Create a Brand

Is there possibly a bigger buzz word concept in marketing right now than social media marketing? If there is, it is brand management. What in the hell is a brand and why would you manage it? A company's brand is your mental image of that company. What do you associate with the Chevrolet's name? Old people, like me, think of “baseball, hot dogs, apple pie, and Chevrolet.” What do you associate with the GEICO name? I think of the gecko, woodchucks, and Mary Todd Lincoln's fat ass in a dress. I feel sorry for our sixteenth president. I have just described brand management created by advertising campaigns. Marketing experts tell me that there is no more important marketing activity than brand management. They tell me brand management is about creating an image in your customer's eye, and the path to creating that image is effective advertising – either the old school way using print media, television, and radio or the new media way using Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.

I don't have a problem with placing great importance on your company's image in potential customers' minds. I just don't believe small businesses build brands through advertising. In fact, I don't believe most large businesses build brands through advertising.

Microsoft is a fine example of brand management. Let's play the word association game. What words come to mind when you think of Microsoft? If you are an average Windows user, you probably think, “Oh shit, I have to reboot again.” Until Microsoft, who knew you needed CTRL, ALT, and DEL keys on a keyboard? And – why would you need to press all three of them at once? We just thought about letters and numbers and the content we were trying to convey. I think I am at least a little more technical than the average user. When I think Microsoft, I think, “Will the END TASK button ever work?”

Their engineers tell me, “Frank you stupid bastard, when you hit the END TASK button, we don't let you end the task ,because that would make the system unstable.”

To which I reply, “Dumb ass engineer, the system is already unstable. That is why I am trying to end the task.” I have been told END TASK will work by Windows, version 2,174 expected to be released just after the second coming of Jesus Christ. It will be part of the version currently code named “Rapture.” I am looking forward to the full support for long file names – no more faking it. It is literally taking the second coming of Christ to get this. What will it take to get rid of lazy programmer bullshit like the system tray and the registry?

The problem with brand management is that brand defies management. Your brand is what you are, not what you want people to think you are. Brand is behavior. Microsoft advertises that the features of Windows 7 were put together by users. Obviously not. Nobody wanted a new user interface – at least nobody I know. There is no reason to favor the user interface of Windows 7 over Win 3.0. To sell the new release of each Windows version, Microsoft needed a marketing message other than, “This time we promise it works.” Thus, we are privileged to struggle with a new and improved interface each time a new version of Windows is released. We ceased begin fooled a long time ago.

The marketing people of Microsoft are so in love with the brand they believe they have created that they have infected products they have acquired with the Microsoft brand. Beginning in the mid 1990's, Microsoft began buying accounting software products. They purchased a number of companies with well established reputations like Great Plains and Navision. In the early 1990's, when someone in the accounting software industry talked about Great Plains, all of us in the industry knew what it did well – ditto for Navision. Microsoft marketers, in love with their beloved brand, took those well known products and created at least a half dozen nondescript versions with no established reputations. Not only that, but the names seem to randomly change each year.

Lest anyone accuse me of being in the Sage software camp – by way of full disclosure, we have been resellers of Sage products since before Sage owned any of them. Sage is a UK company whose US operations have largely been established by acquiring successful US accounting software products. After acquiring a number of successful accounting software products like Peachtree and MAS90, Sage began an expensive campaign of re-branding these products as “Sage”. Unfortunately, Sage lost a legal trademark battle for the Sage name in the US. Oops, what's a few million marketing dollars? They then took one of their acquisitions, Best Software, and attempted a rebuild of the brand around the Best name. Then they purchased back the rights to the name Sage in the US and went back to re-branding all of their products as Sage. Yes, this is a true story. I can't make this shit up. I'm not that imaginative.

When I play word association with Sage, I think, “Don't buy a house.” If you are a top executive with Sage, you will likely have your position for less than two years. Over the past four years, the Sage story of executive purges could rival anything Stalin did in Russia in the 1950's on a percentage turnover basis. Hopefully no torture was involved – other than watching a painful waste of money trying to build a brand. This was brand building in the old Soviet Union. “No, General Secretary Stalin, you don't look fat in that uniform.” This is the same approach successful Sage executives use to advance their careers.

What's the problem with a good corporate house cleaning once in awhile? Nothing until it becomes standard operating procedure. Then you have to wonder if the house needs cleaned or if the house cleaners need to be changed.

Here is a joke for you – how many Sage executives does it take to build a brand?

Answer – It's a trick question. No Sage executive has ever built a brand. To this day, after millions of branding dollars, few people in the accounting business know who or what Sage is. A lot of CPA's remember Peachtree and MAS90. That is the problem. Concentrating on the Sage brand diminished the well established brands they already had like Peachtree, MAS90, Timeslips, and Master Builder among others. Nonetheless, I am still on the Peachtree bandwagon. I just wish some more Sage executives were riding it with me. At least with Peachtree, they backed off the Sage branding a little. Peachtree comes before Sage in the name.

What do competitors like Microsoft and Sage have in common? Not much at first glance. However, they both have the same mistaken ideas about brand building. Brand isn't about marketing. Brand is about behavior. Your brand is the real you, not who you want to be. If you want a better brand, be a better you.

You may be curious how I intend to build the Aniston Outfitters brand and how I am doing raising money to open the first store. I predict that the first store will open before the END TASK button works in Windows. I have been in contact with a number of top flight money people, Any day now, I expect to have the first round of financing in place. Warren Buffet turned me down, but what the hell does he know about money? Jimmy Buffet made more money singing about Margarita-ville. Steve Jobs turned me down as well. In my opinion, he has never been that much of a visionary. Bill Gates said no – but he can't even produce an operating system where the END TASK button works.

So I am turning to you, my dear readers – at least that's what I call you to your face. I need a whole bunch of money really fast. My dear Jen doesn't deserve some crap store like Wal-mart. She is a Tiffany type gal. I need some real bucks. If you are interested, I have a web site set up to aggregate the money, http://www.africanrelief.org/ . Mention “Aniston Outfitters” and you get an extra 1% ownership in the first store. Yes, if I am going to steal from you like Bernie Madoff, I am going to do it for a good cause. To be completely above board, I am on the board of directors of Christian Relief Services (CRS). Bread and Water for Africa is a CRS organization. We CPA's have to be completely above board – don't we? Just like Bernie Madoff's CPA.