WHEN DEFINING YOUR BRAND

WHEN DEFINING YOUR BRAND, DON'T LISTEN TO THE EXPERTS

WHY THEIR OPINIONS MAY STEER YOU THE WRONG WAY

When defining your brand, it is often tempting to listen to the experts. The people who everyone recognizes as the opinion leaders of a specific industry. Be careful!

I remember hearing Bob Pittman deliver a speech to a team of managers once. Prior to joining America Online, Bob was founded of MTV and he headed up Six Flags (an amusement park) earlier in his career.

Bob used to tell us, if you want to know which amusement park had the greatest roller coaster, you would get the most passionate and vocal responses from the self proclaimed roller coaster experts. These experts would claim that there was no place quite like Kennywood (I don’t remember if this was the actual park name). The park had an old original roller coaster that got these folks excited. It was build like a roller coaster should be – wood and creaky!

Problem is, if you listen to these experts about what kind of amusement park you should provide to mainstream America, you would be way off. Think Disney World instead. While these experts would not be too impressed with the majority of what Disney offers, the mainstream audience for amusement parks is quite happy with the Disney experience.

Consider AOL in the early days. Ask any self respecting techie at the time (and even now), and they would not have selected AOL as the top choice for internet access. In their opinion, in its efforts to be simple it lost much of the functionality of the more “obvious” choices. AOL was close to garbage in their mind and would never rival some of the lesser known but more technically advanced options. If they were in charge of what was offered to the world, people would be offered a less friendly, albeit more technically advanced option.

The problem is that these experts which often include the early adopters of new technology, are not the focus group or best representative of mainstream people who can make a product a huge success by their shear volume. AOL clearly didn’t mind being thought of as the “training wheels of the internet”, as they targeted the masses – the people who had not yet gotten onboard the internet bandwagon. AOL in fact did adopt the slogan, “It’s so easy to use, no wonder it’s #1”.

Even though your offering may never be destined for the masses (many services and products are targeted at a more narrowly defined target market), you should be careful of relying too heavily on the experts when defining what you’re offering (your brand’s promise) and how to position yourself in the marketplace.

Certainly you should hear what these experts have to say since it can only help you become more aware of the weaknesses in your offering, but then spend more time listening to the mainstream representatives of your target market. For example, if you’re focused on the target market of accountants, you’ll want to hear what the leading accountants have to say, but then listen closely to the rank and file accountants to get their perspective as well. They may well steer you toward an offering that meets the demands and needs of the much larger, but perhaps much less vocal majority.

Now that you can see the promise you wish to deliver, let's talk about how you can consistently execute