Brand Advertising. It’s not just about “how”

By Mark Semmelmayer, CBC
Chief Idea Officer
Pen & Inc. Marketing Communications

For my last blog, Maralah Rose-Asch, Editor and Publisher of the Gardner Manufacturing Marketer asked me to explore the differences between brand and product advertising. Once published, she liked the blog and thought it might be valuable to Gardner’s readership to create a couple new blogs, one each on brand and product advertising, exploring best practices for each discipline.

In 1000 words? Books have been written on those subjects. But, heck, let’s give it a shot, starting with brand. First, we ought to define what a brand is.

According to Investopedia, “The term brand refers to a business and marketing concept that helps people identify a particular company, product, or individual. Brands are intangible, you can't touch or see them. They help shape people's perceptions of companies, their products, or individuals.”

I’ve no argument with that definition but think it’s overstated. Always the pragmatist, I prefer to think of brand in terms of the customer. B2B marketing luminaries from Don Schultz to Bob Lauterborn and more, generally defined brand in these simpler terms. A product is something that solves a customer’s need. A brand is that product they think solves it best.

The word “product” is used loosely here. A service can be a brand, too. Example: When you want to find information on the web, what do you do? Yeah, you Google it. There are other browsers out there, but, for information needs, it’s Google that comes to mind first . . . and used most often.

This next chunk of thinking will seem elementary to students of marketing, but bears being stated. How does one build a successful brand? I think there are three fundamental building blocks in that process:

• Creating a product or service that well and truly satisfies customer needs
• An unfailing commitment by the brand to maintain quality, availability and innovation, meeting customer needs continually
• Persistent and integrated marketing communication creating a presence for the brand

I worked for Kimberly-Clark. Some will ask “who?” If I said I worked for the Kleenex® company, the name gets instant recognition. Kleenex, as a brand, is immediately recognizable. Say the word, and a customer has an immediate mental “image’ of the product. They know what it looks and feels like, know what it’s for and can probably recall or immediately recognize the brand’s logo. It took the company more than 50 years of marketing to get to that point.

But why did it work?

In researching this piece, I stumbled on a concept that puts that in perspective. Mental availability. In an online marketing blog, The Drum (https://www.samueljscott.com/marketing-speaker/), Samuel Scott, a former journalist, newspaper editor, and director of marketing and communications in the high-tech industry, explored the subject, with some insightful thinking. Especially relevant to the B2B marketer.

According to research from LinkedIn’s B2B Institute, about 5% of B2B buyers are in the market for a B2B product at any given time. Scott looks at B2B brand marketing like this. “Most marcom activity should build and refresh memory links to the brand among the other 95% to be remembered by them when they do want to buy in the future. Basically, it is creating ‘brand-relevant memories’.

That activity builds ‘mental availability’ – making a brand ‘top of mind’ for future buying situations. And it goes beyond just “awareness”.

How do you build mental availability? According to Scott, “First, remember that product marketing focuses on features . . . while brand marketing focuses on people. Product marketing is usually dull, but brand marketing can be extremely memorable. Which is the point. One important part of building mental availability is creating distinctive brand assets (DBAs) and using them in marcom campaigns. When those items are used consistently, they build memory associations”.

If you ask me, that’s a pretty good summation of why brand marketing works as it does. Especially the part about focusing on people rather than product. Brand is about the personality of a product. Making that personality mesh with a buyer’s personality is like creating a friendship that endures.

Personally, I also believe creating a brand friendship carries an implicit promise. The brand will always be of the quality and consistency a customer can rely on.

Brand marketers and manufacturers should take that to heart. Missteps in that friendship encourage the buyer to look elsewhere for reliability and satisfaction.

An old boss of mine at an agency once said that trust is critical to marketing success. He opined, “It’s not all that difficult to gain someone’s good will. It’s tougher than hell to get it back.”

In a nutshell, brand marketing is about consistency in product and brand presence. Those elements flood the buyers mind with impressions of the brand which are then mentally available when decisions are needed. Mental availability. That’s why it has succeeded for so many brands, some for a century of more. Make sure you plan your brand efforts with both the hows and whys in mind.

Need more information?
Mark Semmelmayer, CBC
Chief Idea Officer
Pen & Inc. Marketing Communications
Saint Simons Island, GA
770-354-4737
LinkedIn

About the Author

Mark Semmelmayer, CBC

Mark is a past international chairman of the Business Marketing Association (BMA), the 2015 recipient of BMA’s prestigious G.D. Crain Award and an Inductee into the Business Marketing Hall of Fame. A 40-year B2B marketing pro, including 32 years with Kimberly-Clark, he’s the founder and Chief Idea Officer of Pen & Inc. Marketing Communications, a consultancy in Saint Simons Island, GA.