What's missing from these definitions of "brand?"
• From Ogilvy On Advertising: "The intangible sum of a product's attributes: its name, packaging, and price, its history, its reputation, and the way it's advertised."
• From the American Marketing Association: "...a collection of images and ideas; often, it refers to a symbol such as a name, logo, slogan, and design scheme...directly relating to its use, and through the influence of advertising, design, and media commentary."
• From the Dictionary of Business and Management: "A name, sign or symbol used to identify items or services of the seller(s) and to differentiate them from goods of competitors."
They're marketing-centric, describing what marketing departments deal with daily: Name, packaging, advertising, images, logos, slogan and so forth. This can lead to the big mistake, thinking that "marketing" and "brand development" are almost synonymous. The definitions ignore the real world where customers live, work, play and buy, where their "brand" is also defined by elements like:
• Their distribution channels. How and where your product reaches customers helps define the brand. So the ultimate expensive cosmetic - $125 a bar Plank's Cor silver soap - is not available at Walgreens, even though deep-pocketed people shop there too. And Coach Luggage is not available in Family Dollar Stores, and not just because the stores' customers can't afford it. In our experience, many of these distribution decisions come from the sales department, not the marketing department.
• Their own employees. Going one on one with one of your company's employees, and the policies and process they represent, will have far more brand-building (or destroying) impact than a multi-million dollar marketing campaign. The potential negative is even greater when a company publicly devalues those employees' contributions, as Circuit City did when it announced publicly that it would cut costs by firing its most experienced employees. Within months, the Circuit City brand was so compromised that stores started closing. The marketing department usually has nothing to do with the hiring and training of customer contact employees.
• Customers themselves. Objectively considered, Walmart may offer the best possible value: A great big store with a wide range of mostly high quality products, in one convenient location, consistently offered for far less than competition. So why doesn't everyone choose the Walmart brand and shop for everything there? One reason may be what non-customers believe about the "typical" Walmart customer, as exaggerated, profiled and ridiculed in People of Walmart. Marketing departments have little customer contact, except as "profiles" in their plans.
We're not scolding the marketing departments we know. They work hard, do marketing well, and have the results to prove it. So they naturally believe that their contributions to the brand are the critical ones. It's human nature; we all do it.
But we are reminding them that it's all too easy to get tunnel vision; that there's much more to "brand" than just marketing, and that marketing must not ignore the impact of distribution, employees and customer themselves on the creation of the brand. Think of brand creation as the original and ultimate form of crowd-sourcing, a long term cooperative effort with contributions from many, many elements, activities and people over time. Marketing is just a part that the department can control.