Build up the Brand…

There’s an awful lot of bollox that gets talked about brands these days. Personal brands, global brands, build your brand, sell your brand. Sits neatly next to the instant gratification culture we seem to be hell bent on creating. I wonder what happened to craft?

In Brighton, the capital city of quirk, brand led ventures tend to lose out to home grown adventures. Quirky little restaurants with massive followings based on providing excellent service and a brilliantly original food beat the out of towners for both value and entertainment. Which is kind of ironic since it’s the “experience” that a brand is all about.

An example. A reasonably well known Pattisserie just opened a branch in Western Road, Hove. I’m anonymising the establishment purely for the sake of the staff, who were charming. Anyway, I decided to check it out for brunch on Sunday. Out of curiosity I trawled their web site and to my horror encountered a load of old guff about “the brand”. As in “Every ***** Café has its own individual style and decor, but all of them have the same continental atmosphere. A trip to ******* is a unique experience.” Unique as in same? Huh?

If you want to find out what’s really important to a company, look on their “Careers” pages. *******, established 1926 is in fact an “Exciting brand expanding across the UK” with a “Passion to develop great people across the business” providing “Fast track career progression” etc etc.

I’d seen enough, but not wanting to seem like a curmudgeon, wandered down anyway. The cakes looked lovely and the staff were very friendly. So far so good. I ordered Eggs Benedict and Coffee. The coffee was delicious. The Eggs Benedict arrived, inexplicably served on Brioche rather than Muffin. Alarmed by the prospect of sugary brioche clashing with the poached eggs and salmon, I queried it with the waitress. The menu it seems is handed down from head office. Part of the unique experience I guess. The eggs were raw on the inside, to the point of being inedible. The staff were mortified and knocked it off the bill without any fuss. On the way out the manageress asked me if everything had been ok for me today…

My point, and I do have one, is that if the service or the product or whatever damn thing you are selling is not good enough, then all the brand savvy in the world isn’t going to make your business successful. This notion that the brand is more valuable than the product is as foolish as the emperor who paraded through the streets stark naked. As a consumer of products, I expect a product to do what it says on the tin ie. work. As a consumer of services I want the service to succeed in delivering. If it doesn’t I will exercise my right to move to another provider. The brand and the service or product line should interlock, the two are stronger than the one. but if I had to choose just one, it would be a product every time.

It seems to me that building a brand, whether it’s personal or professional has to be done on firm foundations. The perception of quality cannot and should not be bought. Ferrari have a history of creating excellent motor cars. Apple a history of innovation and design excellence. These people have spent many years perfecting their craft and building slowly but surely, a brand that really is valuable. In the current economic climate, hype is yesterday’s news.

Social Capital – What’s it Worth?

I’m reasonably sure, despite various comments from parents, colleagues and partners that I don’t feature on the autistic spectrum of behaviour – well, no more than the next geek anyway. I will confess to taking an interest in how I interact on the social web though, spurred on by a couple of sites I have found mildly diverting. PeerIndex and Klout.

Both sites purport to measure influence and they do so by tracking your use of the social web. PeerIndex asks you to register such things as your Twitter id, Facebook, Quora and Blogs and then divines a result based on retweets, comments etc. It presents its findings in the context of reach (number of people engaged with), Authority (Divined by number of people engaged with in the topics you typically comment on) and Activity (the volume of content generated).

I approached PeerIndex with some trepidation as I figured the sheer range of topics I engage with would militate against me. I blog at length on Music, Politics, Social Media, Photography, IT, Television and Film. Having worked in all of these industries except thank god, politics, I figure I may have something to say – on politics I admit, I’m simply venting!

Initially, my worst fears were quickly realised – with every fresh post, it seemed my authority rating diminished, while that accorded to more focused (ok, monomaniacal) contributors such as Jemima Kiss, Armando Ianucci and Guido Fawkes (one visualisation in the dashboard compares your rating with that of posters you have interacted with) were gaining credibility with every post. Personal Branding it seems, works. After several weeks, I noticed a peculiar thing – my authority rating began to rise as the search and analysis tools took on more of my output. This was encouraging and reflected in the visualisations presented on the dashboard page.

PeerIndex is at worst, engaging. The feeds it takes are limited, so I have not been able to register all of my blogs and I would like to see Flickr added to the list of defaults, but I like this tool and the possibilities it raises are interesting. We have the technology now to graft analyses onto vast quantities of data and I expect to see social media being used far more effectively by the bodies that are most threatened by it – broadcasters, record companies and newspapers. If the tools used by PeerIndex were applied to, for example, tracking the contents of Facebook pages looking for content related to a single artist, program or film, it might yield some interesting information about the makeup of the audience – and critically, where to find them.

Klout takes a different approach – analysing Twitter and Facebook interaction in terms of influence divined by amplification and reach – in other words, the more likes and retweets accumulated, the higher the score. This seems very satisfactory, at least until I noticed the tool registered my most influential topic as Cricket. A game I follow with the fanaticism of a Yorkshireman, but have never to my knowledge offered an opinion online. Perhaps this puts the value of my online opinions into a new and even more unflattering perspective!

I think that Klout is in the business of identifying influencers for the purpose of marketing. It has always been critical in PR to identify influencers – this is how we used to promote nightclubs back in the nineties and it defines the relationship between for example, Katie Price, The Press and her customers – the people that pay to have her open a shop, nightclub etc. If she didn’t generate the press, she would not be considered to be so influential and her value would decrease. What Klout appears to be doing is identifying influencers who are influential because they tap into a large following based on expertise, not notoriety. That could be a powerful asset indeed.

Lard!

Advertising Genius!

And in todays health tip – you too can have a blemish free complexion kids – just eat plenty of lard…