Brand linkage fail: “Saw a great ad – don’t remember who it’s for –”

Marketing that fails because of brand linkage tends to be more painful (and more expensive) than other kinds of failure. To illustrate why, let’s look at three different categories of wasted effort and busted budgets. 

Failure Category One: Benefit Salad.  Turn on your tv, and observe the efforts of local advertisers. Or open that envelope that arrived from a would-be vendor. You won’t have to wait long before someone gives you a sermon about how they will give you quality service selection price blah blah blah. They want to throw every possible benefit at you in hopes that one sticks. Or that you’ll be swept away by their 10 Reasons Why. Notice that you remain unswept.

Failure Category Two: The Impotent Claim.  So, successful marketing needs to center on one single differentiator to separate your brand from competitors. That’s fundamental blocking and tackling. Once you get visible, get differentiated. It falls apart, however, when the claim is one that multiple brands make. We’ve written before about brands that make feeble attempts to “own” customer service. It’s incredible because e-v-e-r-y-o-n-e claims it, including all your competitors. Besides that enormous hurdle, every prospect expects perfect service as a birthright, and will ask what else you got, pal?

But let’s go beyond the amateur hour of shouting car dealers and item-and-price retailers, and tune in to bigger, more costly failures in prime time, including:

Failure Category Three: Brand Linkage, unlinked.  We step up now to the kind of big-dollar disaster when marketers get almost everything right: about the customer’s needs, about the non-rational basis of persuasion, about the need to dramatize the story in ways that surprise and delight us. Unfortunately…

A well-told story might engage our attention, show us the giddy joys of making the right choice or the dismal consequences of making the wrong choice. It can even be water-cooler talk the next day. And yet? And yet? The messaging lets the “right” brand slip from memory, or, worse yet, summons up the name of a competitor.

Brand linkage failures by definition occur when the message benefits the category in general, but not the particular brand. You’re convinced that yes, you’d love to have that automatic braking in your car so you won’t back over the charming toddler on the tricycle, but what car model was that again? 

In our experience, it’s sometimes a creative team in love with production values and colorful storytelling, but with disdain for branding. An imbalance between art and commerce.