This post is by Michael Pollock, the original owner of Small Business Branding. Yaro Starak now owns and produces the latest content for this blog.
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I don’t know why, but this is just so funny to me. The following is Cameron Riley (co-founder of The Podcast Network) talking about his recent visit to a tech/business conference in Melbourne, Australia:
"so do
you think it’s a good or a bad sign when I’ve had to answer the
questions ‘so what is podcasting?’ about 20 times already this
afternoon? I just had a guy tell me that his company is building an RSS
feed reader that will track when people are talking about your company.
His example was ‘let’s say someone wrote something about your company
on a blog. how would you know about it?’"I told him I have a bunch of technorati search’s set up as RSS feeds that I track most days.
"His response was ‘what’s technorati?’
"I think I’m in the wrong room…"
I am literally
laughing as I write this. "What’s technorati?"!! Can you stand it? I have no problem with
people not knowing what Technorati is. Really. I mean who outside the blog/social media world WOULD know about Technorati? But this guy is building a product to compete with Technorati.
Wouldn’t you think he’d at least know the name of his competitors? I’m guessing he’s never heard of Ice Rocket or PubSub either.
I started off wanting to do a post about the difference between
positioning and branding, but this example probably says a lot more than I
could have ever come up with. Let me give it a shot though.
Your position is what you, your product or service represents in relation to competitors. Here’s an example.
- Think of the name of a durable but inexpensive watch.
- Now, think of the name of a luxurious, high priced watch.
- Finally, think of the name of a watch for runners and other athletes.
If you’re like me, you came up with these three names of watches.
- Timex = durable, inexpensive watch.
- Rolex = luxurious, high-priced watch
- Timex Ironman Triathlon = watch for runners or other athletes.
Before you create a new product or service is the time to choose a
position for that product or service. And when I say position, I mean
the position that product or service will occupy in the mind of the
market; in the mind of the potential consumers of that product or
service. The theory is that the more specific you can be in all this,
the easier it will be to market and sell the product or service.
That brings us back to our RSS reader buffoon above. If he has any
hope whatsoever of successfully marketing and selling his new RSS
reader, he needs to know who the competitors are. He also needs to know
something about the people who are using RSS readers. Now he has a
really big problem because the RSS reader market is very immature and
very volatile. It changes almost daily. You have all sorts of companies
creating new products and big-name, well-established companies like
Google and Microsoft who are integrating RSS readers into other
products (e.g. Google reader and Microsoft’s next version of Windows).
His only real chance of survival is to do something dramatically
different with his RSS reader. Maybe some sort of branded RSS reader
like RSSvp,
but even that market is getting kind of crowded. He could go even more
specific and create a branded RSS reader specifically designed for a
small segment of the market, such as a branded RSS reader designed just
for churches. It would be much easier to create, market and sell a
well-designed product for such a specific market.
Why is it easier? Because you know what their specific wants, needs
and desires are. And you’ll have a much easier time reaching the people
in that market. You won’t have to spend gobs of money on a shotgun
marketing approach. You won’t have to knock on every single door
in every single building hoping there’s a pastor inside. Just knock on church doors.
I still haven’t talked about how positioning is different than branding, and because it’s late, I’m going to leave that till part two of this post. Besides, I’m not really sure I can articulate the difference just yet. Yikes.
by Rob Gelphman 02/03
Often what goes wrong with marketing campaigns bent on creating a brand is the underlying strategy. When it fails, those responsible for execution-such as PR and advertising people- are blamed. Perhaps, the execution itself isn’t the problem, but rather it’s the strategy being executed that’s flawed. The disconnect is that too many VPs of marketing and their product managers pursue a branding campaign when it is positioning that is required. Compounding the problem is that many folks don’t know the difference between the two.
Brand creation is expensive, time consuming, and is primarily intended to generate an emotional response from the intended audience. Commodity-type products with minimal differentiation among competing offerings are generally best served via branding.
Positioning, it could be argued, is brand’s counterpart, requiring the demonstration of real value. Positioning can be done in a much shorter time frame (months, not years), and is significantly less expensive. For many industries and companies, positioning is the best strategy for improving sales and market share, not branding. Besides the cost and time factors, branding is difficult to measure and does not always show up in the form of sales.