We've been asking this question lately. More philosophical musing, we suppose. Perhaps you shouldn't try to "do" branding. Perhaps you should just go about the business of trying as best you can to create the best possible product or service for your customers, and let whatever happens with the "brand", happen. Maybe there's too much emphasis on "doing" branding, "doing" marketing? Perhaps you should just work at your business, day to day, tend to its affairs, be the best you can be, and worry not about the rest?
What we're after -- what Gnosis Arts is always after -- is knowledge, the knowledge that leads to freedom, power, success. We've noticed that, for companies that have been around a while, the brand seems to drive most everything. For some clients we've worked for, the brand drives almost all the traffic to the website; the brand seems to be the gravitational force that produces engagement, fascination, conversation on social media sites; the brand seems to be what scores them the big time PR wins. In short, the brand drives the marketing, actually creates the market, not the other way round.
What does this mean? Well, we see two roads. One, if you just survive for a really long time, without going out of business, eventually you will have a brand. That's not too encouragng for those of you who are "make it happen" types, we know. But the equation we've seen time and again is: Time + Survival = Brand Awareness.
The other option: actually try to "do" branding. Try to put into play a branding "strategy". Of course, "once a thing becomes conscious of itself, it loses its authenticity and innocence," some philosopher once said. But we suppose you still have to engage in it, anyway. So, how do you "do" branding?
Well, we're no experts in branding (or anything else for that matter). But we can tell you our experience. So, here it is, for you make-it-happen types.
Short answer: it's all about PR.
Gnosis Arts scored a huge PR win back in June, a feature video and story in the New York Times. Yeah. We had been tracking the number of brand mentions using Google Analytics in the months prior to the NYT piece. We simply counted the number of times our brand name, "Gnosis Arts", or one of its variants, was searched for. We did this for Jan - May 2010, the months prior to the NYT piece.
Then came the June thunder. We counted brand mentions during the month of June, when the story ran. Then, we counted the brand mentions in the months following, right up to the present day.
What we found was nothing short of awesomeness.
To summarize, brand mentions for Gnosis Arts increased some 44% during the months following the NYT story as compared to the months prior. Even more interesting: brand mentions have stayed at the higher plateau up to the date of this blog post. And during the month the story came out, brand mentions spiked some 795%. No, that wasn't a typo. I had originally thought it was 95%. I had to recalculate it. Yep, it's true. Though I'm no mathematician, even accounting for margin of error, the number was still way above 200% on even the most conservative estimates.
What this means is that more people searched in Google directly for our business name after the NYT feature than before it. The web analytics clearly demonstrate this in terms of both an increase in searches (when we view the "keywords" tab) and an increase in organic traffic from those branded search terms, as well as a terrific increase in raw traffic from the NYT (which is now one of our top referrers).
In short, top quality PR = branding = everything you need to bother with about marketing?
As a result of this, our marketing team is starting to think that the super-objective in marketing shouldn't be generating business, but generating a brand; to bring a business to the place where consumers look for the brand, even before looking for the product or service; where current and prospective customers search for the brand name more than the product or service of the brand name.
Is it gonna take time? Of course. We've been working at this for three+ years now. That's the bad news. The good news is that, now that we see the power of this thing, how fast this thing works, it's gravy from here on out (well, not exactly, but you get the point).
Building a thriving business is going to take time, either way you slice it. The question is: are you going to leave your brand identity up to the fate of time, or are you going to proactively shape your brand with the time you're alotted? Are you going to just keep spamming the free press release circuit, or are you going to really decide to get in the PR game?
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