Customer Reviews

Branding Only Works on Cattle: The New Way to Get Known and Drive Your Competitors Crazy

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1 star:		(3)

 

 

Let's face it, anyone planning on earning an income in the field of marketing today knows it's all about results. Fluffy, unquantifiable, "feel-good" messaging is dead, and Mr. Baskin clearly (and quite entertainingly) explains that branding is behavior. Without results, we're wasting time and money.

I'm a twenty-plus year marketing professional with Fortune 500 experience and stacks of advertising and marketing books on my shelves. Some books were never read beyond the first few chapters. Branding Only Works on Cattle is different. It's incredibly relevant to marketing plan development, and I highly recommend it for marketing and C-level executives.

Portions of the book made me wince at misguided efforts from years gone by, but illumination requires painful self-examination. This is how we learn. Baskin's "Chronology of Purchase Intent" describes consumers' movement from problem recognition to purchase. This continuum provides a perfect basis from which to create specific, measurable marketing activity. Examples and stories provide edification along the way.

If you're willing to accept reality, and formulate marketing that drives action, this book is for you. Or, keep stroking Fluffy. She'll come back around.

Every so often an observer with a kind of second sight comes along to cut through the clutter and tell us where the problems lie and how to solve them. Since marketing is characterized by the rapidity of change, clear direction is especially urgent as the digital world revolutionizes customer connectivity and the potential for instant messaging to millions of consumers is at hand.
Branding Only Works on Cattle notes that most branding efforts are wasted because the emphasis is on changing customers thinking rather than their behavior. Author Jonathan Baskin mentions the ubiquitous TV ads that don't tell you the purpose of the product or show the company name until late in the commercial after you've already left for the refrigerator.
Baskin points out that branding is expensive and usually goes unmeasured and that every branding claim must be evaluated against the sales it will bring in. Or put another way, most branding is made up of nouns instead of action verbs that are directed at customers who aren't listening much anymore and are impatient with intangibles. Branding should promote action and earn loyalty and only does so for high-quality products and services.
Guerilla, or word-of-mouth marketing, only works when it delivers something customers will talk about. Poor quality of service like trying to find a live person to talk to destroys brand benefits. Baskin also writes that branding for image rather than actionable customer behavior (getting customers to do something) is the business equivalent of buying a lottery ticket.
Buy this useful book, study it, and evaluate all future branding against measurable return on investment.

I've been following Jonathan Baskin's Advertising Age columns where he packs more insightful marketing information into a few paragraphs than you see elsewhere in a month. Baskin is always ahead of the curve, and he's way ahead in his fine new book "Branding Only Works On Cattle."
In the age of disintermediation, or eliminating the middleman, and going direct to digital customers, people have no time for vague promises and linty images. Or as Baskin writes, useful marketing is the play-by-play of changing customer behavior and most branding is the color commentary with the sound turned down. Your product or service, Baskin astutely observes, is not a cause for you to promote, it must have a purpose, and that purpose is to get customers to do something.
And branding should be results-oriented, absent guesswork and hope. When changes in customer behavior is the branding focus, action becomes a potent tool and has a whole lot better chance of landing a sale than some fuzzy concept ad. Most of all, Baskin argues, you must measure any marketing activity, including branding. Millions of dollars are wasted without statistical proof.
Baskin cites the impact of statistical quality control in manufacturing as taught by American quality legend W. Edwards Deming and how that management instrument can be used in marketing to measure results and evaluate ROI. As Hewlett-Packard Founder Bill Hewett once said, "You cannot manage what you cannot measure. What gets measured gets done." Branding Only Works on Cattle is loaded with useful gems that are fit for use. I'm buying copies for business friends and clients.

Richard J. Noyes, business consultant, formerly Associate Director of the MIT Center for Advanced Engineering Study

Behavior trumps branding. That's what Jonathon Baskin says and follows it up with the profound if obvious statement "...unless your company and your consumers actually DO things, branding is really a waste of time and money." inside cover.

But what about this statement: "...there's an ugly secret the experts don't want you to know: Consumers aren't paying attention anymore, and they don't believe or remember stuff anyway." Huh? What? Of course you don't pay any attention to all those TV commercials you breeze by when you Tivo something. And even when you watch "live" TV, you really don't care enough about the commercials to even remember why you have just seen. So what's the use in paying all that money for adverts that don't convert?

I found this anti-Branding book refreshing in de-bunking all the hype about branding; including branding myself. But then, if branding isn't the answer, what is?

