I’ve been asked countless times about what branding means. It’s usually an innocent question posed by a genuinely interested individual. But, quite a few times, I’ve been asked by someone who simply wanted to see if I knew the answer. I’m not sure if there is a single, unanimously agreed upon answer but I’d always make my attempt to describe what I think branding represents. My reason for doing so is quite simple. For a marketing professional, branding is critical to fueling and supporting high trajectory growth.
Branding represents a promise. When promises are kept, the brand gets stronger. Before a brand can propel itself, it needs to be constantly fed or nourished. A brand gets automatically reinforced through what I like to term ‘the repetition of making promises and keeping them.
My wife and I are big fans of Volvo. What made us buy a Volvo? A Volvo promises safety and we were on the market to buy a car that was safe. My wife had lived in South Korea all of her life and if you’ve ever tried driving two miles in the city of Seoul, you’d quickly appreciate the bias toward seeking safety above all else when it comes to purchasing an automobile. Drivers in Seoul are a crazy bunch! We’ve owned our Volvo S60 sedan for about three years now. We love Volvo more than ever now because we purchased it based on its promise but now know that it keeps its promise.
Let’s look at another Swedish brand. How Absolut vodka created its brand with distinctive packaging and print ads in the early 1980s to grab market share in the U.S. for what ultimately amounted to a 15,000% increase in sales over a period of time is the stuff of marketing legend. What gets lost in the folklore, however, is the fact that Absolut did it in sustained fashion over a period of 14 years (1981 to 1995) and millions of dollars. Branding takes time and it’s very expensive but it’s well worth it. There are no short cuts.
Did the marketing gurus at Absolut envision using Andy Warhol to design fresh ads to reinforce the “perfection” line of ads when it conceived the campaign back in 1981? Nope. Did it think that Absolut ads would one day be traded like baseball cards by thousands of consumers? No way. But, the folks at Absolut knew what brand building entailed … making a promise and sticking to it … decade after decade. Absolut basically branded itself as a better vodka at a time when all vodka was cheap and all vodka makers were claiming that their drink was superior. It’s pretty hard to actually make a vodka taste better (I suppose you can grow special potatoes watered with Fiji water) so the trick was in figuring out a way to say they were better without actually saying it.
The answer seemed obvious in hindsight but it was a pretty risky move at the time. Put some vodka in unique bottles (short neck and round shoulders like wine bottles with labels imprinted directly), give it a tagline claiming “Absolut Perfection,” and add a touch of humor by placing a halo on top of the bottle. The humor was intended to diffuse the ridiculousness of the claim of offering vodka perfection. The rest, as they say, is history.
If you work in the tech industry, does any of this sound familiar? It should. Most tech companies are like the vodka distilleries of the 1970s. All of their products/services are better. Better performance. Better TCO. Better value. Better efficiency. Better ROI. Better flexibility. Even better ease of use. By the same token, too many tech marketers at startups constantly talk about the brand. Building the brand. Promoting the brand. Leveraging the brand. Huh? Leveraging the brand? What brand?
A startup not only does not have a brand but it struggles more with what it DOES than what it does better. Add to this mix the fact that tech buyers, in general, are a highly educated class of people who have a proclivity to solve big problems with inherently complex solutions and you have what amounts to be an impossible situation for branding. The early customers you're targeting rarely get influenced or dissuaded by brands alone. These buyers are not elicited into action by ads. And, they don’t turn to data sheets and press releases. Mainly, early adopters are the sort who are confronted by conventional problems (albeit BIG ones) but often seeking unconventional ways to tackle them. For this audience, it’s better to emphasize the fact that you offer a DIFFERENT solution. Forget better. Become different since different IS better to these customers.
At NetScaler, we essentially marketed a server load balancer with some added – and valued – functionality. Early on, analysts, press, and other industry folks dismissed NetScaler products as nothing more than load balancers or content switches. We disagreed strongly. We played near the load balancing sphere within networking but we were definitely NOT load balancing. We were different. Many remained unconvinced but the early adopter buyers who managed the most heavily trafficked sites in the world bought into our claim. They bought into the claim because they were seeking a different solution than the aging load balancers that were proving inadequate in supporting their infrastructure. Selling to these early customers taught us what promises we needed to make down the road. These were the early lessons we needed in order to actually begin investing in branding so that we could go after a broader segment of the market. Knowing what to promise made everything come together. Even the earlier critics came around to our side and backed us up with supportive research notes and press coverage around his emerging space.
NetScaler became an application delivery company with application delivery systems because customers valued the fact that our solutions reduced response times of applications delivered over the Internet. We promised application delivery and were dedicated fully to it.
It was no coincidence that the next batch of passionate NetScaler customers came on board just around the time that we began to show some signs of making and meeting that promise of “application delivery.” Eventually, we would hit the third wave of mainstream enterprise customers and by this time (when it mattered most) we truly did have a brand.
One of the proudest moments for everyone in NetScaler marketing came when the company was acquired by a much larger parent (Citrix Systems) who decided to keep the NetScaler product name because it proved to be a very strong brand according to a field survey it ran against its customer base.
The key point in all of this is that branding is pretty much useless early on when you’re looking for those first customers that are absolutely critical to your existence. But, branding must become a fundamental driver of all market-facing initiatives if exponential growth is desired. And, by that point, your customers will begin to become the best stewards of your brand.
I’ll have to end here but plan on writing more about the topic of strategic marketing, branding, positioning, and messaging in future blogs (oftentimes using real world cases from places I’ve worked at … with some amazing and talented people).
- John
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