Silicon Insider: Branding as Modern-Day Fiasco
Dec. 12 -- If it's true that you can never successfully go forward until you have learned all of the lessons of the past, then we've just had the final lecture. I wonder if anybody took notes.
In an interesting coincidence recently, a pair of companies made similar announcements. The big one was the collapse of Enron, one of the highest corporate fliers of recent years. The other, little announcement, made 3Com Corp. was that it wasn't planning to renew its lease on the title of San Francisco's Candlestick Park stadium, home of the 49ers.
What did they have in common? Baseball fans know that the ballpark for the Houston Astros has lately been known as Enron Field. Enron paid a $100 million for that dubious honor — an amount, given its stock value at the time of the bankrupcy of about two bits per share, represented about one-fifth of the company's total value.
Enron and 3Com weren't alone in this idiocy. Modern American life, from bowl games to golf tournaments to stock car races and from arenas to superdomes, is plastered with corporate brand names and logos, all to little apparent benefit to the advertiser.
This is what happens when you let the marketing department run the show. We've learned a lot of things in the last year about business: The old rules still apply. But the one big one that no seems to have noticed is this: Branding is bulls---.
Let me put it another way: If your company seriously contemplates embarking on a multimillion-dollar marketing campaign that is designed not to sell products or services, but solely to enhance the company's image, start typing your resume.
A Devil’s Bargain
The last 10 years have seen the apotheosis of corporate marketing. Business used to be about tough guys in manufacturing and dry bean counters in finance. These days it's about publicists, ad placement specialists and focus groups. It has been a devil's bargain, and we are now paying the price.
It all began innocently enough, and with the best intentions. One of the glories of American industry is its powerful right arm in academia, research institutions and think tanks. As American industry races along in its pragmatic way, innovating new products, services, organizational models and competitive techniques, these professional observers follow along closely in its wake, codifying these new ideas, giving them titles and terms, and determining how to disseminate them across society.
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