Brand vs product
Tuesday, January 9, 2007 at 09:27AM In the course of listening to entrepreneur pitches, I've often heard a sentiment which never quite sits right with me... "We will build a leading [exceptional, great, etc] brand in order to deliver product/service X." I've heard this notion expressed at least twice in the last month or so, which prompted me to opine here.
A well-recognized and respected brand can undoubtedly be one of the most powerful assets an organization can have. And it's certainly important for entrepreneurs to think about how to cultivate a company's nascent brand. But startup brands are by definition built upon the success and attributes of the products or services they provide. The statement above has the cart before the horse.
Think about the most successful and enduring startup brands of the last 20 years... chances are you thought of companies like Google, eBay, Cisco, or others. The power of the Google brand was derived from the success of Google's consumer search engine, just as the eBay brand came from their success as an online marketplace for small traders and Cisco's comes from their success making networking gear for enterprises. For startups, brands are less intentionally "built" then they are "derived" from successful products.
It's true that large companies, with established brands, can sometimes take those brands and leverage them in different markets with new products. A great example of this is Apple who of course leveraged their brand in personal computers to "build" a successful digital music business. We'll see how they do in the wireless handset business (I must confess, the iPhone looks incredibly cool) and keep in mind they've been unsuccessful at leveraging their brand in new markets too (think Newton - PDAs).
Bottom line, if you're launching or in the early phase of growing your startup just focus religiously on "building" a product that's incredibly compelling to your customer audience. I assure you... if you succeed in that, your brand will follow.
Reader Comments (2)
Lee -- an all too rare line of thought.
What are perceived as great brands would evaporate if they didn't deliver great products/service. All the branding hoopla in the world couldn’t save British motorcycles, or poor old Rover cars (sorry about the UK-centric examples) – they were products who’d dropped the quality ball, and lost touch with what the market wanted.
I worked in the design/branding industry in the UK between 1988 and 2002, and developed a hearty scepticism, bordering on loathing of all the ghastly cant (look it up) around 'bwand' (imagine the quintessential 80's account-director Brideshead fop lisping on and on about what a great brand BMW was as he stroked his company car keyfob...).
I feel that talking up the 'bwand' is like hoping for the tooth fairy, or believing that there's an alchemic lead-into-gold substitute for great products. Nike, Apple, Nokia are all examples of firms that create fantastic products -- a quality/usability/price and multi-niched combo that can't be argued with.
A great brand never hurt any of them, but maybe it's just a marriage of good product and intelligent I-understand-my-market marketing and great products. Maybe there’s no such thing as a brand story…
What if it’s all down to products, and there are no brands per se?
Look at Lexus -- a brand that leveraged itself into existence through over-reaching product quality. It literally pulled itself up by its bootstraps from a standing start by beating Mercedes at it’s own luxury-quality game.
Last week I was asked to speak at an investment-research conference on building an investment-research brand. My message was simple, build the brand from the product up. If you don't build quality, they won't come.
Question for you guys. Where a company has a very strong established brand in a particular market and they decide to rebrand themselves completely (new name, icon etc). How much importance do you place on transferring this brand equity into the new brand i.e. spending money on advertising to ensure the market knows about the change and the reasons why (in this case the new brand encompasses more of what the company does now)? Or do you not do much advertising and let individual products do the brand selling for you?