TRADITIONAL ADVERTISING IS DEAD--WHO CARES ABOUT BRAND?
An excellent question. Excellent because it is (a) utterly untrue and (b) an homage to every idiot who tells you brand advertising doesn't sell.
Anyone who's been reading this pathetic weekly screed since its inception knows that we here at Slow Burn Marketing are staunch advocates for Brand.
Anyone who has a business MUST have a brand.
Anyone who doesn't know or understand what their brand is will find themselves losing ground to those competitors who do.
And traditional advertising, in which a solid brand can thrive, is far from dead. It's merely being overshadowed by the glamorous new media darlings.
"WHAT THE HELL IS BRAND?" REDUX
Just a quick refresher for those of you who've forgotten all you learned in Brandergarten.
Contrary to what one majorly successful millionaire motivational guru likes to trot around, brand is definitely not you opening up Microsoft Paint and slapping together a series of shapes and letters to identify your business.
Brand is not a logo, a color, a font, an ad or a tagline.
Brand is everything, both tangible and philosophical, that defines your business. It's how you look, how you act, and how you treat customers.
To refer back to a recent example, the Southwest Airlines brand is (a) Herb Kelleher's maxim that "Southwest is the low-cost airline," combined with (b) the colors, the stripes, the pricing, the tagline, the attitude, the website--all of it.
"You are now free to move about the country" and everything that line means is a distillation of the brand into a single thought--but it merely represents the brand. It is not THE brand.
Bottom line: your brand is what people think of when they think of your business.
So there's your quick brand refresher. Now then...
IS TRADITIONAL ADVERTISING IS ALIVE AND WELL?
This is represented nowhere more vividly than in Slow Burn's eye doctor client in New Hampshire.
The reason I say this is because New Hampshire, the Live Free or Die state, is the most wired state in the nation.
There are more people on the internet per capita there than anywhere else in the US.
Yet, it is a commitment to radio--a "dead" traditional medium--that is making the good doctor a category dominant force there.
It is commitment to print--a "dead" traditional medium--that is supporting his radio presence in a big way.
Yes, he's online. He has a website. He has a YouTube channel. He has accounts on Twitter and Facebook.
But the advertising on traditional media are the reason he has grown into a celebrity virtually overnight.
AND BRAND--THAT OLD AND OH-SO-UNNECESSARY CHESTNUT--IS ALSO TO "BLAME"
His brand is rock solid. Everything about the good doctor's marketing looks and sounds like it grew from a single seed.
The attitude is always the same, the colors, the conceits, everything is a leaf from the same tree.
Including his social media (which, admittedly, is still in its infancy).
So many marketing gurus would have you believe not only that traditional advertising is dead, but brand is pointless--especially because of social media.
Uh-hunh. OK then. If that's so, why does every single bit of social media marketing from Old Spice's "I'm the Man your Man Could Smell Like" campaign look and sound like every part of the campaign found in traditional media?
Is that too big and expensive an example for you?
Fine.
Let's look at $h*! My Dad Says. This is about as low-budget an example as possible of stellar branding in social media.
IN CASE YOU'VE BEEN LIVING UNDER A ROCK FOR THE LAST TWO YEARS...
$h*! My Dad Says is a TV sitcom starring William Shatner.
It was born of a Twitter account by the same name (except that the Anglo-Saxon expletive in the title is spelled out on Twitter).
Justin Halpern, who created that micro blog, endlessly tweeted inane things his dad said.
It was (and still is) hilarious. Example: "Nervous? In 5 billion years the sun will burn out and nothing you did will matter. Feel better?"
Or, "No. Humans will die out. We're weak. Dinosaurs survived on rotten flesh. You got diarrhea last week from a Wendy's."
Or, "Engagement rings are pointless. Indians gave cows...Oh sorry, congrats on proposing. We good now? Can I finish my indian story?"
(The funnier stuff is laden with expletives, and unsuitable for publication in a family newsletter.)
The micro blog eventually caught the attention of CBS--after it gained national attention on The Daily Show, got Halpern an agent, and a book deal with Harper Collins.
ONE GUY, NO MONEY, AND A WELL-BRANDED MICRO BLOG
His Twitter feed could have been @JustinHalpern, and he could have tweeted any 140 characters that made him happy at the time--including the occasional insane rantings of his father.
And he'd still be an unknown comedy writer living in his dad's basement.
The reason he's now on the road to being millionaire.
Brand--pure and simple.
Even if he didn't understand what he was doing as branding, Halpern completely understood what was necessary.
He committed to the brand, he never deviated from it--and oh, look, it's the traditional media that actually made him rich and famous.
Apparently, reports of the traditional media's death have been greatly exaggerated.
BRAND ALWAYS HAS AND ALWAYS WILL MATTER
Understand who you are and commit to it.
Distill the essence of your business down to a series of concise thoughts.
From those thoughts, derive your Reason For Being.
Then, let that Reason For Being inform everything that follows--the marketing, the advertising, the behavior of your employees, the look of the business, everything.
And once you've done that, you're on the road to better, more effective marketing--both online, and in that creaky old dinosaur of traditional media.
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