Brand Fruits: Moving Stories

If your message has a strongly defined core, you can project it through a many-faceted communications program without losing your brand's energy and integrity. Paid communication through advertising and "earned" communication through public relations, two-way communication through blogs and social networks -- each of these channels has its own requirements and rules. Each channel accepts certain types and styles of communications.

A common thread is the narrative that you are building about your brand and your company. When a customer buys your goods or services, they become part of your story, and you become part of their story. You connect with your customers by telling a story that can include them. Of course it's about you -- but it's never all about you.

These days, the fashion among general and financial managers is "Let's stop paying to communicate and just invest in unpaid communication (always chasing the elusive viral explosion) and direct response." That's not a strategy. Budget-cutting dis-invests from the brand, borrowing from the future to prop up the next quarter's results.

Paid advertising gives the brand an opportunity to speak with its own voice. When you buy a display ad or web banner, it's not some weak, fuzzy way to sell product. The classic formula attributed to John Wanamaker is "Half of the money I spend on advertising is wasted: I just don't which half." He probably wouldn't say that today: as a retailer, Wanamaker advertised to bring buyers into his stores. He didn't know how well his ads worked because he lacked point-of-sale tracking data. Today's retailers can tell exactly how well any given offer is moving the merchandise off the shelves.

What Wanamaker (or was it Lord Lever-Hume?) missed was the context of paid advertising. The act of buying an ad sends a message that encompasses the content of the ad. When you buy space in print or online to display a message, your brand is saying "we think this is important enough that we paid to bring it to your attention." It's a golden opportunity, and one which, much more than half the time, is wasted.

If you tell someone "this is important" and then deliver vague, trivial information or meaningless clichés, what you're really saying is either "We think you're too dumb to know baloney when you see it," or "We're too dumb to know what's important, so we just put the same old baloney in here because that's what our competitors do." Look: if it's not important to you or to your customers, you shouldn't bother to advertise it. And that means before you advertise, you need to discover and/or decide what really is important.