Branding Focus – Targeting the Right Audiences

One of my favorite marketing blogs is my friend Derrick Daye’s Brand Strategy Insider, it consistently delivers the branding goodies. Today’s post is from my equally favorite blogger and pundit extraordinaire Seth Godin who is this months contributing blogger.

In today’s post Seth talks about “The Brand Formula” and in his usually succinct style offers a clear presentation of what a brand is. His point is focus on the target audience that will most embrace your value, succeed among them and even as you get successful think long and hard before embracing a different demographic. This is about focus. I think one of the biggest challenges facing companies at just about any time frame of its corporate life is focus.

Focus

The focus I am referring to relates to a number of areas within the company all of them represent your brand. First is the notion of culture. Does your company have more of a sales-driven culture, (which represents a majority of companies)? Or is your company an engineering driven culture? Or is it a marketing-driven culture? In my experience, a small percentage of companies are based on a marketing-driven culture, more than half are sales-driven, and for technology, they are generally engineering-driven. Not being a marketing-driven company is big challenge to maintaining consistent focus.

What I mean by marketing-driven is looking from the ground up at everything you are doing as a marketing opportunity. So, for example, looking at your sales strategy. Is your sales guy running the show? This is very common. The sales guys come in and they want the sale, no matter the cost. And that cost is what I call a "seat-of-the- pants" approach where there is a frenetic environment and the sales guy turns on a dime depending on his customer. And features and benefits of the products are sometimes even adjusted for that one customer. That is a lack of focus.

What most companies are not doing is starting from scratch, looking at the market opportunity, looking at the market need, looking at what pain their product is going to solve in the marketplace for specific audiences. (That's actually a key issue: "product myopia" or  “benefits” versus “features”).

In an engineering-driven culture, it's kind of a "if you build it, they will come" type of approach. They focus on "that little knob over there can create this really cool GUI which really is… like, cool". Versus creating a product that is actually going to meet the needs of the customer. Sometimes in an engineering-driven environment, the product marketing person will meet with customers and will clearly see the opportunities for product improvements that the engineers will resist to their death.

What is needed is a different way of thinking for example using your marketing brain when making business decisions is of the utmost importance. For example if resources are limited and you have the choice of pursuing several different customers but can't service them all, don't just go for the money. Go for the one that will meet budget expectations but also add credibility.

Here is what Seth has to say or click here to go directly to the post on Branding Strategy Insider:

The Brand Formula May 09, 2007

Branding Strategy Insider Blog - By Seth Godin

What's a brand?

I think it is the product of two things:

[Prediction of what to expect] times [emotional power of that expectation].

If I encounter a brand and I don't know what it means or does, it has zero power. If I have an expectation of what an organization will do for me, but I don't care about that, no power.

Fedex is a powerful brand because you always get what you expect, and the relief you get from their consistency is high.

AT&T is a weak brand because you almost never get what you expect, because they do so many different things and because the value of what they create has little emotional resonance (it sure used to though, when they did one thing, they did it perfectly and they were the only ones who could connect you).

The dangers of brand ubiquity are then obvious. When your brand is lots of things (like AOL became) then the expectations were all over the place and the emotional resonance started to fade. If the predictability of your brand starts to erode its emotional power (a restaurant that becomes boring) then you need to become predictable in your joyous unpredictability!

If you want to grow a valuable brand, my advice is to keep awareness close to zero among the people you're not ready for yet, and build the most predictable, emotional experience you can among those that care about you