David Emery Online

Why Brand?

2 August 2006

Is branding still important? More to the point, is branding still relevant online or is it more important then ever?

Take MySpace for example – what is their brand? Is it a good one? The logo is quite frankly appalling, and the message that the site tells me is “amateur”. However, obviously none of this matters in the slightest. MySpace’s users and target market either aren’t aware of the branding and the problems surrounding it (how generic is both the name and the logo?) or they simply don’t care.

Now, to counter this we have the iPod phenomenon. The iPod is all about the brand – the player itself is certainly better then its rivals, but not that much better. So in the iPod’s case the branding is hugely important – and we’re talking about a very similar demographic here as well (I’m sure the vast majority of MySpacers have iPods).

What gives?

It really boils down to what you are trying to sell.

It is, of course, all about the content; the fallacy of many branding exercises is the deluded notion that branding is important all of the time. In fact, the inverse is much more likely. In MySpace’s case the interesting content is your friends, and the social space it creates. In what way does the branding affect that? None at all.

In the iPod’s case however, what you are selling is both the look of the player, and the story that the iPod is better then the other players. The branding is essential in both these cases – affecting both the aesthetics of the player, and the believability of the story.

So, lets take this logic and apply it to some other cases.

Say for example you are trying to sell a record. Branding is hugely prevalent in the music industry – not too surprising for an industry based on marketing – but is it worth it? For a start what are you actually selling? Two things, actually: The music, and the potential for more music.

The first one is fairly straight forward: branding is not needed. Does a good brand for an album make the slightest bit of difference to the quality of the music? No. It may play a role in creating a successful advertising campaign around it, but then advertising doesn’t work these days anyway.

Now, how does a brand affect the promise of more music? When I say “the promise of more music”, this generally means the artist or band themselves – after all, why would you care about an artist if you didn’t think they were going to release more records? Branding an artist then is surely all about keeping a constant brand across multiple releases. A few bands actually manage this – look at Basement Jaxx’s back catalogue for example – but the vast majority actually go through a complete re-brand once an album. Anecdotally, it seems like the more popular artists are the ones that maintain a brand over a several year period – whether this is related or not I don’t know.

For an artist, the brand purely helps as a reminder – a distinctive logo reminds you of the music you’ve heard before, so if you liked what you heard you get automatically associate with the brand in a positive way, and hence anything related to the brand gets strengthened. If, however the artist is for whatever reason not a long term artist – maybe it’s a collaboration or a compilation – then the artist branding is really inconsequential.

In conclusion then, branding – now that advertising is loosing its grip on the world as we are increasingly desensitised to it – is not necessarily the be all and end all. In some cases it is vital, but others it’s really not.

Don’t forget what you are selling.