number of solid business reasons, a brand organization decides it wants to re-evaluate the brand images embedded in our mental file folders? What if it believes there may be good rationale for getting people to think differently about its brand. How does it decide what brand images to “delete?” At the same time, how does it ensure it doesn’t delete the wrong stuff? The stuff that created positive equity?

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