As I said at the end of last week, for this week, I want to explore how the Pro-Life Business Industry might transform if there emerged an “information mechanism” that helped direct pro-life philanthropic capital to the Pregnancy Help Centers that proved they were the most effective at saving lives from abortion, as measured by market share.
However, based on an experience I had over the weekend, today I want to take a quick detour and write about something different than what I was originally planning.
On Saturday, I had the honor to speak at the Pro Women’s Healthcare Center conference (pwhcenters.org).
My topic was internet marketing, so I covered both branding and direct response marketing.
Following my remarks, I had a very lively discussion with audience members about branding.
I find that the topic of branding always gets peoples’ emotions revved up – partly because people intuitively sense how important it is, and partly because they also sense how little they really understand about how it works.
One Way Street
Many folks who don’t have deep experience, both successes and failures, with brand marketing tend to believe that branding is about a company’s logos, colors, fonts, and catchy memorable phrases.
Companies create those things and then “push” them out into the market, hoping they attract target customers.
Most of those branding campaigns end in failure.
Why?
Because human being are not like cows. 🙂
The word “brand” originally meant a hot instrument used to burn into a thing a permanent mark of some kind.
You’re probably familiar with ranch hands branding cows to identify them as belonging to the ranch.
In the case of cows, it’s a very one-sided affair with the cow having absolutely no say in the matter.
Poor cows.
Unfortunately, this “one way street mentality” is also how many companies think when they create their branding campaigns – “we’ll use advertising to push all these fancy graphics and clever jingles into our target customers’ minds, and they will accept the program.”
Umm, no.
Can I Have a Say in This?
When human beings live in an environment of free choice where they can exert their own free will, they are not interested in what your company wants to push into their minds.
They are intensely interested in what they want, not necessarily what your company thinks they should want (your product, of course!).
So effective branding for humans is a two-way street whereby companies MUST bring the voice-of-the-customer (VOC) into the brand creation process.
If you don’t position your company’s products/services in a way that resonates with your customer’s worldview, your branding program will hit them like a clanging gong.
Most companies aren’t willing to do the hard work to bring the worldview of their target customers into the branding process because, well, it’s hard work.
And the path is very uncertain because you are dealing with the complexities of human minds and psychology, which can be very difficult to pin down.
It’s so much easier to just assume many things that you feel certain would resonate with your customers, and get that branding campaign out there into the market ASAP!
Will the song (your brand) you push out to your prospective customers have them soon humming the same tune?
Not likely.
We’ll explore why tomorrow.
Regards.
Brett