There’s a school of thought in advertising circles that effectively divorces the retail component of advertising from the brand component. The ‘image’ people focus almost exclusively on the brand, while the ‘product’ people focus on the deal-driven work (and once they make a deal, they’ll pay off your old ad, no matter how much you owe!)

 

This separation, aside from creating elitists from the first group while retaining order-takers in the second, is a vast mistake that results in mixed-messaging, irrelevant to ineffective advertising, as well as wasting the client’s time and money. All retail marketing needs to flow through the brand ideology, and all branding needs to have the ultimate goal be to sell more products and services.

 

I’ve been fortunate in my career to have worked at all ends of this spectrum, churning-and-burning retail ads, crafting brands from scratch, and fitting both image and retail advertising within the context of the brand. At each Tier of advertising work, I’ve encountered severe disconnects from the others, and it truly hampers the overall impact on the marketplace.

 

 

In retail advertising, the brand of the product itself is rarely considered. This is made very clear in the Saturday automotive section of your local newspaper, or when you pick up a Sunday circular from a major retailer. Here, product and price are king. Get the cost-leader ‘hero’ hook out there on the page, and everything else is secondary. You’ve all seen this form of retail advertising. It’s usually dressed-up (or down, really) with cheesy graphics, bursts and doo-dads exploding onto the page, web banner or television screen.

 

 

One of my all-time ‘favorites’ of this category involved a local car dealer’s Saturday spread. Two cartoon graphic depictions of the owners of the dealership were created…and then dressed up in outfits fitting the theme of that week’s ‘hook.’ For example, one week they had a sale on their minivan product, so the theme was ‘space’: a galactic background, with the minivan on the moon, and the two cartoon owners in spacesuits! The week they used the truck as the loss leader featured a ‘western-cowboy’ motif…and so on and so forth. As long as the price took center-stage, everything else was merely over-the-top ‘stop on this page’ nonsense.

 

 

Specialists in retail advertising are no doubt wondering exactly what is wrong with this picture. You want an attention-getting ad, and the space-dealers certainly fills the bill. Well, for starters, there’s no tie into the national branding strategy from the manufacturer. Remember, an automaker spends hundreds of millions of dollars per year to develop and market their brand. This sum of money is spent not merely to move product, but to create an ideology that increases the intrinsic value of the product itself. To put it another way: the price is only one way to create a sale…the branding is the other, and effective branding means that the price of a product or service can actually be raised, purely on the strength of the brand.

 

 

Nowhere is the power of branding over product more obvious than in automotive marketing. Take the compact-car model from any major car conglomerate. Why does Brand#1’s version sell for less than Brand#2’s version? No doubt, a little of this is a meager increase in equipment and feature content…but most of it comes from branding the exact same vehicle in a different way. Sometimes, this platform strategy is taken to absurd heights, with the mass-market midsized sedan selling for more than ten thousand dollars less than the luxury-make. Remember…same essential car, same essential platform and equipment. It all comes down to branding.

 

 

So, it’s a fallacy to think that retail specialists need not understand the product’s brand and image. Brand comprehension in retail is key to targeting messages to the audience the company is trying to reach. I had a co-worker at the beginning of my career who described retail advertising as ‘throwing spaghetti at a wall and waiting to see what sticks.’ It is this attitude that has kept him from progressing forward in this profession. Indeed, many retail/product peeps share this belief…and it’s why there are so many troglodytes in the profession. Almost every other white collar job gets the dead weight filtered out along the way…but not advertising!

 

 

A good retail advertising specialist understands the brands they are associated with. They siphon away messages if they don’t fit within the context of the ideology. And they take advantage of the zillions of dollars spent nationally on branding to enhance their work in the other Tiers. Good retail respects the brand, and uses it to enhance and sell the ‘hook.’ The pace of retail advertising is often described as fast and hectic, but I’ve found that most of that frenetic energy is the result of non-direction…of ‘throwing spaghetti at a wall and waiting to see what sticks.’ The way to focus that energy is the brand. It distinguishes between the good and the hack. It’s what sticks.

