Pseudo Brands: All Surface, No Core
Companies often wonder why their brands seem to return only a marginal
benefit back to the business. The answer may be that their brands aren't
really brands at all. They may be pseudo brands.
Pseudo brands are truncated brand programs that superficially look and
act like brands, but deliver minimal brand value to customers and to
the company. Through a faulty brand model they reduce brands to a thin
presentation layer of identity, symbols and slogans.
While these may project the appearance of brands, they're not much
use in building new brand platforms, or opening new markets.
Is this a brand, or a pseudo brand?
That's the question every company needs to ask about its brands.
This FAQ explains the nature of pseudo brands, how they differ from brands,
and the potential threats they pose to brand value.
Frequently Asked Questions
- What are pseudo brands?
- Why are pseudo brands important?
- How can I tell a pseudo brand from a brand?
- Are pseudo brands the same as counterfeit brands?
- Are pseudo brands actual brand programs?
- How did pseudo brands arise?
- Is there a connection between pseudo brands and "branding"?
- How do pseudo brands produce brand clutter?
- How do pseudo brands lead to commodity markets?
- What's the best strategy for dealing with pseudo brands?
1. What are pseudo brands?
Simply stated, pseudo brands are brands that aren't.
They go through the motions of brands—an eye-grabbing logo,
pumped up personality, lofty vows, zippy tagline and media splash—but
in reality they do little to advance customers, or a company's ties to them.
That's because pseudo brands have no customer at their core.
They're all surface, a static, idealized display instead of a brand
structure for customer growth.
A critical weakness of pseudo brands is that they're framed in company
context instead of customer context. They're "all about the company",
focused on differentiating the company as dramatically as possible from
its competitors. What they don't do is learn from the customer's world,
and extend the customer through the brand to a better world.
Pseudo brands are counterproductive to a company's brand strategy.
They open the door to brand clutter, and they can accelerate product commoditization.
2. Why are pseudo brands important?
Pseudo brands are important because they can simultaneously look
great and undermine a company's success.
They drain resources and produce little in return. At the operating level,
pseudo brands are a drag on performance because they distance a company
from its customers, making marketing, product development, sales and
support work even harder.
3. How can I tell a pseudo brand from a brand?
Look beneath the surface to see what your brand actually does,
i.e., delivers to customers. Pseudo brands typically employ a skim coat of brand
elements (symbols, identity, persona and promise) to represent the brand.
Using these surface elements, pseudo brands can only pose and posture.
They're long on looks, short on leverage.
What you want to see are working brands
that can move your customers forward.
Brands and pseudo brands reflect different brand models.
Brands have customers at their core.
Pseudo brands are a communication layer draped around the company.
Being centered on customers enables brands to deliver value that can build
customer communities. In contrast, pseudo brands don't engage customers
directly. Instead, they operate behind a corporate wall to project an
artificial brand image in the hope it will shape customer perceptions.
While brands team with customers to create new value, pseudo brands beam
messages from third-party media.
In a nutshell, pseudo brands lack the stuff of brands:
the brand programs that reach out to customers, the brand platforms to
extend customers and markets, and the value networks that feed customer
initiative and innovation back to the brand.
4. Are pseudo brands the same as counterfeit brands?
No. Counterfeit brands are made by crooks. They're illegal.
Pseudo brands are the result of well-intentioned—but flawed—brand thinking.
They exist inside the very companies that need brands for their survival.
5. Are pseudo brands actual brand programs?
Only in the shallowest sense.
Brand programs are designed to deliver value that can make markets.
Pseudo brands are one-way messaging programs rich in superficial brand elements,
but little else. At heart they're indoctrination programs that would be
at home in a medieval church. While brands are dedicated to growing customers
to new levels, pseudo brands are dedicated to keeping customers just where they are.
6. How did pseudo brands arise?
Pseudo brands have been around for decades.
They exist because they're easy to manufacture:
a formulaic, default brand package based on top-down, one-way communications
than can be quickly shaped into media campaigns.
Pseudo brands reached their peak in the dotcom era when thousands of new
firms found themselves with money to burn, but few real products, and fewer customers.
Under pressure to produce, they pumped up what little they had—mostly
their new name and logo—called that their "brand," and took
that to market. The more they pumped the bigger they got, until they soon had
the biggest brands in the world. It was a volume business . . . while it lasted.
Pseudo brands were the surface of the dotcom bubble.
7. Is there a connection between pseudo brands and "branding"?
Yes. "Branding" is the preferred methodology for deploying pseudo brands.
It is a media-driven process that formulates an image of a business and its products,
and then attempts to burn that image into the minds of customers.
In the branding model, actual brand value takes a back seat to
persuasion. Customers are reduced to the status of cattle, to be
"branded" with a pre-packaged mindset through branding campaigns.
The major downside to branding (apart from the obvious fact that people
are not cattle) is that the "us/them" branding
process transforms customers into passive objects who can never become partners
in generating brand value. The very process of branding severs a company from
its greatest market resource.
8. How do pseudo brands produce brand clutter?
The false-front strategy of pseudo brands may be easy to implement,
but it comes at a price: it's also easy to mimic. That's why all
pseudo brands in a category look and act alike. It's surface in, surface out.
A key clutter-inducing factor is that pseudo brands define themselves
as forms of persuasion, instead of forms of value. Since the forms of
persuasion are few in number, the result is a sea of homogenized signs and
signals where all (pseudo) brands fundamentally appear the same. At best,
they're riffs on a theme. Confronted by this look-alike onslaught,
customers tire and tune out.
Brands avoid clutter by grounding themselves in customer context,
instead of the context of persuasion. This requires more work at the program level,
where value innovation occurs, but the payoff—in platforms and customer growth—more
than justifies the effort.
9. How do pseudo brands lead to commodity markets?
While brands create customers, pseudo brands inadvertently produce a commodity
ethos for their companies and their products. This happens because pseudo brands
typically treat customers themselves as
commodities—purely to be sold to—instead
of treating them as partners in the brand enterprise.
Through this narrow, one-way approach, pseudo brands define their relationship
as transaction-based, not value-based. From a customer perspective, this marks
the end of the brand proposition (a partnership of equals toward a common goal),
and a fallback to the primitive rules of a buyer/seller, where commodity logic
eventually prevails, no matter how much "brand messaging" takes place.
10. What's the best strategy for dealing with pseudo brands?
Within your own brand program:
Through their top-down branding process pseudo
brands erect a virtual barrier between you and your customers.
You can break through this barrier with bottom-up brand programs that co-create
value with customers. Focus on new forms of value that your brands can deliver.
Pseudo brands often emerge when companies follow a traditional "build it, brand it,
sell it" approach, which relegates brands to being stylized sales stimulants.
Strong brand connections can be re-established with a more strategic approach:
"Grow the customer, grow the brand, grow the business."
If your competitors employ pseudo brands:
Pseudo brands are a sign of weakness.
Their presence can signal opportunities to increase your market share.
Pseudo brands are like colorful, low-hanging fruit; their customers are ripe
for the taking. They are especially vulnerable to a new brand context that puts
customers in the driver's seat with their own platform.
