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Trying to build your brand with advertising?

Then don't!

Attempting to convince your target audience of your brand's claims through paid space or time lacks a key incredient vital to success — credibility.

What do you believe — what's reported on the evening television news, or the advertising which precedes and punctuates it?

As customers we're cynical, suspicious, and cautious. We see the majority of advertising as biased, self-serving, and company-oriented rather than consumer-oriented.

So we turn to independent, authoritative, third-party sources for recommendations and advice — friends, relatives, neighbours, and the media.

When we've made up our minds, advertising serves as a reminder.

Some business people say they rely on "word of mouth" marketing, leaving that process to its own devices. Others feel the outcome for their bottom line is too important to leave to chance.

In simple terms, public relations applies research, creativity, and planning to assist the third-party brand perception-building process.

PR builds brands

Advertising doesn't build brands. Public relations does. You should use advertising to defend your brand against competitors once it's been built, and its credibility established, through PR.

That's the main conclusion and key piece of advice in The Fall of Advertising and the Rise of PR, a book by US-based marketing guru Al Ries.

Ries, with Jack Trout, wrote Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind, a long-time marketing classic based on a series of articles the pair wrote in 1972 for " Advertising Age". In his latest effort, Ries collaborates with daughter and business partner Laura.

How do ad agencies build their brands?

This book is going to upset a lot of people. As they say, "some of my best friends" are advertising people, but sorry guys, what Ries has to say needs to be said. Things like:

• "Advertising has no legitimate role to play in brand building. Advertising's role is defensive in nature. Advertising can only protect a brand once it's established." This is Ries' central thesis which he illustrates copiously with case studies.
  
  
• Advertising agencies often sell advertising to clients on the basis of their own creativity. "Creativity wins awards, but does it also win sales?" asks Ries. He has chapters of evidence to the contrary.
  
  
• "Advertising agencies do almost no advertising themselves. Instead, they rely heavily on PR techniques to build their own brands." True again.
  
  
• People tend to judge the value of a discipline by its numbers and ad budgets are invariably bigger than PR budgets. But more money doesn't necessarily mean more effective.

Ries cites Dell Computer's advertising/PR budget ratio as typical ($430 million on advertising last year, $2 million on PR).

"Yet Dell is a good example of a brand built by PR, not advertising," he says. "Early on, Dell made sure that computer analysts for all the trade publications received Dell machines for testing."

"PC Week's rave review of the Turbo, Dell's first IBM-compatible machine, appeared shortly after the product was introduced in 1985. Almost immediately, the company began selling more than a thousand Turbo machines per month. And the rest is history."

PR should come first

Perhaps a word of caution is needed, just in case you think I'm anti-advertising.

Like Ries, I believe advertising has its place. It should be a reminder of a perception that has already been established by more credible means. Public relations should come first, establishing perceptions and credibility.

To quote Ries: "Brands don't need ‘creative' advertising (the brand has already been created in the mind by PR). They do need ‘reminder' advertising.

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