What do Marketing People Mean When They Say Brand?

Lately I've been hanging out with marketing folks, and I'm learning their language. That's scary for an ex-engineer, because to engineers, "marketing speak" means "meaningless double-talk". But having spent more time with these folks, I'm realizing that they are often onto some subtle and interesting issues.

An especially interesting word is brand. Of course, everyone knows that brand means the name you slap on a product, but marketing people also mean something much more subtle. One person explained it to me this way:

A brand is a promise that you make to the customer.

A brand is a promise? Meaningless double-talk! But as I thought about it more, it started to make sense. FedEx is a promise: "We will get it there tomorrow." Disney: "We will provide wholesome fun for the whole family." IBM: "We are the safe choice. You won't get fired for choosing us."

When marketing people talk about branding and brand management, they are—in part—talking about making and fulfilling promises. You will never see Disney-branded porn, because that would violate their promise. If FedEx wanted to offer "cheap shipping via slow freighter", I bet they'd invent a new brand name, because slow would confuse the FedEx brand.

Bad branding happens when a company makes promises it can't keep. For McDonalds, the promise of "fine dining to impress your date" wouldn't fool anyone. Worse, it would hurt the company's credibility. On the other hand, a well-managed brand helps customers know what to expect. It's always safe to take your kids to a Disney movie.

How does this relate to NetApp? Like most hi-tech companies, our brand as a small startup was "We promise you the coolest, most innovative stuff." You don't expect a startup to offer global support, enterprise quality, or advice on re-architecting your data center infrastructure. When we matured as a company, and developed those sorts of capabilities, we had to add new promises to our brand. It was a conscious effort to add promises and capabilities in parallel. We wanted to make sure customers knew what we could do, but we didn't want to over-promise, because that creates dissatisfaction.

Our new StoreVault division, focused on small and medium businesses (SMBs), created a new branding challenge, because the promises you make to an SMB are very different from the promises you make to a Fortune 1000 company. One key difference is that the NetApp brand promises "enterprise relationship", while the StoreVault brand says, "for a relationship, work with your VAR (Value Added Reseller)."

We are creating a new brand, StoreVault, to represent the SMB promises, because we don't want to confuse the existing promises of the NetApp brand.

Comments

[Unmesh]

A brand is a shortcut/level-of-indirection for the customer to associate a short, recallable, "id" with some delivered/expected level of product/service.

The term 'Promise' seems too touchy-feely for down-to-earth storage/business vendor/customer relationships. ;-)

Nothing new in that: Most of human decisions use shortcuts because no one has the time to perform a complete 'inline' analysis of pros/cons for every decision one takes in the course of a day. This instinctual/in-grained ability is a very handy survival tool (you dont evaluate the same plant everytime you pick fruits off it it) but has been used by 'experts' to make you willingly, rationally, happily make poor decisions.

Such is life! (You may have read the the classic by Robert Cialdini).

Cheers,