Is your brand dead? Does imagery matter anymore? (Part I)

Yesterday I read an article on Bnet entitled "Kiss Your Brand Goodbye". This is a book review of Jonathan Salem Baskin’s new book “Branding Only Works on Cattle”.

The book is an interesting opinion on a larger trend in advertising and branding to deal with the new influence of integrated marketing (combined traditional advertising and web based marketing) and consumer mindset in the new millennium. His hypothesis is basically that a "brand" is an emotional association that marketers have created but consumers no longer buy into that association. They have become smarter and now look for product attributes that offer "actual" value rather than emotional brand attachment. This book is part of a trend to kill branding and in essence completely revise the advertising industry (some argue this has already happened). Well, I’ll throw my two cent hat into the ring (if you’ll allow me to mix sayings)...

First, brandchannel.com (article by Vincent Grimaldi) provides a pretty concise definition of branding:

Branding is the foundation of marketing and is inseparable from business strategy. It is therefore more than putting a label on a fancy product. Nowadays, a corporation, law firm, country, university, museum, hospital, celebrity, and even you in your career can be considered as a brand.
As such, a brand is a combination of attributes, communicated through a name, or a symbol, that influences a thought-process in the mind of an audience and creates value.

Ok, full disclosure, I have not yet read Baskin's book (I plan to), so I won’t be able to delve too deeply into his specific arguments. However, the article gives the background, and the book has several points that he claims prove that branding should be dead:

1. “There are no more trends, only moments” – shattered attention spans of consumers have killed the trends
2. “Subtlety is dead” because “people are more literal now” – our diversity means we no longer share as many common experiences. This means that “repetition risks becoming noise” and brand “recognition isn’t the same as brand relevance”
3. “Choice is real-time” – in other words, brand messaging doesn’t matter, and “forget about inspiring purchases through appealing to fantasy”
4. The “Virtual Experience is the new dreamscape” - social media “conversations are just the beginning”

As Michael Fitzgerald, the author of the bnet.com article points out, this is ahead of where we are in the market right now, and as such, I don’t actually agree with all his points.

I think of branding to be more like developing a friend – the brands are perceived to share consumers beliefs or interests, and consumers are likely to start the purchase process by looking at their "friends." Setting the attributes of a brand is an excellent way to set guidelines for the way a business will be marketed. For almost four years now, I’ve read about how the branding world is dying (Baskin’s book is just the latest shot across this bow), but then brands like Apple, Coke, Pepsi, BMW, Budweiser, Columbia, etc. remain stronger than ever.

In my mind, Baskin's argument only works if you don't believe consumers make image-driven purchases. Does just advertising product attributes or benefits really hold greater value than advertising a brand image? Frankly, I would argue that this isn’t the right question. We should be asking whether the current advertising model is working properly in the integrated social media millennium. Does the current media mix really work to advertise product benefits and image or is it all just becoming noise? I would argue that (as in the past) the two still can't be truly separated without disastrous results, but creating a truly integrated mix to reduce noise and target niches is the key to branding now.