Page 58 - MYM 2015

Brand Faith
Milton Kotler Lisa Merriam
Abstract: Joining “brand” with “faith” calls attention to a new way of thinking about brands. Human beings have a deep-seated need for belief. Our article outlines a new proposition: Branding is about creating belief. Creating brand beliefs is as a new way of thinking about selling products and services can be of enormous practical use to leaders starting new businesses or growing their existing ones.
Joining “brand” with “faith” in our title isn’t meant to insult religious faith or demean ideological conviction. Our purpose is to call attention to the deep human need for belief. What we propose is that branding is about
creating belief. Branding is more like a psychological mass movement than a science.
We propose that brand belief creates is a new way of thinking about selling products and services—a way of thinking in direct contrast to the conventional science of marketing.
Systematic marketing science has become a costly edifice of research, analytics, and organization that
it is largely useless to entrepreneurs and companies who must start new businesses or grow their existing businesses.
We know of a young man who desired to build a media business. He had $200,000 of start- up money and proceeded to hire a marketing specialist for $80,000 before he had any coherent idea of what his business would produce. He turned to marketing as some kind
of deus ex machina that could build his enterprise. He believed in marketing, like some kind of witch doctor, more than he believed in a vision of bringing speci c new value to the market place. In short order, his money vanished. He knew no more about his business at the end that at the beginning.
We have worked with Fortune 500 companies that have hired expensive agencies to refresh their brands. These companies have spent millions to develop new marketing strategies and paint new logos on their
trucks for no measurable results. USAir spent hundreds of millions to become USAirways in 1996, but it still failed, going through two bankruptcies, suffering years of nancial woes, and earning the distinction of being the worst major U.S. airline in terms of consumer satisfaction. Once a style leader, American retailer Gap redesigned its logo in 2010. The negative reaction was so immediate and intense that the company scrapped its new design (which cost an estimated $100 million) within six days of its launch. The company could not paint over core problems with management churn, inability to effectively sell online, too many physical stores, and fundamental style changes that have left Gap in the dust.
Could we be looking at the decline of marketing? We think so. Marketing has become a complex system
of a thousand costly moving parts—with branding as just one of the cogs. We make this radical proposition: Branding is the primary consumer principle. Branding must be unleashed from the technical framework
of marketing and embrace the art of brand belief building—building faith in the things we buy and companies that make and sell them. Marketing is
only a way to implement the creed of the brand which ignites the heart. Instead of branding being a subset of marketing, marketing is a subset of branding.
Demoting Marketing
Back in the Mad Men glory days of mass advertising in the 1950 and 60s, marketing was as an anecdotal craft of advertising managers and designers, company owners and salesmen. When Philip Kotler, a PhD of Economics, not business management, rst wrote his
58 I October 2015