The word brand as it’s used today has become so ubiquitous it’s lost most, if not all meaning. From individuals, to rock bands, to countries, to religious and political ideologies – all now called brands – one has to wonder what brand really means anymore.
Even prototype products, yet to be named, are regularly called brands.
Claimed to be the world's oldest brand.
The brand concept began in Sweden in the middle ages. A brand was a unique symbol burned into the flesh of a domestic animal to signify ownership. The branding iron wasn’t the brand, the mark on the animal was. And branding was the action taken to create the mark. The word “brand” is actually a degenerate of the old Norse word “brandr.” The Vikings may have spread the word “brandr” in England, where it was eventually incorporated into the language.
The meaning of a brand was later registered in the dictionary in 1552 as “An identifying mark made by a hot iron.” (online etymology dictionary, © 2001 Douglas Harper)
During the mid 19th century, the word brand began to be lightly used to differentiate products. However, the vast majority of products remained trademarks, labels, patents, etc., gradually becoming known as “name brand” or brand through the 20th century.
Then as today, there remained philosophical confusion in the meaning of brand, does a brand exist solely as a product, or does it exist solely in the customer’s mind, or both?
In 1960, Theodore Levitt who was then a lecturer in business administration at the Harvard Business School, wrote an article called “Marketing Myopia.” In the article Levitt claimed that “Management must think of itself not as producing products but as providing custom-creating value satisfactions.” Sound familiar to today’s mainly online idea of consumer customized products? Levitt claimed that firms that define their business myopically in product terms can stagnate even though the basic customer need they serve is enjoying healthy growth. His key contribution was based on defining the business in terms of the classic customer need rather than the product.
Although smart and insightful, Levitt was probably riffing on another man’s work. In 1954, Peter Drucker’s “The practice of management” placed marketing at the centre of the organization and proposed what became known as a marketing philosophy of business − “Marketing is not only much broader than selling, it is not a specialized activity at all. It is the whole business seen from the customer’s point of view.”
In 1980, Trout and Ries published their thoughts in “Positioning: The Battle for your Mind.” The concept “starts with the product…but it is not what you do to the product…but what you do to the mind of the prospect. That is, you position the product in the mind of the prospect.” In other words, branding takes place in the customer’s mind.
Again, Peter Druker, in his 1973 book “Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices” wrote that “…because it is the purpose to create a customer, any business enterprise has two-basic functions: marketing and innovation…There will always, one can assume, be need for some selling. But the aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well that the product or service fits him and sells itself. Ideally, marketing should result in a customer who is ready to buy. All that should be needed then, is to make the product or service available.”
(Sounds like the inspiration for Alex Bogusky and John Winsor’s book, ‘Baked-In,’ where they more-or-less claim this as a new and revolutionary idea).
Today, branding is mostly thought of as adding value to a product. It’s rarely seen as an investment. It’s mostly seen by CEO’s and CFO’s as a luxury and accounted for as a cost. Therefore, when times are tough, it’s the first cost to be cut.
The problem is, branding isn’t optional and doesn’t go on vacation. If you don’t create your brand in the audience’s mind, they will do it for you.
The admired corporations, whether knowingly or unknowingly, have taken Peter Druker’s advice that a brand as the marketing object “…is the whole business seen from the customer’s point of view” and therefore view the brand as the central business idea and the impetus for everything the company does. This viewpoint breeds success.
Smart marketers should abandon the looser, and less useful meanings of the word “brand”, and focus instead on the one with the greatest potential to support their efforts in building their business.
That is, branding is a verb. It is the consistent, continuous and single-minded creation of a unique concept in the prospect’s mind, based on fulfilling rational and emotional needs. Therefore, a brand is not a product, it is an evolving concept in the customer’s mind.
