Brand Clegg and How To Build A Brand

If you didn't see my article in the EDP Business section, here it is now in all its (slightly faded) glory:

In the weeks running up to the election, all sorts of pronouncements were made about Nick Clegg and how he was going to cause an upset. In the end, of course, he did cause an upset – but not as a result of anything he’d planned.

Quite a few people were left with egg on their faces over Clegg. Despite what they told us, he simply wasn’t something that most people were prepared to take a punt on.

The worst thing I heard about Clegg before the election was that he’d created a great brand. The worst thing I heard about him after the election was that, despite his failure, he still had a great brand.

Here’s a question: how do you discover whether your brand is a good brand or a bad brand? The answer is very simple. But I can guarantee that most business people will assume that it’s complicated.

And they’ll assume it’s complicated because there are people out there who do everything they can to turn basic marketing and advertising principles into dark, mysterious arts.

Here we go: The only surefire way to tell whether you’ve got a good brand is if people are buying your products. If they’re not buying your products, you haven’t got a good brand. It’s that simple.

Nick Clegg didn’t have a good brand.

The thing is, you can’t simply take what you consider to be good brand values, paste them on to your product and hope for the best. It’s not you who decides what makes a good brand – it’s the people buying your product. And the only way they’ll decide if your brand is any good is by buying and using your product.

As the excellent Bob Hoffman says: “ We don’t get them to try our product by convincing them to love our brand; we get them to love our brand by convincing them to try our product.”

It’s why I’m so suspicious of notions of “branding” – because it’s the wrong way round. Just think about the great brands out there and how they got to be that way.

Apple, for instance. It’s a great brand because it makes great products. And does great advertising. The same goes for John Lewis. They didn’t just paste brand values on to their products - they were built up over time.

Again, as Hoffman says: “If you get the product right, the brand will take care of itself. If you don’t get the product right, all the branding in the world won’t help.”

As Nick Clegg, and his supporters, discovered.

There’s a lesson here for business people: don’t waste your time, and money, worrying about textbook “brand values” and how you can apply them to your product. Worry, instead, about creating a good product and doing good advertising and promotion. If you get those things right, you’ll get people to buy your product: which will then result in them loving your brand.

It might take a while, but that’s how good brands are built. They’re simply not created in a matter of days, or weeks.

Comments

[nick]

nah, you can build a brand in just 30 days...

;-)