The Next Engine: Beyond Campaign Thinking

The Church of the Customer blog has an interesting interview with David Vinjamuri, author of Accidental Branding. It’s a good interview, and you should know that the “accidental” part refers to the incident(s) that caused an entrepreneur to start his or her company - an incident that occurred accidentally.

Here are couple of things Vinjamuri talks about that apply all of us involved in branding and marketing:

Learn how to tell your story really well. I call it ‘building a myth’ because like a myth the story has to be easy to remember and share, dramatic, and it has to have a lesson contained within it. That shareable founding story is what consumers use to convert people to your brand.

Sweating details is about choreographing the brand interaction – whether that is opening your brand packaging, approaching the customer service counter, calling your business on the phone or even having a vendor meeting. If any of these interactions fail to represent the brand, then you’ve just lost your brand positioning.

I pulled these out of the 10 questions he answers in the post because they remind me that so much of what works isn’t rocket science (or rocket surgery, as a client of mine who mangled cliches used to say). The problem is that most clients and their “marketing partners” are so far removed from day-to-day interactions with living, breathing customers that we forget just how basic it is.

Instead, we discuss things academically, do research behind mirrors, review secondary research, and wonder why our consumer measures aren’t performing as well as they should based on our proprietary prediction models.

If branding can occur “accidentally”, why aren’t we better at it?

Tags: branding, Church of the Customer