If Your Product is Amazing, but Your Marketing is Crap, Where Does that Leave the Brand?
Brand Strategy, August 13, 2020
“Disruptive technology should be framed as a marketing challenge, not a technological one.”
Clay Christensen, The Innovator’s Dilemma
Among product-driven brands, there is a belief that if the business only focuses on building a better product the world will beat a path to its door/store with wallet in hand. In the marketing world, this is appropriately referred to as the Better Mousetrap Fallacy. A fallacy because the tenet is entirely focused on the product and technology, at the expense of the consumer and their perspective. As Marketoonist Tom Fishburne notes, “Consumers really don’t care about a better mousetrap. They care about fewer mice.”
The awesome irony is there are more than 4,400 patents issued by the United States Patent and Trademark Office for new mousetraps, with thousands more unsuccessful applicants, which make mousetraps the most frequently invented device in U.S. history. So perhaps a more apt precept is “Build a better mousetrap and commoditize the market.”
This doesn’t mean that product-focused companies don’t market their mousetraps, it means that they underinvest in the marketing of it. The underinvestment occurs with lack of design and creative talent, marketing strategy, and paid media spend. This underinvestment ultimately leads to a lack of distinct positioning and messaging, muddled or uncreative creative, amateur execution, and low differentiation and visibility. While the product team is stocked with Varsity players, marketing has to compete with a JV squad.
So how does that disconnect impact the brand?
To avoid opening the semantic can of worms on the definition of “brand”, let’s defer to the International Organization for Standards (ISO) definition as “an intangible asset” that is intended to create “distinctive images and associations in the minds of stakeholders, thereby generating economic benefit and value.”
Value created in the mind creates value in the market.
A few years ago, the Financial Times reported, “The average British and American company is valued by the stock market at around twice net balance sheets. Brand rich companies are valued by the stock market at four times net assets.”
A strong brand is a value multiplier. Conversely, a weak brand is a value destroyer. What makes a weak brand? It lacks (an incomplete list):
A Myth - The Origin Story.
Specific meaning - How it shows up in service to a cause/customer
A cultural ethos
A distinct aesthetic
A vision or point of view of how the world should be
Actions in order to achieve the vision
An Experience - How to take customers on a trip From...To…
Investment in Marketing
Today, a brand is the full experience a customer has with all the touchpoints; everything within the orbit of the company and the market. The X factor in all this is that brands aren’t actually owned by the company. Brands live in the heart and heads of the consumers. The associations, the emotions, the experiences, the memories, the intangibles...are uniquely different and meaningful to each individual. Those feelings are impacted by the performance of the product, but it is not the entirety of the brand (as demonstrated by the list above).
Marketing, in all its forms, impacts consumer brand perception and value as the connection between the brand components and the customer’s associations. If the marketing is weak then so too are the affiliations or differentiations established with the customer, with no additional value earned in the market.
The weaker the marketing, the weaker the brand--regardless of the product--and the weaker the value of the business in the mind of the consumer and the market. Invest in and support marketing at the same level as the product and the brand becomes a long-term competitive advantage and not a cost to be minimized.
MG