HOW BRANDING, MARKETING, SELLING, AND SERVICING INTERRELATE
"I don't want brands to advertise to me, I want them to be my friend"
Pieter Casneuf, CEO, ADAM Software, email of 19 November 2007
How do we parse this, breaking this speech act into its constituent parts? Here it goes:
Brands constitute the emotional connection by and between buyer and seller, customer and solution provider, stakeholder and institutional citizen—three evolutionary stages of brandedness.
Think of BRAND as the rhythm and bass of a great jazz, hip-hop, or rock song. Does your brand have a tight groove?
MARKETING constitutes the interaction by and between buyer’s criteria and seller’s value proposition. Think of marketing as the melody. Does your value proposition evoke recognition and possibility, leading to “I want THAT”?
SELLING constitutes the the reassurance by and between customer and solution provider that both can and will have mutually satisfying experience. Think of selling as the harmony. Does your selling capabilities speed the buying process?
SERVICING constitutes the collaboration by and between customer’s change-management process and solution provider’s service-fulfillment methods. Think of servicing as the orchestration. Do your service methods deliver assured satisfaction faster than industry norms?
If you lack or suffer a low-fidelity emotional connection (brand) or fuzzy and inconclusive interaction (marketing), you will have to over-emphasize Selling — okay for entrepreneurs but problematic in growing a business (too few super star sales staff).
If you have a great brand, you don’t have to market or sell it. Think Starbucks, iPhone, Bose earphones.
If you have all it working, then the word of mouth becomes the voice of the brand. The richness, tone, timbre, and cadence of a great brand-voice arises from the ultimate question: Would you recommend the purchase and use of this product or service to close friend or family member (i.e., someone with whom you have a long-term committed relationship).
The ultimate answer to the ultimate question remains: “Hell yes!”
Simple. Drive relentlessly to get “hell yes!” and make the emotional investments in moving buyer and seller to become customer and solution provider, and then to stakeholder and institutional citizens.
- Michael Moon's blog
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Forrester conference
I got this from a Forrester conference in Barcelona; I think that the guy from MySpace said it. :-)
Two days of presentations at Forrester were about how brand can be strengthened or broken by blogs, social networks etc., and how to market your brand within an era of social networks.
My feeling is that in the old days, because of non-interactivity and one-way traffic, a brand could have a difference between the tone of voice and the actual value proposal, before and after sales. If the value proposal didn't meet the the expectations, it could be that the brand had still a change with loads of branding and marketing.
Today, my feeling is that the power has shifted to more balanced proportions. If the brand proposition is not in line with the actual offering, the correction will immediately follow: social networks or other networked sites will create buzz and mass communication on itself to temper the brand owner in its value proposal