Brand Central Station

… and what it’s not.

The Media Orchard blog has an interesting post about brands and branding.  They take on Jeff Bezo’s comment that “a brand for a company is like a reputation for a person.”  And rightly so.  As the Baradels’ team at the Orchard point out, branding is a little more complex than that.

Instead, they say, branding is much more:

Branding is all about personification — giving human traits to things that aren’t human … Branding communicates the continuity of a company’s business model — to shareholders, to customers, to employees. It says, “This is the kind of person we are — if we were actually a person.”

But here’s the hard truth to the matter:

Corporations are not human. And that’s a good thing, because if they were human, they would be sociopaths. This isn’t a cheap shot. A sociopath is a person who is interested only in their personal needs and desires. By definition, corporations are designed expressly to serve the interests of their shareholders — and only those interests.

Now, these are important facts to bring up when discussing brands and branding, but they only tell part of the story.

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There’s a tug-of-war going on between traditional marketers and those who consider themselves on the vanguard of the social web. This post by Mitch Joel, about the end of THE BIG IDEA, is indicative of this battle.

Some consider it “old school” to pitch THE BIG IDEA to a client when, in the age of the Internet, the individual is the thing and success is only, really attainable through the successful implementation of a succession of smaller, more highly targeted and customer-reponsive ideas. Big ideas are a thing of the past and should be relegated to Mad Men (or Bewitched, I suppose). It’s all about the small ideas that can make a difference.

On the PR side we see the same thing happening. Big media, newswires, mass audiences are breaking down (either as part of their own strategy or by circumstance) into smaller, more focused publications, distribution channels that often bypass reporters and editors and go straight to the people who have the need to know. It’s the triumph of small over big.

Or so it might seem.

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On Friday, The Wall Street Journal reported that Anheuser-Busch InBev NV is trying to reverse a slide in market share for Bud Light by ginning up another 15 ads for the brand. All this in response to the first drop in market share for Bud’s younger sibling in over 25 years.

The ads are set to break when the NFL football season kicks off.  The ads will continue to make people laugh, concentrating on bringing back the humor associated with the brand over the past generation.  What does this mean for the often-lame “Drinkability” campaign?  According to the article, it sounds like DDB is planning on sticking with the theme but will freshen things up a bit.

The ads will refine the company’s “Drinkability” campaign — which sought to persuade drinkers that Bud Light is neither too heavy nor too light in taste — that began last year and has struggled to gain traction.

Some creative executives at Omnicom Group‘s DDB Worldwide, an ad agency working on Bud Light, struggled with the “Drinkability” strategy while creating this year’s Super Bowl commercials, finding it difficult to fit in the “Drinkability” message without sacrificing humor, according to a person familiar with the matter.

So, don’t plan on the return of Spuds McKenzie – but for those of you who are jonesing for some classic Bud Light moments, check out this link.

TNS, the world’s largest provider of custom research and analysis, recently published their list of the top 1,000 brands in the Asia-Pacific Region (more details on the study).  Japanese brand, SONY, came in at number one displacing Canon, the leader of last year’s list.  US-based Nike came in third.

In fact, the top ten list showed the depth and influence of US brands in Asia by occupying five of the spots on the list.

The top ten brands for 2008 include:

• Sony
• Canon
• Nike
• Google
• Hewelett-Packard
• Coca Cola
• Adidas
• Samsung
• 7-Eleven
• Yahoo!

It seems like some marketing questions can never be answered, doesn’t it?  Well, when it comes to who’s brand is better, the folks over at Brand Tags have the solution.

The Battle of the Brands.

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Laura Reis’ blog post about focusing brands on owning the category and not the name is right on the money.  Too many marketers are looking for the next big brand extension – the equivalent of a profitable sequel in the movie business (like Toy Story II or Godfather II or James Bond 20+).

Sequels, like all brand extensions, are desirable because they are “safer” than developing an idea from scratch.  If successful, a “defining” brand becomes synonomis with the product it represents.  This is part of the cognitive process for humans and it’s part of the reason why drastic logo changes for established brands can cause such angst among consumers (re: Pepsi).
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Diego Rodriguez’s metacool blog started me on a search for sites and blogs that tracked the evolution of different brands.  There’s something about this that appeals to both the marketing guy and the historian in me. 

Check these out:

Evolution of automobile brands
Evolution of tech brands

Let me know if you find any more studies like this!