The Nature of Brands

To ensure a sojourn at the branding altar free from sin, it's vital to understand what a brand is. First, it is not, nor can it ever be, a product or service. This is a concept difficult for many marketers to grasp. Yes, you can buy a company. And you can buy its brands. However, you can never sell these brands to the customer. All you can ever sell is products or services.

This basic fact was ignored time and again during the dot-com and application service provider (ASP) boom of the late 1990s. Branding exercises were substituted for sustainable business models. Billions of investment dollars were lost as companies poured money into expensive media and PR campaigns without first analyzing or testing whether anyone would actually buy their offerings.

The reason brands can never be sold is that they're symbols, intangible entities created and charged by dint of product excellence, unceasing PR, advertising, and good collaterals with positive equity. Brands live in a symbiotic relationship with products and services. If a product or service offers value and utility, a brand "rides along" with the purchase decision, whispering a soothing string of assurances into the buyer's soul that he's done the right thing. The ultimate goal of investing in a brand program is the ability to charge a premium for a product or service, to increase market share, or both.

Please note the emphasis on positive equity. It's quite possible for a brand's equity to change from positive to negative, and when this occurs, you no longer have a brand. Instead, you have a liability or an antibrand, if you will. WordStar is a classic example of a product's brand equity changing from positive to negative. At the beginning of the 1980s, WordStar represented power and market dominance; by the 1990s, WordStar stood for hard-to-use and out-of-date.

A more recent example of this phenomenon is the gruesome fate of the aforementioned Pets.com Sock Puppet. The Sock Puppet is an example of creating a brand component to support a corporate branding program. The Sock Puppet followed in the footsteps of his ancestors, Speedy Alka-Seltzer and the Pillsbury Doughboy, and was a huge PR success. Everyone loved that stuffed bit of cloth with buttons attached, so much so that when Pets.com collapsed, the company announced it was selling the rights to the Sock Puppet and listed it as one of the company's assets.

This was, of course, ridiculous. Some pundits claim that brands and brand components don't die. They're wrong, and sometimes something even worse happens. The brand component upon death undergoes a horrible transmogrification and emerges from the grave in a decayed, decrepit state. This awful fate befell the Sock Puppet. He became a mortuary icon, a symbol of death and failure, an antibrand. His decayed remains showed up in a Super Bowl commercial. He appeared in numerous mocking cartoons, his pathetic body subjected to all manner of indignities (run over, squashed, dismembered, torn apart) to illustrate the foolishness of the Pets.com (and the entire "dot-bomb") strategy of pursuing brand recognition and bigness while ignoring business realities.

What was the marketing value of the Sock Puppet? Nothing. Unless, perhaps, you're in the business of selling coffins. (He finally did get employment in a comparable industry: selling auto loans to people with bum credit.)