Twitter hashtag chats are wonderful. A little overstimulating, but hey.
Problem is, when a chat is really lively and brisk, serious untruths can fly by and not get corrected.
Example: in Beth Harte’s #pr20chat of August 5, @brandingexpert inserted this tweet:
Don’t EVER forget that branding is purely about generating more revenue, no matter what any “guru” preaches.
I’m not a guru, much less a “guru,” so I suppose I could have avoided getting on this guy’s wrong side just by keeping quiet.
But he’s wrong.Very emphatic, he is. And wrong.
Branding is about effectiveness.
Branding is about effectiveness. No matter what any “expert” preaches.
First, not every entity which (or who) might develop a brand is a for-profit entity. While it’s true that Amnesty International is very effective at fund-raising because of its brand equity, funds are only a part of what it gathers in order to be effective. AI can collect thousands of signatures on a petition in very short order because of its brand. The persons saved from disappearance and torture are the measure of AI’s effectiveness, and its brand leads to that effectiveness.
Ralph Nader is a brand. He developed his brand equity by doing exactly what he wanted to do and doing it well. Like AI, he can mobilize vast support for a cause. That he’s done pretty well financially is perhaps a side effect; it’s not his primary aim. If he made it his primary aim, his brand equity would help him achieve it. In short, his brand can help him be effective at anything that doesn’t contradict his positioning.
Of course, most participants in #pr20chat do most of their work for for-profit companies, so the above might seem a minor quibble. But @brandingexpert’s dictum is untrue for those companies as well.
Choking on revenue.
I believe the following is true although it’s seldom talked about:
When Congress set out in the early 70s to restrict cigarette advertising, the tobacco companies protested. On the principle that they needed to protest anything that challenged their freedom of action. But the legislation was passed that forbade TV advertising. Big tobacco lost that battle. And on that day, in the privacy of their boardrooms and C-suites, they were all grins.
Why? Because they’d been engaged in rent-dissipating advertising wars. Rent dissipation: that’s the economists’ schmancy term for throwing away profits. And all those squandered profits had been lost because the players had been brand-building in pursuit of revenues. And they kept doing it despite the huge portions of those revenues that were required to keep them on the brand-war treadmill.
They were in a bind. With little real product differentiation, their branding was driven and defined by advertising, and with lots of competitors, they had to pour major resources into branding. But they weren’t really happy about it. Not nearly as happy as they’d be after their hands were tied and their profits soared.
Other companies aren’t necessarily in the same bind. They can squander profit not because they’re forced to, but simply because they’re naive enough to believe “experts” who tell them branding is about revenue. They can take their eyes off profit long enough to lose a good deal of it.
How to correct while agreeing
Two people retweeted @brandingexpert’s tweet. I assume that means they agreed. Most interesting, though, was a tweet from Kathy Moore (@kathy_moore), to whom @brandingexpert had directed his wisdom. She corrected him even while seeming to agree:
@brandingexpert righto! good branding should ultimately deliver bottom line results
So [scratches head], does Kathy actually think that revenue and bottom-line-results are the same thing? Or was she correcting brandingexpert, knowingly and slyly?
Life is full of enigmas. In the twitterverse, they fly by so fast one might not even notice they’re enigmas. It takes a pretty fat fast canary to catch them.
