GOT MY NOSE OPEN

"Any damn fool can put on a deal, but it takes genius, faith and perseverance to create a brand."

-David Ogilvy

As much as I admire the late David Ogilvy, I have to say that his comment on creating a brand was rubbish... albeit useful, self-serving rubbish. Ogilvy was an ad man and wanted business people to think of a brand as an image created by advertising, which means we can rewrite his pronouncement as follows: "It takes genius (me, David Ogilvy), faith (trust me, I'm a genius) and perseverance (a lot of your money, year after year, even when you've nothing to show for it) to create a brand." Maybe you'll create a brand that way, but it's the slow, stupid way.

The better way to create a brand is by caring so much about customers that you move through the stages of consumer interest: that's nice, that's good, that's better, that's different.

What got me thinking about branding was doing a seminar for a printers' group in Florida. Many of the attendees were frustrated at the intense price competition of having their product perceived as a commodity. I got a tad frustrated with these complaints. You don't blame the marketplace if you have failed to make customers care about quality. If you can't educate your customers and make them appreciate the impact of quality on results, then it's your fault, not theirs, when they buy according to price. I got so peeved that I finally blurted out this: "You are a commodity till you prove otherwise."

I think that rates as one of our IBDs (Important Business Principles), don't you? There's no point whining about the customer not caring - it's your job them to make them care.

Branding is caring. It need not be with advertising, or even expensive gimmickry like graphics. Think of Google... on most days it's the most graphically boring page on the Internet and yet the most startlingly useful. "First, do no evil," the Googlians tell each other, which is the precursor to the first step of branding: to have customers react by thinking, "that's nice." But every decent business is nice. And most businesses make it to the next step, which is "that's good."

It's going beyond good to better that starts to thin out the competitive herd. If you ask an entrepreneur if his or her business is better, every one will answer in the affirmative. That's why the third step is not "I'm better" but "it's better" - the test is what the customer says, not what the owner thinks.

That brings us to the real test of brand creation: "that's different." You may recall one of our foundation IBDs, "Different isn't always better, but better is always different." Yes, better IS different. And it might seem logical that different would come first. However, we're talking about customer perception and we've moved into the "slogic" (slippery logic) of the emotions and the unconscious. A customer might say that a given policy or product feature is better than competitive ones, but the tougher test is to say, with feeling, "Oooo, now that's DIFFERENT!"

Oooo. That's where you want to be, the place where better merges with different and the unconscious mind takes over.... Or, in the immortal words of Tina Turner on "Fool in Love", "He's got my nose open." That's when you have the customer's attention, straight to the subconscious.

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Dale Dauten is the founder of The Innovators' Lab.  His latest book is "(Great) Employees Only: How Gifted Bosses Hire and De-Hire Their Way to Success" (John Wiley & Sons).  Please write to him in care of King Features Syndicate, 300 W. 57th ST, 15th Fl, New York, NY 10019, or at dale@dauten.com.

Copyright © 2009, King Features Syndicate

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