Traditional marketing and branding has an inside-out approach. Understanding the customer or client is now the central challenge to B2B companies. This means that companies should adopt an outside-in perspective.
I just heard a podcast of Maureen Blandford and Michelle Nichols (BusinessWeek) on reasons why business-to-business organizations should spend less on marketing and more on sales to increase revenues. I think Blandford was not only inaccurate but illogical.
In the first part of this post, we discussed the nature of the ordinary kind of branding. Last post, we discussed the shortcomings of this approach and distinguished it from the true nature of branding. This time, we’ll discuss how to achieve this kind of branding and who is good at it.
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As usual, Seth Godin adopts a strong position: good is much worse than great. I am reminded of Spinoza’s famous claim (from 1677) that “all things worthwhile are as difficult as they are rare” (Pt. V, prop. 42).
If good isn’t nearly as good as great, it seems to follow from this claim that it’s better to perform 1 great act than 2 (or 3? or 4?!) good ones. Is this true?
Last time we discussed the ordinary kind of branding. This time we’ll look at the better kind.
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Good branding creates an understanding of the essence of the company. Just as a writers characterization allows the reader to grasp the true essence of the individual (whether fictional or nonfictional), the brander must establish the true nature of the company.
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John Gruber offers a new take on an old debate: are design templates a good idea? He’s talking about blog templates, but the idea is general. And so is his conclusion:
Default templates are terrific for people who can’t or don’t want to design their own—but they’re terrible starting points for anyone attempting to establish their own unique brand. If you start with nothing, you’re forced to think about everything.
Since it’s general, the same applies to Web sites. Many companies think that they need a template and not a custom design. They don’t think it matters. In a certain sense, this is true. The content is the main attraction, not the design. On the other hand, I think that this attitude reveals a deeper attitude. It shows that a company doesn’t value branding. In this sense, branding means your public persona. And since they don’t think their public persona needs to be unique, they don’t think their Web site does, either.
Again, at one level, that’s fine. Maybe you’re going to focus on content to be unique. But, there is no sense in which you don’t have to be unique. Branding is not trickery. It’s a method to make it easy for your customers to clearly understand who you are and what it would be like to do business with you.
In making sure that customer know who you are, a custom Web site can go a long way.
Seth Godin brings up an example of an attitude that I see often. When you work at a company for a while, it’s easy to start thinking that your company is the universe. In this way, you start optimizing the work to suit you, not your customers.
In the agency world, it’s the same thing. The best example is designers who design for themselves, not their clients. They create what they think looks great, ignoring their client’s needs. The worst part about this is the clients often don’t realize this is happening. Unlike with parking spaces, clients often can’t tell when a design represents the designer and not them.
And this makes it hard for me, too. In explaining why Synaxis doesn’t do that, I first need to educate clients on how to hire an agency and on what to look for in design work.
Many people have written about SEM and/or SEO. Today, I want to offer an outsider’s perspective on the industry.
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