BrandSimple | BrandDigital: The Blog

I love NBC’s 30 Rock. It’s a great television show. Given that it airs when I’m either helping my kids with homework or getting them ready for bed, it was easy to download from iTunes and watch it on my schedule. Note I said “was easy.” It’s not all that easy anymore. As a matter of fact, NBC has me in pause mode. You see, earlier this fall NBC teamed up with the Fox network and a number of media companies like MSN, AOL and Comcast, to create Hulu, an online brand that aggregates content from a number of places. Hulu is in beta right now, but the idea is that viewers would have to go to Hulu to download their favorite NBC or Fox shows. This is neither intuitive nor smart when it comes to reinforcing brand loyalty. Having viewers jump through this Hulu hoop creates an unwelcome EXTRA stop between brand and user. If they must control distribution and don’t want to pay Apple anymore, they should do it on the NBC.com site like ABC.

ABC has made the wise branding choice to reinforce its relationship with viewers by directing them to ABC.com for downloads. I don’t have to think twice about how to watch ABC shows on my schedule. It’s easy, it’s smart and it’s intuitive. ABC shows - ABC.com. Search made simple. No jumping through hoops. I like that.

Building a brand is hard enough today what with so many brand choices and so many media choices. The idea is to make things easier for consumers, not more complicated. NBC is risking its well-respected brand name by having an intermediary brand host its shows. It’s created a step between me – an NBC advocate – and my interaction with its brand. This Hulu hoop doesn’t rock.

The current Lamisil TV spot for its athlete’s foot treatment does more than demonstrate how to get effective relief from this itchy condition. It demonstrates how to make effective use of sock puppets. Actually, I’m being serious. Despite the best efforts of Pets.com to put its adorable sock puppet dog to good use in the 1990’s, it turned out that consumers loved the cute little scamp with its wry humor, but couldn’t remember the name of the company it represented. It wasn’t relevant enough a branding signal for them to make the connection. Lamisil, on the other hand - um, foot - is using its sock puppets in an incredibly relevant, not to mention clever way. In its ad which takes place in a locker room, a variety of sock-puppet’s talk about feet. Come on. What could possibly be more natural for a sock to talk about than feet? The amusing spot takes the conversation about athlete’s foot out of its generally staid, medicinal space and makes it entertaining in a meaningful way. It’s hard these days to find a branding signal that gets peoples’ attention for reasons you want them to pay attention. The key is to make it captivating, but relevant. Socks that talk about athlete’s foot are both. These smelly guys are also pretty funny. Seriously.

I have a friend who used to say that as long as Walter Cronkite was on the air he felt everything was going to be okay—even when he knew the world wasn’t okay. Well, the world isn’t okay and Walter Cronkite isn’t on the air anymore. But, based on recent ratings numbers, it seems that a lot of people these days feel about ABC’s Charles Gibson the way my friend felt about Mr. Cronkite. Why is the Charles Gibson brand clobbering the Brian Williams and Katie Couric brands in the evening news branding derby? It boils down to a BrandSimple answer; the essence of his brand. The Charles Gibson brand is all about authenticity. And in the evening news space authenticity is the gold standard of brand promises. It’s the most important brand benefit the anchor of a prime time news program can have. Charles Gibson, man as brand, looks and behaves like someone who’s been in the business for awhile. Someone who might have earned his stripes at a small town newspaper. Just the facts delivered with an appropriate degree of compassion. His branding is as real as his brand.

While the Brian Williams brand has a smooth and polished essence, it may be too smooth and polished, especially for viewers who want information, not a sophisticated performance. And, no matter how fervently she tries to distance herself from it, the essence of the Katie Couric brand is one of friendly conversationalist. A great brand for morning coffee, but not right for those seeking hard news from someone who comes across as having been in the trenches. Even in his Good Morning America Days, Mr. Gibson was genuinely self-effacing. No matter how much Brian Williams and Katie Couric try to close the branding gap, it’s going to be hard to do. They’d have to change the very essence of their brands which would hardly ring true. The reason Charles Gibson is winning the evening news branding game is that he has the right brand essence for the space and for the times. Charlie, as he’s referred to, is authentic.

Geico is literally a mom and pop brand made good. Actually, made great by way of brilliant branding. The company started out with the simple promise of being able to save you 15% on car insurance. It hasn’t wavered and, as a result, can claim ownership of this promise. Owning anything in branding today is hard.

But wait, there’s more. Geico also owns one of the most amusing branding characters on the telly. The little British gecko who has a thing for pie an’ chips. Realizing the name of the company might be hard to pronounce, this droll, green fellow was created to make it as easy as pie (an’ chips) to remember. He’s helped take the company to its leadership position.

Geico continues to employ its gecko and its 15% savings claim. But, it’s also started to expand its message beyond price with another series of ads that focus on the quality of the Geico experience. Celebrities as disparate in nature as Charo, Peter Graves, Little Richard, and Burt Bacharach add a twist to what would otherwise be stodgy customer testimonials. While the strategy behind this branding is in lock step with Geico’s humorous brand persona, there’s something distracting about it. I remember the celebrities. I don’t remember what the customers had to say. A case of cleverness trumping intention.

Clever is good. And Geico is great. But when using humor in branding, make sure the brand promise is as easy as pie (an’ chips) to remember.

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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