 

 

On the other side of the fence are the gurus, the visionaries, the brand specialists. For this group, it’s entirely about the brand ideology and nothing else. For many of us, it’s this realm of advertising that prompted our entry into the field in the first place…to create mood boards and mantras, to be the inventive force that shapes an entire ideology is quite compelling, no? I’ve had the honor of working at two branding houses at this point, and the process of ideological generation is quite thrilling. There’s this school of thought that if a brand is strong and resonant, one can sell anything on the power of that brand…

 

 

…so why is it that the brand people have little to no respect for the product or service itself? Recently, I worked on a real estate branding campaign, where the art director was adamant that putting a picture of the building itself in the ad was somehow against the brand! I was floored at the thought, especially since we were only showing a simple, modern art piece as the ‘hero.’ Furthermore, putting my consumer hat on, I’d wonder, if I were in the market for real estate, why I couldn’t see that real estate in marketing communications. I’d think that it was an ugly property.

 

 

On another project, a silhouetted image of a plant was used as a possible icon for the brand…which looked suspiciously like pubic hair, despite the ‘cultural relevance’ to the project. Rule of thumb: I don’t care how far into the process you are: if it looks like genitals, you’ve crossed a line.

 

 

There’s such a thing as going too deep into the process of branding, of burying one’s head up one’s own ass so far that you can’t escape. Remember…at the end of the day, we’re trying to increase the value of a product or service via branding. In effect, we’re playing a more conceptual game of retailing. A brand without sales is not a brand for long. And it’s important to remember that we’re not creating art here. It’s advertising, and it uses the tenets and some of the techniques of the traditional art field, but it’s not art.

 

 

I say this not to disrespect the profession, but to honor what we do. Artists have free-range to explore and discover their pieces…and are impaired by limits set, which is why they haven’t ‘sold-out.’ To put it another way: ‘real’ artists haven’t sold out because they can’t. On the other hand, advertising artists that focus on branding are basically creating limits, and are working to develop a filter that limits communication to realize targeted results. We sold out because we can. It takes real talent to not only establish and define a brand, but to work inside the context of that brand, to use the limits to target a demographic…and to propagandize your brand in a crowded market.

 

 

However, to not respect the end goal of the work in advertising (the eventual sale of a product or service,) is to not do your job as a brand specialist very well at all. For the client, it means investing in an ideological adventure that doesn’t work. It means a breach of trust between the client and the branding house: they are trusting your expertise to create profit…and if it doesn’t… And for the creatives themselves, to fashion a brand that also creates sales is to get another chance to create anew, no?

 

 

Strangely, the image side of the business also attracts its share of bad apples as well: people who have beautiful books but no marketing perspective. Some of this is the result of modern technology…as now anybody with inDesign and a night course can be a ‘graphic artist’ (One of the great things about copywriting involves technology not really changing all that much from pen-and-paper to typewriter to MSWord…you can either write or you can’t.) These people are smart people who like art and creativity…and now have the tools to fake being a creative person.

 

 

For example, not too long ago I worked with an artist who branded everything with a ‘hipster, nostalgia vibe.’ Everything. In his own words, “this is the period that makes me happiest. I feel like I should have been alive then…the fifties.” Oookay…but what if the product or service doesn’t really warrant a lounge-brand?  (Does toothpaste really make you think of Dean Martin and martinis? Discuss.) Moreover, if one always does the exact same thing…or imagines a variant on a theme, over and over again, is that creative? Intelligence is not creativity. It takes both to be a brilliant brand artist, as well as respecting our craft: inventing ways to ideologically result in more profit per product or service sale.

 

 

Because it’s both sides: retail and branding that tell the story of a product. And both need to be married together to target consumers across all marketing communications. I urge everybody in the industry to take a hard look at their counterparts on either side of the proverbial fence, and discover ways that retail and brand work synergistically. The work will be more challenging, rewarding…and effective. Effective work means more work…and more chances for us to display our skills.

    

Filed under: Strategy