One of my favourite definitions of band is brand is what people say about you, not what you say about yourself.

A great corollary for guiding marketing is brand is what the market gives you permission to believably say.

Great definitions, and I do like them, but I would like to point out that there used to be another word for that – reputation.

People and companies had reputations, and business was conducted around said reputation. Brand is, as used, largely a shadow of reputation and this is doing massive damage to people and businesses alike.

Reputation is More Than Brand

Some example reputations to compare against your sense of what brand means.

  • IBM had a reputation of being able to solve big IT problems.
  • Consultants had a reputation for great work (or not).
  • School-yard fights occurred when someone insulted your reputation.
  • Reputation was socially important to survival in herding cultures, as people had to know not to mess with your flock.

Are these brands or reputations to you?

The gory, honest, brutal truth of it is that reputation is more powerful, and more meaningful then brand, and when companies talk about brand, they are actually engaged in a half-assed effort to repair or create their reputation.

Brand, as practiced, is what you wish people would say about you, and it cumulates in a 4 to 10 page messaging document and updated web-page design. It never takes a hard look at what people actually say about you, and it never makes the hard decisions about people, processes, critical capabilities, and strategies that truly effect reputation.

Branding Considered Harmful

So with that, I have to say it – branding should be considered a harmful practice. The next time someone says “we have to improve our branding” tell him to shut up, and lets talk about improving our reputation.

And you know what? That hurts. It takes YEARS to fix a reputation. It requires effort, leadership, coordination across multiple departments, painful reorganizations, and clarity of vision and decision making that most companies are completely unable to perform.

Rackspace is one of my favourite “branding” stories. You know how they improved their brand? They got rid of the answering machines in technical support. All calls had to be answered live. Shitty service and crappy processes where fixed almost immediately, the right people were hired, the right critical capabilities identified, and the rest of the organization adjusted to support this actionable, customer facing activity. And the reputation followed, and it followed quickly. The rest, as they say, was history.

Compare that to most companies branding activities- a new website with a slogan that says “we care”.

So shut up already about branding and start thinking about your company’s reputation.

Test-Driven Marketing Checklist #1: Successful Branding

  1. Are you talking about reputation, as universally defined, or brand, as almost always poorly practiced?
  2. Are you talking about specific markets (a group of people that reference and trust each other), and personas (a very concrete definition of a buyer) or a generic market that doesn’t actually exist? This is essential since companies often have different reputations in different markets (“oh, they are a engineering solution company and don’t know a think about manufacturing”, “oh, they are a hospital solution, not a pharmaceutical solution”).
  3. Have you identified measures of reputation?
  4. Have you identified what you want your reputation to be?
  5. Have you identified reputation building events? For example:
    1. Reference accounts
    2. Success rates in activities critical to reputation (e.g. rapid deployment, quick solutions to issues, fantastic customizations to exact customer need)
    3. PR in that market (good coverage by analysts, interesting articles in magazines, etc.)
    4. Have you identified critical capabilities to create reputation building events?
  6. Have you identified the critical capabilities needed to create those reputation events?
  7. Do you have a concrete long-term plan in place to achieve your reputation goals?

TestDrivenMarketing.com Checklists are a new feature in this blog that will make an attempt to end posts with a test-driven checklist to implement the idea or technique discussed.

Make sure to subscribe to this blog for more TestDrivenMarketing.com thoughts and checklists on a weekly basis.

Thanks and happy testing.

Nick

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Is Evidence-based Marketing Possible?

by Nick Van Weerdenburg on November 27, 2011

Modern medicine is evidence-based. The adoption of evidence-based medicine saw our lifespans double in the space of 50 years. That’s a remarkable achievement.

Sadly, evidence is missing in modern marketing practices. We rarely see any marketing discussion mention anything about significance, confounding variables, or correlation versus causation. Most blog and social media recommendations are anecdotal evidence masquerading as statistics. Overall, there is a disturbing lack of anything that one could fairly call evidence in recommending any particular marketing practice.

This becomes apparent when you start asking some simple questions about “statistically” justified marketing recommendations.

