The Significance of Style & Substance: Brand Building Outside of the Box…

By Shelley Jane Graff 

            Marketing and branding opportunities used to be fairly limited in scope depending on the specific message’s medium.  Communication used to be quite limited.  Limited, that is, compared to the seemingly limitless sea of communication opportunities that exist today.  A sea that will only continue to grow, making successful marketing and branding strategies a matter of honing in on style and substance.  Success for a brand nowadays seems to lie in its ability to connect with its consumer on a deeper level than ever before. 

            In the book Brand Digital: Simple Ways Top Brands Succeed in the Digital World by Allen P. Adamson, Michael Mendenhall (Chief Marketing Officer of Hewlett-Packard) is quoted saying: “‘Many companies continue to look at marketing in conventional ways—from a mass market point of view.  Branding today is not about the media; it’s about the idea…’” (p. 94) He goes on to say, “‘The idea should be the organizing principle, and it should inform everything you do to help consumers grasp your brand promise in whatever channel you’re reaching them: the television, the blogs, the banner ads, or the word of mouth.’” (Mendenhall qtd. in Adamson, p. 94) In other words, instead of using digital media as a means of branding through medium-specific strategies use brand as a unifying notion through which the company finds specific strategies.  In the endless amount of digital media opportunities lies the potential to pick and choose them based on the brand’s “attitude.” 

            As John Morgan writes in his book: Brand Against the Machine: How to Build Your Brand, Cut Through the Marketing Noise, and Stand Out from the Competition, “Branding is about emotion, and emotion turn prospects into buyers.” (p. 6) The exponentially growing technological advancements of the modern day demand the construction of a relationship between brand and consumer that goes beyond buying and selling—it is a realm that is interactive and full of reciprocity.  Branding is a matter of building a business’s identity—to brand is to speak to the company’s character enough to identify with the character of its consumers.   

            (Word Count = 348 words total)