My trip to the Market Research trade fair last week in Wiesbaden was an interesting experience in many respects - also in terms of branding.
There wasn’t much of it.
Payback or Paypal - I’m not sure which - had a booth that I recognised from previous years.
Séissmo stood out with their confessional concept - wearing various forms of religious garb.
Mindline had a spacious, modern-looking stand space. It had stand-out for sure.
And yes, Quirks’ Stuart Tippler had a customary high-impact high viz garb on - the Stars and stripes on day 1, much to my amusement as a fellow Brit. So true to form - bold.
But the rest - lots of “nice”…..plenty of pleasant stands, but little in terms of hit-the-retina impact - certainly nothing I remember. Visually, slogan-wise….hmmmm. Swoosh…..nope. And brands are all about memorable moments.
Take a look a the pictures (ignore the German text, if you wish):
It’s a big missed opportunity - short-term sales may well be the ambition of many SMEs, but the link between short-term (activation) and longer-term (brand-building) has been adequately demonstrated by Mssrs. Field and Binet in their paper of 10 years ago.
So what’s up - what are the barriers?
Branding may not be flavour of the month - witness Twitter’s sad demise. Chirped down. Not to mention that of my own ex-company Happy Thinking People; The People Understanding Company was such a good promise.
Maybe tech companies - often new entrants into the MR/ analytics space - don’t accept the value of the System 1 style decisions.
Or Private Equity simply doesn’t have a time-line beyond the 5 year horizon - so the long-term doesn’t really matter, somebody else’s problem.
Maybe for many in market research the fourth quarter pressures on fixed-cost ad-hoc business models are so great that any talk of equity build seems fanciful.
But it’s utter madness to neglect branding.
Let’s take trade fairs - think of the actual costs of booth, including staffing: Euro 20.000 and upwards.
Raising the profile of your company brand has to be one of the key goals’s of investing in a trade fair - the ROI on lead generation and customer acquisition is tricky.
So why not plan a bit of emotion, distinctiveness, brand signals - sure, you have to be in for the longer-haul, but equity build doesn’t need to cost much on a per-activity basis. Ask Stuart Tippler. The cost of NOT doing it is more the point - you lose.
There are rules of branding - beyond marketing, beyond sales, and however much they have gone out of fashion, they still apply. A bit like semiotics - or physiognomy - you may not realise their influence, but influential they are.
Your wonderful presentation - great that so many people attended. But how many actually recall who you are and your messages 15 minutes later? Most people forget what’s been said in any non-critical business presentation very fast - so the non-tangible stuff counts.
If anyone’s interested in my white paper on what I call the10 immutable laws of branding, do get in touch.
There - you see. Sales and branding are inextricably linked ;)
X can say whatever it likes.
Curious, as ever, as to others’ views.
(Visual: Photo by Skyler Smith on Unsplash)