Before we start, what does "branding" mean to you?

If you're in the advertising/marketing industry, it may mean creating a cohesive look and feel for a particular company, service, or product in order to create a competitive advantage in the market vertical. In English, that would simply translate to "creating a preference for something being sold by a particular company".

Considering that I have worked with a variety of different companies which have ranged in size from small start-ups to global enterprises, I have a very particular take on what branding is and how much of it you can leave at the door when you're growing your business. To be blunt, Starling Interactive plays in the Direct Response arena because it's a solid way of retaining clients. You can measure and compare and calculate any campaign you wish. You know down to a penny what your return on investment is, and from that if it's wise to continue spending. With branding though, everything is really soft. Measurements, reporting metrics, and results are all muddled up with everything else you do. You run a branding campaign anywhere and who knows what the effect is? You have to wait and watch and bet that it will work. Therein is one of the problems I have with companies who with to "brand" themselves.

A brand isn't something you conjure up with your creative team or agency. It's not making a neat-o logo and catchphrase and then watching millions of dollars pour in. This applies to the hot "Web 2.0" ventures as well. No shiny logo with a reflection or big fonts will create market share. No, branding is much more than that.

Real branding, the kind that drives revenue for your company because of a preference, is gained through doing good things. You can spend millions of dollars on advertising, you can have Super Bowl ads and cool placements in movies and still get nowhere if you don't embrace this fact.

If you don't agree with me on this, pick a brand and think about it a little. Let's take the search giant "Google". Google owns a majority of the search market in the world, and has huge competition from companies such as Yahoo, MSN, Ask, and others. These are companies with budgets in the billion dollar range, yet they can't create what Google has. Why? Because Google approached their brand the right way. They focused on their product: a great search engine service. Then they kept focusing on that product to create the loyalty to their product over the competition. That approach is something that advertising and marketing can't buy.

Your "brand" will need to follow the same rules. If your product is lacking, your service sub-par, or your user experience worse than your competition, it will be all but impossible to throw advertising dollars at the problem to make it go away.