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Brand Conversations: Who The Heck Would Want One?

By David Hanson, President, MemberTree Consultancy

Posted 11/4/2010

I decided to paint my fiberglass sailboat by myself last spring, and I had no idea how to do it. So I hit Google and started researching how to do it, what type of paint I needed, what type of preparations were required, and how hard and long it would take. On the web I found three companies that sell marine paint. Each offered good directions on how to accomplish the task. I read all their promotional materials and then read some (hopefully) independent reviews. The reviews clued me in as to what paint actually performed the best and was easiest to apply.

So now I have made my choice, and guess what, I had absolutely no conversations with any of the brands I researched. Now of course you might say, “Well, by reading their materials and reviews you actually ARE having a brand conversation," but no, that’s sloppy and I won’t let you get away with it.

In reality, there’s nothing really new here at all. I just happened to use the web to do my product research instead of asking around and having to go to different outlets for the products. Same procedure, different path is all. Heck, I like it better BECAUSE I didn’t have to have a conversation with a commissioned salesperson or rely on some store that sells the stuff, which is hardly an unbiased review. I didn’t want to converse with any of these boat paint brands. I just wanted information on what was available and how well it worked.

Come to think of it, I don’t recall any conversations I’ve had with any brands. Can you? Seriously, I’m trying to figure out exactly what a brand conversation is. It’s lost on me. If you’re interested or working in marketing, you’ll find endless crap out there about these supposed brand conversations.

So I sampled a bunch of “conversation gurus” on the web and chose the following one as a fairly typical exposition of the current “brand conversation” babble. Kevin Masi, Co-founder, President and Future Builder of Torque, a Brand Marketing Agency writes:

“A brand is a conversation between a company and its customer tribes.”

Customer tribes? So Walt’s body shop has customer tribes? This line alone is the essence of how these vapid pundits lump all businesses into one leavened loaf of lingo-babble. He continues:

"A brand story stays out of the way unless people seek it out. People are busy and have high expectations. Interrupting them in the middle of something (like a television show or reading a magazine) is annoying."

Has he ever picked up a copy of Vogue or Glamour? It’s nothing BUT advertising. The content actually interrupts the advertising.

And again:

"For a very long time, businesses focused on products and sales. And they thrived. Their marketing flowed in one direction, from company to consumer: selling, advertising, and generally imposing their brands on a hungry audience of consumers. A one-way conversation. Then: change. Markets became crowded with competitive choices, and interruptive advertising became pervasive. Businesses no longer thrived. The marketing techniques that grew out of their sales-and-product focus stopped working."

Stopped working? Isn’t that a rather broad statement? Plus, he speaks of marketing “techniques." Good lord...techniques are tactics for cripe's sake. Marketing based on techniques has always been a loser. Marketing is based on creative exposition of relevant messaging to likely prospects.

Has he even read the data about the absolutely incredible rise in television viewing, which by the way is filled with “one-way” advertising? Does he think companies would be buying that much television advertising if it wasn’t performing? Obviously people aren’t finding it too annoying, and that’s because for over 60 years the American public has honored a tacit agreement between the owners of the frequencies and their time: they will get free entertainment in return for watching messages from the people who actually pay for it, the advertisers.

Peeps, let’s stop the jargon mill. There is no one out there who wants to have a conversation with a brand. Is our current definition of “brand” so skewed that we think we can converse with them as if they are conscious beings? Since brands are the aggregate summation of all the sensory input and mental experiences we have concerning a product or service, isn’t having “conversations” with them really a form of just talking to ourselves? The entire conversation jargon-wagon is in a rut and its wheels are broken.

It’s just not that hard. If marketers want to promote their brands, they will need some form of commercial messaging placed in locations and times where people either see, hear, smell, touch or taste them. And it’s okay to simply call it what it is: advertising.

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