Branding Is A Marriage, Not A Fling

It used to be that you could tape up some snowflakes cut from paper, dangle a few ornaments (the glass kind) around the store, and blast Bing Crosby holiday standards (without worrying about copyright infringement) and call it your holiday campaign. And on the morning of December 26th, it would take less than 30 minutes to dispose of the previous day. When the store opened, it would appear there never was a Christmas.

The retail world now sees more money spent on a single point-of-purchase display than many stores spent on an entire campaign two decades ago. The effort on getting the customer to choose you rather than the other guy rockets freely into the millions of dollars without so much as a free ornament (the plastic kind) for your tree.

Today, the brand reach created by a campaign extends beyond anyone’s wildest dreams of engagement. The internet and social media have allowed end-users to absorb campaign material and keep it forever, literally. We enjoy reminiscing about great retail campaigns from bygone days thanks to the likes of YouTube.

Campaigns are no longer the five or six major calendar holidays they used to be, either. Campaigns revolve around calendar events for dozens of cultures. The holiday campaign includes Christmas, Hanukkah, and Kwanzaa, and opens the can of slogan worms on what to call it. Happy Holidays? Merry Christmas? Happy Hanukkah? All of them? Brands and retailers find themselves walking a fine line between spreading good cheer and kicking political correctness in the shin.

And, campaigns are no longer cultural events; they are social events. Best Buy devoted the entire month of January to its Home Theater campaign so that you could have the perfect home theater for the “big game,” the Super Bowl. Some retailers build promotions around the Academy Awards. They have a countdown leading to it. The day after the show, the movies that won awards are proudly displayed in the front window DVD shelves, and you can find the latest celebrity fashions online to purchase for yourself.

But there is a point where the efforts of branding via campaigns become suspect. If “brand purpose” is to create an ecosystem in which people can engage, then the idea of campaigns is contentious. Brands are not built through episodic events; they evolve through long-term relationships.

When brands spend too much time and money on a campaign, they spend too little time on the brand itself. While working at Best Buy, I spent almost 10 months of every year in projects that concerned a campaign. The other two months were spent cleaning up from the other 10 months of work. I rarely spent ample time simply focused on the brand — the foundational engagement with customers that we strived to achieve.

It was kind of like putting a new coat of paint on an Edsel.

I believe that in this culture of short attention spans and fast knowledge, it is much more important for a brand to embrace the engagement with the customer and utilize campaigns as talking points, not as brand builders. Campaigns are conversation starters, not conversations. They are a great way to get customers in the door, but not very good at keeping them there. When a campaign ends, you should never hear your customer ask, “That was fun. What now?”

How do you keep them after the campaign? Some do it by hammering another campaign down your throat. The back-to-school campaigns seem to start earlier each year; they cannot get here fast enough on the heels of the 4th of July campaigns (in the U.S.). That doesn’t work. At some point, the campaigns stop.

You build your brand by focusing less on how you look during a particular time of year and more on how you look at all times.

When building a campaign, three questions come to mind:

a. How does this campaign support our brand as a whole?
b. How will this campaign be perceived AFTER it expires?
c. How does this campaign work with the next campaign?

These are only three questions, and they may appear elementary, but when you have several internal teams working on a campaign, you will get several different answers, and not all of them will be right. This is crucial in knowing the role your brand plays in the culture, and the value you have in your customer’s lifestyle the next day.

Effective brands build relationships; they do not have affairs. Affairs always end bad.