BRAND AND BRANDING, REVISITED YET ONE MORE TIME AGAIN

BRAND AND BRANDING, REVISITED YET ONE MORE TIME AGAIN

James R. Rosenfield

April 2004

"How do we integrate our brand into direct mail?"

It's a reasonable question, which someone first asked me decades ago. I would still be asked the same question decades from now, were I still practicing my trade at that future point.

The question implies that brand presence is often lacking in direct mail. This is true, for two reasons. One is historical: direct mail, and its distribution sibling, mail order, spent their early years as low-cost-of-entry means of marketing non-branded products. Brands were built willy-nilly, of course: One thinks immediately of Sears or L.L. Bean.

But the communications and distribution modes preceded the brand, not vice versa.

Another reason is cognitive. We'll get to that later.

What does "brand" mean in the 21 st Century?

With the important exceptions of luxury categories ("I'm richer than you"), consumer electronics ("I'm less clueless than you"), fashion products ("I'm hipper than you"), and high-emotion products (baby stuff, pet items), brand loyalty has little to do with self-articulation and the smug condescension of consumerism.

It has to do with stress-reduction.

There are two aspects to this:

1) Negative stress-reduction equals consumer inertia. Although I hate my bank, thinks the consumer, at least they're the devil I know. Although I hate my cell phone provider, it's a pain to switch. Danger: Negative stress-reduction looks like brand loyalty when companies analyze their customer retention records. If someone has been a customer for six years, doesn't that indicate loyalty? Nope. It can just be inertia, which means that as soon as a competitor makes it really, really easy to switch, customers will flee.

2) Positive stress-reduction, on the other hand, equals brand loyalty . Positive stress-reduction occurs when people have a good customer service experience, for example. It's a vulnerable kind of brand loyalty, though, since the good experiences have to be maintained. (Diamonds and other gems have to be the products generating the most lasting brand loyalty. After all, they don't break down on you, like a Mercedes does.)

Personal example: I am (at least for now) brand loyal to Time-Warner Cable in New York, because they hooked me up for high-speed Internet service with a minimum of muss and fuss. They came at the beginning of the four-hour window, and the guy even took off his shoes before entering the apartment. (It was an evil New York winter day.) Time-Warner then solved a problem for me over the phone expeditiously and politely.

Big ad agencies are sort of correct when they go into "brand personality" mumbo-jumbo for luxury products and high-emotion products. But they're way off base when they try to force-fit this model into other categories. And everyone is way off base when they try to integrate brand into direct mail by invoking TV advertising.

Big consumer brands are built on television. This is still true in 2004, in spite of ever-multiplying and fragmenting media.

Why is this? Because television is the archetypal right brain hemisphere medium. Television influences the brain by bringing it into a kind of dreamtime, when images can creep in, more-or-less subliminally, in a nanosecond. That's why intellectually indefensible notions can be communicated persuasively on TV, that drinking beer makes you attractive to the opposite sex, for example.

Direct mail is the archetypal left-brain hemisphere medium. It's verbal and therefore leisurely, the very definition of how the left hemisphere works. (In fact, in order to make direct mail effective in the 21st Century, left hemisphere communications techniques have to be transmuted into right hemisphere techniques as much as possible. That's a big subject, though, on which I lead a two-day seminar, in case you care. )

The net results of this bifurcation? What would seem to make sense - integrating images from television advertising into a direct mail package - never works. By "works" I mean improving results over a direct mail package lacking the TV imagery.

You integrate brand into a direct mail package through logos and tag lines, not through invocations of television imagery. The logo is right hemisphere, the slogan is left hemisphere, and the visual union of the two gives you whole brain communication.

I was reminded of the power of the right hemisphere just yesterday, when I walked by a shop featuring merchandise from that loathsome company, French Connection United Kingdom. These diabolical folks have chosen a name whose initials look like the most venerable obscenity in the English language. You do an immediate right hemisphere double take, until the left hemisphere kicks in and sees the difference. Clever folks, although I don't want to shake their hand.

A strong logo and a strong tag line are essential to any business, certainly any business that's using both left hemisphere and right hemisphere media.

Do you need to hire an enormously expensive specialty shop to create a powerful logo? No, of course not. Logos gain their force by repetition, and as long as the logo doesn't have to be read, you're in business. Gargantuan repetition over time, by the way, trumps a logo made of words. Best example is Coca-Cola. I ran into a literacy-training enterprise in Africa once that used things like Coca-Cola, which people could "read" right hemispherically. The image was then literally moved into the left hemisphere, and literacy began: "C-O-C-A C-O-L-A" vs. the instant comprehension of the logo.

If you do nothing but direct mail, and are concerned about brand - and you should be, because of the stress-reduction aspects discussed above - customers will eventually get the brand message through repeated communications. That answers the question of whether mailings to customers should bear your identity. Of course they should.

What about tag lines or slogans?

Here are some guidelines:

• Keep it short. Several companies around the world use "Simply" as their tag line. I like that. It's short, and promises a key benefit in the hyper-complex world of the 21st Century.

• Make sure they work graphically with your logo. A thin vertical logo and a four-word slogan will make you look like an inverted "T," which is OK, but be aware you're going to have to live with the look.

• Beware of backfire potential. A big insurance company developed a slogan, "We'll always be there." What they meant, of course, was that in time of need, they'll take care of you. What it meant to consumers, though, was the idea of constant calls from pesky insurance agents.

• Make sure it's about the consumer, not about you. See above: "We'll always be there." It starts with "We." Compare McDonald's "You deserve a break today."

• Try to get one that will last for a long time. Don't tie it to a current event, for goodness sake.

• Use only one, just as you would use only one logo.