1. Are these numbers for B2B or B2C?

2. What is the impact of brand and market Leadership on these numbers?

3. What is the impact of fashionable trends on these numbers?

4. What is the sample size?

5. What is the breakdown by industry? Company size?

At this point, you are probably not getting your emails answered or your phone calls returned.

Some of these questions and related concepts have obvious ramifications- brand leaders are usually older, more mature, have larger budgets, and are more likely to optimize existing processes. So…any numbers hinting at a best practice and revenue growth needs to control for brand and market leadership. And any recommendation needs to be prefaced by “it depends”.

Generally, any statement like ’65% of best-in-class companies use X and grew an average of 20% more year over year then non-best-in-class companies’ is meaningless, or should be treated as meaningless without access to the support data and methods used. Without decent evidence and analysis there is absolutely no reason to make ANY kind of inference here between the use of X and growth. And even given that data and where there is a strong causal effect, there is the important question of whether the principle is applicable to other industries, markets, or business models.

In medicine, there is a very cool organization called The Cochrane Collaboration which aims to improve health care by providing systemic reviews of the quality of evidence being used to propose and select treatments- i.e. which studies are good, and which suck. Even in esteemed scientific circles peer-reviewed journals aren’t enough, and The Cochrane Collaboration aims to raise the bar by provide systemic evaluation of the quality of studies and the quality of how they are published. Is the data available? Can the study be repeated? These are other markers of quality are emphasized and graded.

Evidence-based medicine had doubled our lifespans. Would evidence-based marketing double our revenues? Is it even possible with so many confounding variables at play in the business world?

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Authentic and Useful Blogging

July 28, 2011

Things have been quiet here on the blog for a while. The new job has been keeping me busy, and one of the goals of this blog was to focus on topics a little deeper than most and not write rehashes of popular marketing topics that create no unique value. That requires some extra time [...]

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How TED (the conference) Compelled Me to Change Jobs

November 2, 2010

I have a new job as a B2B marketer at http://www.northplains.com. The standard disclaimers apply: Test-Driven Marketing is my personal blog and does not reflect the opinions of my employer But I figured that since my employer does sell software that impacts content marketing, global branding, and marketing execution in general, I should let my [...]

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Test-Driven Marketing is in the October Pragmatic Marketing Newsletter

October 20, 2010

Test-Driven Marketing has been published in the October 2010 Pragmatic Marketing newsletter! Pragmatic Marketing October 2010 Newsletter- Is Sales Becoming Marketing Tech Support? Have a look and let me know what you think. If you like this article, consider reading a few of our other marketing strategy posts: When Being Customer Driven is Dangerous The [...]

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Velocity’s Plea for Ambition: The New B2B Marketing Manifesto

September 28, 2010

Velocity, a B2B Marketing company in the UK, has released their newest ebook called, appropriately enough, The New B2B Marketing Manifesto It’s subtitle is “Five imperatives and six staples you need to win the battle for attention”. At a quick and lively 48 pages, it’s a fun and quick read, and it nicely captures the [...]

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What Lawyers Can Teach Product Management and Marketing About Requirements

August 19, 2010

Lawyers can teach a simple rule to product managers and marketers that will serve them well. It’s an evil sounding rule- one you might not believe at first. But bear with me. Never Use One Word When Two Will Do. Well, not all the time, but getting to specific meaning is very hard in most [...]

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Should You Trust a Blogless Marketer?

August 17, 2010

Starting a personal blog is one of the best marketing educations a person can get. The journey of a new blog to readership is marketing in its raw essence, the experience of which will make almost any person a better marketer. The Inner World And Growth of a New Blogger The silence of a crowded [...]

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How to Manage the Coming Content Explosion

August 5, 2010

The Challenge is Filters, Not Overload We tend to think we live in a age of information overload. Yes, we do. But we have for over a hundred years. Information overload is not the problem. Clay Shirky nailed this with a talk called It’s Not Information Overload. It’s Filter Failure. The filters we developed have [...]

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Do You Need Obsession-Driven Marketing?

August 3, 2010

Who Should We Market To Marketers often talk about who we need to market to, and how we should be market-driven, customer-driven, buyer-centric, and at all costs avoid being product driven. However, there is a danger here. It doesn’t consider the the question of who we can effectively market to. Say you’ve done all the [...]

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