Compare and contrast! A new game for loyal readers to play alone or as a family.
Firstly, from Wired:
And yet there’s something strange going on in branding land. Even as companies have spent enormous amounts of time and energy introducing new brands and defending established ones, Americans have become less loyal. …
If you had a set of customers today, you could be pretty sure most of them would still be around two years, five years, ten years from now. That’s no longer true. …
The aristocracy of brand is dead. Long live the meritocracy of product.
(From The Decline of Brands)
Similarly, from Hugh MacLeod at gapingvoid:
Branding is dead.
Holy Shit.
Branding. Is. Dead.
We thought just marketing and advertising were dead. Nope. Branding kicked the bucket, too.
Dead, dead, and dead.
(From branding is dead with follow-up at why branding is dead)
And the other side, exhibit 2a from Andy Abramson (sorry to pick on you, Andy!):
Sure, companies like Vonage and Packet 8 have made some announcements that say some of the same things, mostly where you can buy their service, but not one of the other VoIP players has taken the kind of approach that AT&T, which with their budgets and brand equity are the only ones who can pull it all together the way they have. [my emphasis]
And from the horse’s mouth, (then) SVP of AT&T Consumer in USA Today in 2003:
“The AT&T brand is a huge asset that the company has, and it stands for quality, integrity and family values.”
(From AT&T will sell prepaid cards for online Web purchases)
Spot the difference? I just couldn’t resist bringing this up. I keep reading stories that say “AT&T trying to recover old glory via VoIP” and “gee, what a great brand”. Each time I lower my sorry face into my outstretched hands and shake my head.
Now Andy would argue that AT&T have a superior product, so they’re winning in the meritocracy space. But I just make a very satisfactory zero-cost Skype call to the US this evening, enabled by presence and IM, and with a voice quality CallVantage will never meet.
It’s not just branding dying. The PSTN is dying. It’s a Norwegian blue. It can’t compete on features against an infinitely flexible stupid network. Sinking zillions of dollars into an inflexible centralised IP infrastructure doesn’t help you. You’re not building a Next Generation Network with all those session border controllers, SIP proxies and media gateways. You’re building a Last Generation Network. It’s the end of the line. All change please!
Just think: system A where every new feature needs to pass through the AT&T product development cycle, or system B which can build off a Skype API, or even start afresh at minimal cost if that doesn’t suffice.
The kids are all chatting on XBox Live. (They’d chat via Yahoo! IM on their mobiles if only they could get hold of a decent cheap IP connection. You really think the cellular carriers will be able to co-opt WiFi in the home? You’re kidding me, right?) I’m using Skype. My mum’s on Skype. The big story isn’t service displacement to wireless or CallVantage. It’s service provider elimination. Value slipping through the fingers of network operators.
SIP is barely more involved than SMTP and HTTP. We don’t expect to pay a service provider big bucks for access to simple protocols like this. Improved IP-based re-creations of last century’s voice products just don’t cut it any more. And your brand won’t help you on bit in changing that. Five years of arbitrage won’t sustain AT&T through another century. Enjoy watching the last few turns of the game. Taking a few enemy pawns and bishops late in the game doesn’t matter when checkmate looms.
Posted by Martin Geddes at 12:17 AMTrackBack URL for this entry:
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Branding is Dead? I was led to believe that branding was the solution to some of our problems!
OPINION://Marketing: The cause of, and solution to, all your spam problems
http://www.telepocalypse.net/archives/000028.html
Robin Geddes
Posted by: at November 12, 2004 09:02 AMHere's my latest thinking on the matter... The old article would be written differently today.
There are three things that get conflated: confidence, trust and brand.
Confidence is an expectation of certain behaviour or attributes based on past experience.
Trust in its original sense was a hope of certain behaviour in the absence of past experience. Leaving your car unlocked in an unfamiliar place with the keys under the sun visor is an example of trust (or stupidity if you're in Gateshead.) (The term "trust" is now normally meant to mean "confidence": do you trust George Bush is about the expected behaviour of a known person, not a stranger.)
Brand is a superset of confidence and trust. It includes a whole bunch of image and lifestyle associations too. You expect a Sony DVD player to be great because the CD player you bought 10 years ago worked well. But you've no experience of Sony DVD players. The value of a brand only exists to the extent to which it creates premium pricing, and a reluctance to switch suppliers for consumable products that require repeated purchase (e.g. washing powder).
Back to spam. Stangers send you messages. You trust them to be legitimate and let them enter your inbox. But you have zero confidence. What you seek is some mutually known third party who can turn a trust-based transaction into a confidence-based one. In other words, someone who based on past behavior can assert the likely value of the message to the recipient. But there may be no premium price offered to the supplier of this assertion, and communicants may choose to easily switch suppliers. So branding is dead, confidence and trust aren't. Perhaps.
Martin
I have had some respect for and loyalty to a few companies over the years. All things being roughly equal (and even a bit in the competitions favor) I would tend to buy their products.
However there is a very dangerous side to this. If the company fails my personal sense of it's reputation, then the "closure" is far fiercer than it would be towards an enterprise to which I am more neutral. Once the slack is used up it's pretty much gone.
For example HP bothered me as I saw the new management destroy the "HP way" of management, then there was less certainty of quality and finally this trick of loading a nearly empty set of cartridges with a low cost printer. This last was the final rejection of "quality, quality quality, no matter what the cost." I no longer disagree when people say that this is a printer company that got over it's head with computers, not knowing it was the founding company of "Silicon Valley."
I feel a similar contempt for AT&T though still hold hope for Lucent and the scanty remaints of Bell labs.
But some companies once branded in my mind are entities I will probably never again by from. It is a double edged sword.
Posted by: at November 13, 2004 09:21 AM
thats good,
your coming to meet up for a xmas bash eh?
how many are u bringing with u?
best wishes
tom