Is Branding Dead?
That question raises ire in all but the most sanguine marketer. Branding dead? That's pure heresy.
Actually branding will never die—it's the tools and the means by which we typically use them to achieve the goal of branding that are, in fact, obsolete.
What's worse, every tool and technique we've spent our careers learning—useless or not—is under new scrutiny: a new, mathematical, quantitative, hard-core, squirm–in-front-of-your-CFO scrutiny. After the wreckage has been removed, even the slowest amongst us will discover it is disruptive marketing that has died.
Few of us got into marketing because of our math chops. Ironically, it is the quantitative methods we dread that will save us.
That said, let's review the technologies that are silencing our branding initiatives.
TiVo: Believe whatever hype you want, TiVo and other hard disk video recording devices aren't going away. Nor is technology that allows TV viewers to skip commercials.
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Tom Barnes is CEO of Mediathink (www.mediathink.com), a consultancy specializing in media and marketing strategy and implementation. Contact him at tom@mediathink.com.
Comments
Defining what you mean by "branding" is always necessary before making a blanket statement such as "BRANDING IS DEAD!" Here are three defininions of BRAND:
-Your Brand is your reputation
-Your Brand is a collection of perceptions in the mind of the consumer
-Your Brand is a promise of future value
By these definitions, is BRANDING dead? I think not. What is dead is one size fits all, disruptive ADVERTISING. Let's not confuse the two!