Branding Only Works on Cattle

Citation

Paswan, A. and PhD (2010), "Branding Only Works on Cattle", Journal of Product & Brand Management, Vol. 19 No. 2, pp. 153-154. https://doi.org/10.1108/10610421011033502

If the author's objective is to start the book by using provocative, somewhat shocking arguments and goad the readers into reading further, then he has succeeded. I started the book with a bemused mind set, followed by irritation, and was finally left with a feeling of “this is interesting.” However, I must confess that I am not entirely convinced that the inherent logic on which this book is written is infallible. For example, I do not agree with the author's narrow definition of branding – i.e. “Branding is thinking that those tactics can do something more, something esoteric; like plant ideas or associates in people's subconscious that will, one day, influence them.” (p. 17) “Branding is based on an outdated and invalid desire to manipulate and control consumers' unconscious.” (p. 14) Or, “Branding is a hope wrapped in a desire inside a fantasy” (p. 17). Neither do I agree with the author's goals and objectives attributed to branding – i.e. simply raising awareness and planting ideas, and not bothering about the behavior. Maybe the brand manager in me does not want to accept an alternate definition – i.e. just behavior irrespective of how the behavior is achieved. In any case, the fact that I kept reading the book is a testimony to the author's ability to keep the reader interested.

Chapters 1 and 2 try to debunk everything we know about branding and establish that branding is useless. However, Baskin's basic premise is that branding is useless because most branding activities and efforts, i.e. advertising, use of symbols, positioning attempts, repetition, and brand recall do not sell products. The author argues that “Branding is behavior, not something before, after, or apart from it.” (p. 21). While I agree that if branding does not change behavior, it is probably not doing its job, I am not sure one can find a direct relation between branding efforts and consumer behavior. I do agree that the author is making a point here – the mediascape has become fractured, diversified, discredited, replaced, and repurposed (p. 27), but this does not mean we must debunk branding. There is more to branding than just media calisthenics. I also agree that consumers are reverting to the basics of exchange based on transparency, authenticity, interactivity, applicability, sustainability, and have the added notion of virtuality due to technological breakthroughs. However, I do not think the science and art of branding has changed. What has changed are the tools and techniques, and we must change the way we view and do branding, not simply abandon it. Clearly, the book pushes to challenge some of our basic beliefs about branding. I think this would be an impetus for a lot of research on branding in the future, which I believe is the book's true contribution.

Chapter 2 deals with some of the measurement confounds of branding. The author takes some of commonly used terms such as risk profile, considerations, market leadership, stability, global reach, and ability to cross borders, and concludes that these cannot be quantified, and hence the commonly used measures of branding are not scientific. He suggests that we must focus on questions such as “where's all the detail between awareness and eventual purchase behavior?” (p. 42). Baskin argues that most of our current branding practices and measurements revolving around such practices are flawed and we must focus on behavior as the penultimate measure of branding success.

In the next seven chapters, the author identifies and explains some of the factors that support the argument that we should focus on behavior instead of branding activities. Without meaning to reduce their importance, this review will simply list these factors and leave it to the readers to delve deeper into these factors (I am also doing this to not reveal too much). Chapter 3 delves into guerrilla marketing and elaborates on how the success of guerrilla marketing is primarily because it focuses on behavior and not just awareness and recall. Chapter 4 hints at how technology is making it easy for consumers to search and create their own content, hence basically creating a force that is labeled anti‐brand. Extending the logic further, in Chapters 5 and 6, the author touches upon social communities and asks whether any of the current social communities exhibit some core qualities such as transparency, authenticity, interactivity, virtuality, applicability, and sustainability. He further goes on to assert that the rise of social media has the potential of outsourcing the creation of content, followed by behavior through consent. Baskin identifies some of the core attributes of the social mediascape (voice, connectivity, behavior, transparency, proximity) and proposes a nine‐step process on how to use the social media to generate behavior. Chapter 7 looks at the gaming environment and offers this as yet another factor which leads to increased focus on behavior instead of typical branding concepts. The author argues that as consumers we engage in gaming as a behavior. Winning as the outcome of such behavior is critical for us, and hence an understanding of our gaming behavior could help focus on the core of marketing – behavior.

In Chapter 8, it is suggested that unless the entire company is geared towards this shift of mind set towards behavior, branding activities are unlikely to yield a satisfactory result, i.e. behavior. In the ninth chapter, Baskin acknowledges something that most managers do not want to acknowledge – success of branding is also a function of doing the right thing at the right time, or luck according to some. The book goes on to draw some analogies from nature and offers the behavior of bees or ants as an alternate way of looking at consumer groups to understand how behavior can be understood better if we looked at consumers as a group and examined consumer behavior as intricately interconnected – sort of like the behaviors of bees and ants. The book ends with a closing remark that our understanding of branding and its network of concepts is dead and the industry should be focusing on behavior.

By the end of the book, I was convinced about behavior being the most important part of branding. However, I am still not convinced about the approach taken by the author. He seems to suggest that we should be looking at just behavior and nothing else. Personally, that is a very “black‐box” approach to looking at marketing activities and behavior without any concern for understanding how consumers move from being exposed to marketing or branding activities to behavior. Notwithstanding the personal take on how we should be looking at branding, this book does raise some very pertinent questions and at least should force people to question their current belief system about branding. It should also help future researchers reexamine some of the classic “attitude‐leading‐to‐behavior” approach to branding and may be help formulate an alternative approach to branding – branding leads to behavior, which leads to attitude change.