Steve Hoch
Retail and Brand Strategy Consultant, Proteus
Marketing Professor, The Wharton School of Business

At the Design Management Institute's Brand/Design 20 Conference in Cincinatti June 11 - 13, I had the pleasure of addressing a group of attendees on the subject of Branding Without Advertising. These are some of the key observations and insights that were part of this discussion.

Why would anyone even try to create a brand without advertising? It's not a rhetorical question. These days, it's a decision many companies are making for a variety of valid, thoughtful reasons. I can give you four that come to mind right off the bat:

1. Advertising costs money. No surprise there, right? Advertising isn't free. And smaller companies, as well as product lines within bigger companies, simply don't have the marketing budgets or resources to support an advertising effort. Plenty of smaller firms just don't have the money to build demand and equity for their brand through traditional advertising channels. Instead, they've made the decision to use the limited dollars available to them on things they view as more important, such as product design, packaging or securing retail commitments. For them, leveraging the consumer's experience at the point of purchase takes precedent over running glossy ads in magazines.

2. If a company makes products that people purchase on an infrequent basis, where and when to deliver advertising messages becomes problematic. Keith Reinhard, formerly head of DDB Needham Worldwide, one of the most respected advertising agencies ever created, was reportedly fond of telling clients that the trick to effective advertising is determining "when and where am I most likely to find my prospect in a mood where he or she is most likely to be open to suggestion?" That may make perfect sense for fast food chains and consumer products manufacturers, but it's not always applicable for other kinds of companies. Those companies may not know when their prospects are in buying mode, but they know this: they're virtually guaranteed to find prospects that are open to suggestion when those prospects are standing at the shelf inspecting the package, and that's where those companies choose to commit their marketing resources.

3. Consumers are hard to target. If that was true before, it's even more true now, given how fragmented people's media habits have become. And that's only the first problem advertisers have to deal with. There's also the incredible media clutter we all face these days. It's no wonder consumers have wrapped themselves in multiple spam filters to reduce the all-out attack that comes at them on a daily basis. Given these realities, you'll understand why I say it has never been harder to create an efficient media strategy.

4. Advertising turns people off. It's the last thing my friends in the advertising business want to acknowledge, but believe me, they know it as well as the rest of us do - advertising reeks of partisanship, and people react against blatant intentions to persuade. Notwithstanding those few great commercial moments that appear annually on the Super Bowl, we are largely jaded when it comes to advertising. Marketers these days are relying on less partisan sources to get their message out, including users, bloggers, experts and friends. Yes, it's more difficult to control the message, but it can also be so much more effective.

That said, the team at Proteus constantly encourages our clients to make the most of every touch point along "The Retail Journey." In fact, we encourage our clients to not only provide innovative product design but also to embrace effective websites, packaging, merchandising and point-of-sale collateral to inform, entice, interest, educate and gain consumers' confidence at those critical moments when they are predisposed to make a purchase decision.

Take a look at the download and see if your company is addressing all these opportunities to bring your brand to life.


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