A Better Question than “What Does the Brand Get Out of This?”
A lot of people are cynical about brands. This is easy to forget when you work in marketing, and you regularly stay up till midnight working on a brand’s latest, highly-researched, tested and thought-out campaign.
But what a lot of people, partners or even collaborators often think when they look at a campaign is, “What does the brand get out of this?”
Now, this is not a naive question. Oftentimes brands do get something out of a service they provide. Look at Facebook and Google – while their sites are free and absolutely life-changing, they are getting a lot of data out of them. The benefit for them is clear, but not enough to cancel out our appreciation for them. Beyond just collecting data, many brands are also initiating socially-conscious campaigns to distract from the muck of a recent P.R. disaster.
But when you can’t look at anything a brand does without asking this question, you’re thinking too small. The best brands are not merely transactional with their customers. They don’t approach a charity they’re working with and say, “You scratch our back, we scratch yours.” They know that reputation is its own reward, especially in a time when success can be determined by what the masses are saying about you on the Internet.
A better thing to ask is “What does a brand become by doing this?” Whether they’re getting something out of their actions or not, better brands do something because it will make them a better brand.
I’m often surprised at how often even the media is still stuck on the old question. This Fast Company article is absolutely perplexed about why CNN would buy smart iPad magazine Zite and not use it just to push CNN content forward. Similarly, they were shocked when AOL created a similar product called Editions, which promised not to favor AOL content. The writer even refers to it as a “remarkably unselfish product.”
It never occurred to the writer that AOL and CNN would simply want to have useful products that help people’s lives in their portfolio, without any ulterior motive. If AOL ever dies (I know you’re balking at the thought), it can’t hurt to have something with social relevance under your name to concentrate on instead.
Sure a lot of brands are growing so they can have incestuous relationships between their many products. But the importance of earning trust is catching on, and we have to start appreciating trustworthy brands instead of assuming all brands have nothing but the worst motives.