Keeping people loyal is next to impossible, as customer satisfaction has declined in lockstep with the outsourcing of services to distant call centers, user forums, and automated response. Despite loud and colorful exhortations from experts, there's an ever-widening chasm between the qualitative intentions and expectations of branding, and the quantitative, behavioral reality of consumer purchases.
Brands matter, but do so only in conversation and retrospectively. For all of the equity companies have invested, there's very little prescriptive benefit. We've been struggling with this reality for over a decade, and with limited and inconsistent successes. Many of the tools and ideas offered up as remedies -- social media, viral marketing, buzz communications -- require a definition of branding (and its ROI) that's even more vague and obtuse than the traditional role.
It's almost as if we're being told to fix the problems of traditional branding simply by expecting less of it. The marketing and ad trades have been filled with folks celebrating this idea, and proposing new ways to pay for it. And then the Recession hit.Oddly, it has felt like a bit of a reprieve for many marketers: the problem is no longer that we've lost our ability to sell to anybody. Now, the problem is that customer's aren't buying. Phew.
Unfortunately, that's not the problem, despite the barrage of news stories that conveniently blame consumers for not doing their spending duty. And it's why slashing prices has not done much to fix it. Wrong solution for the wrong problem.I think we need to challenge ourselves to analyze and understand the challenge of brands irrespective of the current economic downturn.
The simple fact is that people still need to buy stuff. They still have desires, interests, expectations, and fantasies. Human beings consume things, and there's no statue of limitations on consumer needs. To fix brands, we need to look past the recent news headlines, and get at the core problem. Brands were already tarnished a long time ago.
Link to original post