Are Brands Real?

A very interesting piece appeared last week in Ad Age about vacuum cleaner magnate James Dyson. The piece was called "James Dyson: I Don't Believe In Brand."

Here is the gist of the article:

"There's only one word that's banned in our company: brand," Mr. Dyson said... "We're only as good as our latest product. I don't believe in brand at all."

While I applaud Mr. Dyson's spirit and his disdain for the insufferable brand babble that infests our business, I'm afraid he's wrong.

Brands are important to people. That's why stores have signs and bottles have labels. It's why he puts his name on his vacuum cleaners.

I read a remarkable article recently about a very talented football player named LaMichael James who went to the University of Oregon. James said...

...he based part of his college decision on what brand of athletic apparel sponsored the athletic program...

“I would not go to two or three colleges just because they were Adidas,” James said... "I wouldn’t go to Arkansas and I wouldn’t go to Mississippi State because they were Adidas schools… No three stripes for me. All Nike.”

Now, let's be clear here. Not everyone in the world is a knucklehead football player. But to think that brands don't influence our decision making is just plain naive.

Where Mr. Dyson is correct -- and where most everyone else in marketing is wrong -- is in how you build brands. As Mr. Dyson has shown, the best way to build a brand is with product advertising. Not brand advertising.

Just to make sure we have our definitions straight here, I consider "product" advertising to be about features and benefits. I consider "brand" advertising to be about imagery and lifestyle.

There are a few categories in which "brand" advertising is effective -- fashion, soda, booze, some luxury goods.

In the vast majority of categories, however, product advertising is far more effective -- not just at selling products, but at building brands.

The best example is Apple. Virtually every ad you've seen of theirs has a single product smack dab in the middle of the page or screen and talks about the benefits and features of the product. As a result, they have one of the most powerful brands in the world.

As we say here at Ad Contrarian World Headquarters...

We don't get them to try our product by convincing them to love our brand, we get them to love our brand by convincing them to try our product.

By the way...

...for more about brand reality, you could do worse than pick up my new book, 101 Contrarian Ideas About Advertising. Just sayin...

And also...
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