Page 98 - Selling the Invisible: A Field Guide to Modern Marketing - PDFDrive.com

America is shrinking; companies have down-sized 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.