Selling the Invisible: a field Guide to Modern Marketing \(Biz Books to Go\) pdfdrive com

A brand is money.
Brands in a Microwave World
You want a new sound system. Because you love music and hate wasting money
on large purchases, you want to choose wisely. But you also have eight calls to
return, a lawn to mow, one recital, and three Little League practices—you are, in
short, the typical Got-No-Time American.
You cannot buy more time, so you must give some up. You need shortcuts.
You need some way to speed your decision on that sound system.
Fortunately, you find your shortcut: a brand-name system.
Brands are decision-making shortcuts in a world of people like you looking
for shortcuts. Often, a brand is all the information some people will need to
choose their next sound system—even though at least one unbranded system is
clearly superior and 30 percent cheaper than the system they choose.
In choosing a brand-name sound system, you demonstrate a rule of modern
marketing: As time shrinks, the importance of brands increases. And time in

---

America is shrinking; companies have downsized their staffs and upsized the
workloads of all the survivors. These people need shortcuts every waking
minute. They turn to service and product brands.
Give your prospects a shortcut. Give them a brand.
Brands and the Power of the Unusual
Try this test:
The following are most of the great brand names of the English-speaking
world (a few brands have been overlooked, although being overlooked says
something about that brand):
Harley Davidson
Sony
Honda
Procter & Gamble Nike
Levi Strauss
Rolls Royce
Disney
Xerox Kleenex Coca-Cola Mercedes-Benz
Lloyd’s of London Nikon
Harvard Kodak
Microsoft Marlboro
What is striking about this list? It is how unusual these names are. Virtually
no one or nothing else carries any of these names. You know no other Sony,
Disney, Harvard, Kodak, or Harley. Unless you studied mythology and
recognize the goddess Nike, or studied anthropology and remember Claude
Lévi-Strauss, you have no other connotations for Nike and Levi Strauss, either.
Consider the brand names in the following services, and ask yourself: Where
else have you heard these names?
Accounting: Ernst & Young, Deloitte Touche, Coopers & Lybrand, Peat
Marwick.
Law: Skadden & Arps, Covington & Burling, Fulbright & Jaworski, Pillsbury,
Madison & Sutro.
Consulting and consultants: McKinsey, Bain, Senge, Hamel, Prahalad, Drucker.
Business schools: Wharton, Tuck, Fuqua, Harvard, Stanford.
Granted, in each of these four service categories you find one “usual” name:
Arthur Andersen in accounting, Sullivan & Cromwell in law, Tom Peters in
consulting, and Kellogg in business schools. (Although giving a business school
the name of a successful and well-regarded business sounds like smart
marketing, even if the name is not unusual.)
But each of these exceptions seems to prove the rule.

---

Most of the great brand names are unconfusable: People associate those
brand names only with the companies behind them. The names have no bad
associations created by their connection to something else with the same name.
We follow this principle when we name our children. We ruthlessly exclude
every name with any negative association. So after Nixon and Watergate,
Americans stopped naming boys Richard, just as parents everywhere stopped
naming children Adolf after World War II.
People’s minds are quick to make connotations. The smart service company
avoids any rub-off of negative connotations by developing unconfusable brand
names.