More on branding

Says Craig: “While you are right to say that branding is a critical step in establishing a long term business model, the real problem that the internet presents is how you create that branding in the first place. For something like the New Yorker the physical artifact is, I think, relevant. Most magazines, branded or otherwise, can't say that."

Branding is one of the great banes of the business universe. Established companies with known, long-term brands hire herds of recent MBAs at extraordinary expense to tell them what their brand is all about. As a general rule, after a long enough period of time, the owners of corporate brands seem to no longer understand the meaning of their brands. I mean, someone starts a business based on a good idea, and that business succeeds, and the product of that business is recognized by consumers, and the brand, which is the consumers’ gestalt concept of that business, is developed. Then the company starts making other products, and the founder dies of old age and is replaced by a board and a bunch of business execs who understand running businesses but do not necessarily understand the products the business produces, or the brand those products represent. Until, eventually, you get companies whose name, derived from their original product, no longer make sense because they no longer produce the original product. Send in the clowns MBAs.

The key here is that the brand, despite what the producers might want it to be, is controlled by the minds of the consumers. The brand is what the consumers think it is, not what the producers necessarily want it to be, although in a good business situation, those two are identical. I was talking about magazine branding, but what applies there applies everywhere. Good branding is branding that identifies products the way the company wants them to be branded and how consumers want to consume them versus bad branding, the release of products that are inconsistent with the brand, either on the part of the producer or the consumer. A perfect example of good branding is Apple, where all products come across as the brainchildren of Steve Jobs, elegant, safe, classy, expensive, simple, effective, stylish, hip. Whether the products are all of those things is another matter altogether; the important thing is that is the brand, so when you encounter an Apple product, your response to it is a combination of those things. (That the Apple brand also includes paternalism, Big Brother control, v.1.0 fails, etc., is probably limited among the technoscenti, and not the public at large, who simply don’t care about DRM because they have neither the time, patience, interest nor inclination to torrent files.) Bad branding? Well, let’s say the makers of a certain product tangentially associated with chocolate released “Ex-Lax Brand Truffles” to candy stores…

So a brand is more than just a name of a product. It is the concept of the product. The meta of the product. The gestalt. Whatever. Amazon has become one of the biggest internet companies working from scratch, with a name that has no identification with its initial service, and it established its brand (cheap, fast, exhaustive, accessible, friendly) by doing a good job with books and slowly expanding into everything else. Once upon a time there was no Amazon, now it is indispensable. And it is a meaningful internet brand. So brands can be established on the internet with no previous connection to a product. Content brands on the internet tend to be aggregators, like Digg or HuffPo or Boing Boing, but then again, Andrew Sullivan writes plenty of original net-only stuff from a recognizable brand position (absent The Atlantic).

In magazines and newspapers, the brand is relative to the perception of the public of the editors of that periodical. If the editors are perceived as having an identifiable, coherent stance, then it’s a brand. Like the New Yorker, and plenty of others. This brand starts somewhere, and sticks or not. Wired is a recent example of a strong brand in magazines. Oprah is another. I maintain that this branding can transcend a particular medium, but the brand owner needs to be clever to make it happen, and to understand the other media it wishes to enter. My original contention was that the content of magazines is now available as the content of the internet, and that the internet is rendering magazines obsolete. Publishers of magazines, to survive, need to become publishers of web content, at which most of them suck. Boing Boing services my need for “magazine” content, and does it better than a magazine because it’s fast, current, and multimedia. BB also has a recognizable editorial voice, in its writing and its aggregation, which is why I wouldn’t recommend it to my mother. There used to be magazines for everybody; now there’s websites for everybody. The content—short-form journalism—is the same.

So, today’s magazines, as I say, will live or die as they master the new medium, the same way movie studios lived or died in the 50s when they confronted the new medium of television. Same content, different delivery system. Some old brands will travel along, some new ones will be created. Possession of a strong brand will be no guarantee of being able to make the leap. Lack of a strong brand will be no guarantee of failure, as long as you work toward overcoming that lack with consistent content that can be seen as a brand.

Think about this. Today, J schools are enjoying their greatest popularity ever. What are all those journalists going to do when they graduate into a world with no newspapers or magazines? They’ll think of something.