How Traditional Brand Methods Fall Short
Markets and customers are changing, but traditional brand methods seem
frozen in time. Some of their assumptions, concepts and practices date
back a hundred years or more, when societies were far less diverse and
dynamic than they are today.
Common Weaknesses of Traditional Brand Methods
Traditional brand practices can be handcuffs from the past.
There are many ways they can limit your ability to innovate on brand.
These include:
- They implement top-down, command-and-control architectures.
This results in narrow, one-way brands
that exclude the customer, and resist innovation and change.
- They assume brands are a communication layer applied to the surface
of the product and the company. This leads to "paper brands"
that are long on looks and short on action.
Such an approach can reduce a brand to pose and posture, opening the
door for competitor brand advances.
- They frame the customer as a commodity—purely to be sold to.
This introduces commodity thinking into the brand proposition,
a first step toward brand decay.
- They maintain an antiquated "build it, brand it, sell it" approach,
which reduces the brand to an add-on package of attributes.
This approach weakens the ability of the brand to create new market
context as a holistic expression of product and customer.
- They build their brands to shape perceptions rather than deliver value.
This approach limits their ability to create customers, and to
augment product innnovation.
- They assume markets consist of uninformed, passive consumers waiting
for top-down brand messages. This prevents brands from enlisting customer
intelligence and initiative to help grow the brand in new directions.
- The one-way brands they produce create low-performance customers,
who add little or no value back to the brand.
