“I went to school on Tom’s ideas!”
Jeff Taylor, Founder, Monster.com
A Clear Eye.
On customers, brands and marketplace success
by Tom Asacker
“I went to school on Tom’s ideas!”
Jeff Taylor, Founder, Monster.com
« Unnamed Law | Main | Earnest Hemingway on movement »
"Forgive me my nonsense, as I also forgive the nonsense of those that think they talk sense."
Here we go again. In his most recent issue of The Copernicus MZine, Kevin Clancy writes:
In a recent piece for Ad Age, marketing guru Al Ries made the statement: "Fundamentally there are two ways to increase sales: (1) Expand the brand [i.e., a brand-centric approach to marketing], or (2) expand the brand's market share [i.e., a customer-centric approach to marketing]." "While it's more difficult to expand a brand's market share, this is the better way to go. The larger the market share," Ries writes, "the more powerful a brand becomes. Unfortunately, he laments, "Overwhelmingly, marketing managers believe in the expand-the-brand philosophy."
We share venerable Al's frustration: when it comes to taking actions to grow the bottom-line in the short- and long-term, the discussion becomes not what are we going to do to grow our customer relationships, but what are we going to do with the brand. In their breakthrough Harvard Business Review article, "Customer-Centered Brand Management," Roland Rust, Valarie Zeithaml, and Katherine Lemon agree that, for all the talk about the importance of the company, "Brand management still trumps customer management in most large companies."
Expand the brand vs. expand the brand's marketshare? Will this nonsense ever end? How can you grow a brand without growing the connection between the brand and the customer?
A brand is nothing more than an expectation that customers have of something. So if you're continuously elevating the customer's expectation and delivering on that expectation with an experience such that customers are predisposed to choose your brand at a price which allows you to make a profit, you are growing your brand. How can this be done without growing the "relationship" between the customer and that something? Please folks. Stop the double-talk.
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.typepad.com/t/trackback/5144/3422168
Listed below are links to weblogs that reference Robert Frost on nonsense:
» "Brand" reading of the day from Vy Blog
This was very well-put at A Clear Eye:A brand is nothing more than an expectation that customers have of something. So if you're continuously elevating the customer's expectation and delivering on that expectation with an experience such that customers... [Read More]
"Tom is timely, thought provoking and all about the new brand vision packaged as a Seinfeld stand up. I went to school on his ideas."
- Jeff Taylor, Founder, Monster.com and CEO, Eons.
(Rest assured, we will never provide your email address to anyone. Period.)
RSS feed
Well put.
I think it was FAST COMPANY who recently ran a short article comparing the "branding" mania with the self-help industry; an apt comparison, noting the short-sighted, backwars way that both often work (though I must confess I'm a fan of self-help books...)
"Expanding the brand" is foolish. The weird notion that the brand is an end in itself, rather than a means and a byproduct is nothing but a marketing and adfirm cash cow.
Posted by: Max Leibman | October 24, 2005 at 07:03 PM