Often, one of the best results from reading blogs is that it spurs other, related thoughts.
The judgement and weight given to how you differentiate your brand and the need for clarity in communication came to mind after reading the Mark Cuban/BlogMaverick post on Branding and Newspapers, a Lesson in How Not to Brand and Market.
He makes several noteworthy points about the value of differentiation in branding. For example:
Never, ever, ever consider something that any literate human being with Internet access can create in under 5 minutes to be a product or service that can in any way differentiate your business.
If you feel that you must offer this product or service as a means of “keeping up” or as a checklist item that you must have for competitive reasons, then do everything possible to brand the product or service in a manner that segregates it from the masses. Perception is reality. If you can leverage your existing brand to create the perception that yours is different from the masses in some meaningful way, then you must do everything you can to do so.
Creating a perceived differentiation can take the form of promoting better execution or quality of the product or service, or it may be something as simple as just branding it with a different name than the mass product or service.
Failure to do so will pull your brand down to that of the masses or elevate the masses to a position of being better able to compete with you.
For the most part, the emotional ties around a brand are what make it a success, a failure or just mediocre. The strengths of the brand are what allows the company to survive a crisis, and what propels the company to continued growth beyond competitors. And, for weak brands that have no emotional ties and rely on other activites like low-end pricing and commoditization, they struggle in times of crisis and the regular, cyclical market downturns.
But, part of that branding is to clearly communicate what’s so different. Educating the market is often unnecessary time and costs spent away from effectively marketing the brand — and communicating what’s so different, so special, so unique, so in-demand about it.
Sure, education plays into the branding process, but it can be an up-hill climb and distracting from the core message.
Just because someone can quickly, easily duplicate the appearance of what you’ve done — copy a blog like the one you have — it doesn’t mean the content and the quality are also copied. A blog is just a platform. The content is what makes it different.
I’ve been working on this post in my head since Friday. Before finishing it Tuesday evening, I checked back on Mark Cuban’s blog. Lo and behold there was a comment on another post that makes my point — and makes it better. It comes from NYTimes Sports Editor Tom Jolly:
[T]he defining difference among all news sources has been whether the reporting is reliable - and that has been the case since the beginning of time. When you need information - real, trustworthy information - you go to the source you believe in, whether they are distributing their content by word of mouth, on a cave wall, via pamphlet, newspaper, magazine or through a digital format.
We call our “real time” news reports “blogs” because it’s a term our readers have become familiar with, but what we do with our blogs is different than, say, Deadspin or BlogMaverick. The convention is popular because of the ease of posting, but that doesn’t mean the content of our postings is the same as other sites that also describes themselves as “blogs,” any more than the content of our newspaper is the same as other newspapers.
As with any branding effort, there are judgment calls in how to proceed. Yes, you need to set your brand apart from others in the marketplace — but you can’t confuse the marketplace with your communication.
There is no right or wrong answer in the process — until you start getting results and you see where you need to better differentiate or more clearly communicate.
–Mike
