Branding In A Changing Marketing Environment

Branding is more important than ever. Why? Because every day there are more companies, products, and more brand names to try and remember. Due to the large number of competing brands in most categories, and the overwhelming amount of total marketing messages competing for attention, brand obscurity is the natural order. Branding is what can move a company, product, or service from brand obscurity to the creation of brand identity and affinity.

Bob Garfield from AdAge, in an article titled, “Are Brands Headed For Obsolescence?,” pointed out a comment author Chris Anderson made in his new book, The Long Tail: “Brands are a proxy for information.” When a consumer has a certain brand affinity, it slams the door shut on all the information competing brands are trying to impart to that consumer. Brands offer consumers a way to block out the extraneous noise from similar products vying for their attention. In other words, brands are fulfilling that proxy role, and in essence, consumers who use that brand are saying, “I have all the information I need in this category, thank you.”

The job of marketing is to either reinforce the brand, or to break through the competitive brand blockade with an integrated approach that involves adept advertising, timely PR and other marcom tools. In the past, the majority of this brand marketing was orchestrated from the top down and implemented with mostly paid media. This strategy could work uniquely well when mainstream media companies (and the advertisers who supported them) were in firm control of the communication landscape.

The challenge now is that the consumer has been afforded considerable access to the communication process through blogs, social networks, online video sites, forums and user groups. Brand messages that were once calculated to deliver a concerted effort from the top can now be deflected, altered, mocked, or at the least distracted, by voices from the bottom up that are beyond direct control of advertisers or their marketing partners. Ben McConnell and Jackie Huba summarize this nicely in their new book, Citizen Marketers.

Although the media and marketing landscape is being rapidly altered, the fact remains branding is critically important. Old media and new media will continue to play important roles in this process. And, for the most effective branding in today’s communication environment, it will also take marketers who understand and can utilize bilateral branding that originates both from the top down and the bottom up.