It wasn't until Chapter 7 that something really blew me away. Games! Or as the tile says; "Games as Purpose, Not Distraction." I mentions that companies try to engage customers with games such as coupons or sale bins or the plethora of premiums being given away at fast-food restaurants. He quickly talks about the potential of video games and then makes this statement: "Understanding game behavior yields a very different understanding of brand. If actions matter and consumers define brand by their behavior and their communities, games could provide a model for understanding how those behaviors connect. They structure of a brand behavior strategy sho8uld have linearity, dependences, and outcomes. Hmmm. Just like a game?" p.158

For Baskin, it seems, that gaming structure is best found in Altgernate reality gaming, or ARG. "But imagine a branding campaign as the start of a real-time, ongoing game that involves materials and behaviors that cross between the virtual and real worlds. A game could be the model for a truly interactive experience, involving not only presentational materials and cues but the behavioral responses of players/customers." p.160

"Branding is for Cattle" does not have all of the answers for the rapidly approaching (if not arrived) "post branded" world, but it asks the right questions to begin thinking about it. Baskin describes the current world of branding campaigns whose success cannot be measured (at least in terms of sales). He builds a compelling case for why one way business to consumer conversation no longer work in the internet age. The future is far more complex than this and Baskin's book begins to put how to succeed in this new era into focus.

***Full disclosure: I've known the author since we were 15 and both worshiping at the throne of the almighty image ad-making machine.***

Since then, each of us has spent enough time in the industry responsible for making those image (a.k.a. "branding") ads to realize how irrelevant and even damaging the old marketing model has become.

I've done little but grouse about it. Mr. Baskin, on the other hand, has taken his experience in the business, his frustration with how things are currently run and his vision for how they might be and created a wonderful starting point for a different, more effective kind of marketing.

His book points to the pointlessness of old-skool branding, from its fuzzy, unmeasurable goals to its diversion of valuable resources into stuff that doesn't move product. He uses plain English, not market-speak, draws from a range of excellent examples to support his arguments, and best of all, outlines actual, actionable steps companies can take to market themselves truly effectively: i.e., with measurable results.

Small side note: while the stories in the book are mainly those of big business, the lessons here are applicable to small business, too. It may take a bit of creative imagining and extrapolation to see how the lessons apply--this book was not explicitly written for ground-level use by the little guy--but they absolutely do.

Ignore them at your peril.

I loved this book. I'm not a marketing guy. I have been on the sales side for too many years to remember. I have been presented with countless marketing campaigns aimed at awareness and branding. It never made sense. No one focused on how we were going to sell our widgets. All that feel good stuff was nice and made for good banners around the office, but it never sold anything. We'd introduce hot products and the marketers would talk about the success of their brilliant branding effort. The next year when the products weren't so hot, the marketers would blame the sales team. Then came the web and all of the incredible opportunities to speak directly to customers, except we still talked at them with electronic versions of the tired old traditional campaigns. This book does a great job of describing what we need to do to sell stuff. Buy this book. Save some money while you increase your sales. What a concept.

Finally...the deconstruction of the branding 800 pound gorilla is here. It is fabulously refreshing to read Baskin's scathing critique and insightful analysis on one of our least favorite pastimes, i.e. watching corporate america woo us via magazines or tv with expensive and usually incredibly vague appeals to feel...or think...or...something. In the era of our modern-day leviathan - that something better be to buy! Who knew?

As a young person who recently entered the world of branding, I already feel a bit jaded. Often when browsing through books on the subject, I wonder if they were not written by a computer algorithm. They simply rehash the same ideas, in the same language. Brand marketers have developed their own cult-like industry, insulated from reality. They are swimming in their own mush.

Jonathan's book is a breath of fresh air. Instead of irrationally rationalizing some nonsense theory that his career is dependent on, he takes his own life experiences in branding to task. He questions what he believed. He is not afraid to critically consider the foundations of branding gospel.

While you might not like what he has to say (and I certainly don't agree with all of it), he will get you thinking about your long-held assumptions. Aside from the witty writing style and many astute perceptions, I think the thoughtful discussion he prompts is its crowning achievement.

I highly recommend this book to forward-thinking individuals who want to move the marketing industry into the 21st century. It is certainly not going to ride on its own legacy. After reading it, I am more motivated than ever to make a difference and actively work to "refresh" our field. But not with a new logo and messaging. With new ideas.

I loved this book. The big idea to me is that companies should be spending their money on creating great product, not on a gimmick to create the impression of a great product. Business executives should read this book to understand how common sense and metrics around their marketing programs will benefit the business.