Can digital build brands?

Michael Bayler, strategist and author, Bayler & Associates, writes: Engagement continues to both fascinate and bewilder stakeholders right across marketing and media. An underlying question that’s key to the discussion is whether brand-owners should look beyond advertising for ways to build and grow brand equity?

A troubled history

Stephen King’s brief, urgent paper, “What Is A Brand?” was produced 40 years ago at the dawn of the seventies.

Even then, branding was struggling for its seat at the high table of commerce:

I wonder whether all top management are involved deeply enough in the nature of their brands. Do they realize fully enough that it is from the success of brands rather than as products that the profits will come? Do they fully understand the nature of brands? Do they set company objectives in terms of brand positioning or simply in financial terms?

The answer – then, and perhaps all the more so now – is an emphatic “No”.

Now the unforgiving context within which marketing and advertising must operate, along with a number of questionable assumptions that have come to prevail, have forced branding’s role and value even further into the background.

One of the least satisfying developments since digital advertising has so radically disrupted the industry, is the current demand for ROI at every turn. This has pushed brand managers into a position so defensive that they can often only point to e-commerce conversions to justify investment in anything digital, other than perhaps the most meat-and-potatoes search program.

The assumption seems to be that the lion’s share of brand building is still best achieved by blanket messaging via above the line advertising, and that digital investment sits – as it perhaps always has since its inception – further down the pipe, alongside direct marketing and retail.

Such developments, given particularly that the balance sheets of many of the world’s biggest businesses continue to list brand equity as a dominant line, are surely an immense concern.

At a time when swathes of quality consumer attention are lavished on social and smartphone, can we seriously continue to imagine that brand equity – like royalty at a rugby international – watches from comfort and safety in a warm hospitality box, while every other significant aspect of the connected consumer’s life, including our own products and services, is kicked vigorously around the chilly playing field of digital?

No. Brands, for better or worse, are being actively, constantly and irresistibly constructed and deconstructed in digital. We are fascinated and bewildered by capricious shifts in the tribal sentiments of connected consumers: utter indifference to our most exquisite, flattering siren calls one moment, and the next, their inexplicable rush to engage en masse, triggered by an apparently tiny flutter of influence in a corner we never knew existed.

We have to date gained no convincing idea of how to play under the ever-shifting goal posts of 21st century marketing. Certainly the performance of advertising in digital – while spend increases every year, the bulk of the investment is still in the “defensive”, hygiene-factor area of search – continues to vex all but the most dedicated of advocates.

Here we revisit and review this important element of Stephen King’s substantial legacy, the argument for advertising’s key role as architect and builder of the brand equity that translates as preference and premium prices, through the unsentimental lens of post-digital culture and commerce.

To continue to read the rest of the essay please follow this link to The Strategy Review.