Over the past few years, there has been two converse trends that speak to an interesting shift in the marketing landscape. On the one hand, the benefits of a strong brand have become more discussed and desired than ever before. CEOs, politicians, athletes, and entertainers are obsessed with developing and shaping their respective brand. Numerous self-help columns promise to help people develop their individual brands. Never before has branding been perceived as such a critical success factor by so many people in so many fields.
So these should be heady days for established branding experts. Marketers from brand managers to agency directors should be enjoying unprecedented status and influence. Yet the opposite situation seems to be the case. White papers for CMOs circulate around the struggle to get a seat at the decision-making table. Agencies are increasingly treated as commodities, set out for bid in much the same way as office supply contracts. Major consumer marketing companies have bypassed the professionals to embrace “user-generated content” and crowdsourcing to fuel their marketing campaigns.
One explanation for these contrasting trends is that branding has become too important to be left to the marketers. Supporters of this view argue that the limited toolset and mindset of traditional marketers has made them ill-equipped to deal with the challenges of the modern marketplace. There is some isolated truth in this, but anyone who has dealt with a large sample of CMOs can attest that as whole they are as engaged, intelligent, and creative as anyone you could hope to meet.
The more credible explanation is that branding has become bigger than marketing. The digital era has brought an unprecendented amount of information and transparency to products and the companies who make them. As a result, people are forming brand impressions from a far greater number of inputs than ever before. A frustrating customer service experience becomes a viral video hit, a golf outing with clients sparks national outrage, financing from an overseas bank results in a store boycott. So brand impressions are being formed less by the things marketers control and more by the corporate culture and its day-to-day operations.
Branding used to cover a company like frosting on a cake. It was something you added at the end to make it look good. Now the branding is baked in. For branding experts to contribute, they have to make a positive impact on what goes into the cake, not on what comes out of the oven.
The Ryan Report 