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But the more we understand about the way that consumers make choices, the less brand thinking and traditional brandtracking research make sense. Brand tracking often makes artificial distinctions for consumers that really don’t model the
way we make a buying decision. They ask things like: Does A wash whites better than B? Which performs best on colored
clothes? They rarely give consumers an option that says, Meh. I just don’t care.
Good tracking studies need to be accompanied by research to understand the latent needs of consumers: Done in
isolation, they can end up focusing marketers on solving the wrong problems.
Point #3: Why do companies buy brands
for millions of dollars if they’re valueless?
Why did investment companies plow
your pensions into subprime mortgages?
Because they had a model that showed
that they were valuable and another
model that showed that their value would
increase. Remember how that ended?
Brand valuations make those models look
positively scientific and precise. WPP’s
Brandz tracker values Apple at $183
billion. Omnicom’s Interbrand values it
at $33 billion. Any models that are so
absurdly divergent are worse than useless.
As some physicists say about string theory,
it’s “not even wrong.”
Brand equity measuring dates to the late
’90s, when companies became obsessed with delivering “shareholder value.” It was in the interests of marketers and
marketing networks to show how brands contributed to shareholder value and to put a tangible figure on something that
had previously only been abstract. The companies that restructured around delivering “shareholder value” failed to do
just that--and spectacularly. It’s time to move on.
Point #4: Your arguments are old-fashioned.
This was the most puzzling group of objections, but it was a fairly large one, so I’ll answer it as best I can. I wouldn’t have
written this article 10 years ago, when large corporations had a great deal more control over the conversation between
themselves and consumers. It was a pretty one-way kind of a chat, with the brands doing much of the talking through
above-the-line advertising, sponsorship, and so on.
So the classic simplified branding model, where you make a promise, deliver on the promise, and then repeat the
process, actually worked pretty well. Now the situation is a lot more complicated. Consumers don’t just form opinions in
their own minds any more. Instead, we have conversations. And one vociferous consumer who, say, writes a song about
your airline can earn a louder voice than the biggest brand can buy. So brands are even less of a property than they used
to be.
That also goes for the brands that I don’t real H [