Your Brand Is Irrelevant

Branding has been tremendously valuable over the last 100 years or so. Even during the last five or ten years, pundits have been telling people to turn themselves into brands. Brands are identifiable, they stand for something, they signify quality. But, is social media going to render brands meaningless?

Fifty years ago, brands were king. You didn’t have a whole lot to choose from, but people stuck by their choices. People didn’t just buy GM cars, there were GM families. Housewives only bought Morton’s salt or Revlon cosmetics. These brands represented a known quality. Wherever you were, if you could find a drugstore, you knew the Revlon lipstick you bought was going to look good. You knew whenever it rained, Morton’s would pour. Being able to offer consistent quality was huge selling point, and fit perfectly in an era when the only modes of mass communication were newspaper, radio, and a tiny bit of television. Brands were built around this lack of information: people put their trust in a company to curate their products because there wasn’t really anybody else to put their trust in.

But the world is totally different now.

Before you buy something on Amazon, what do you do? Unless you’re a maniac, you read the reviews. Before you choose a new restaurant, chances are you check out yelp or open table or zagat to see who has the best of what you’re looking for. Before you book a trip somewhere, you probably check out TripAdvisor, or at least browse some of the reviews on Expedia or wherever you’re booking. Hell, before you book your seat on a flight, you can get a review of the individual seat on SeatGuru. If something is really, really new, you can cull reviews from thousands of people you may not even know on twitter or facebook. There’s now more information than we know how to handle.

So why do we care about brands? If AppleTV gets lackluster ratings on Amazon, we’re not going to buy it just because it’s made by Apple. We know it’s shitty ahead of time. We don’t care if it’s a Wolfgang Puck restaurant if everyone on yelp says the staff is rude and the food sucks. I don’t care if the sign on the outside says its a Ritz-Carlton; if the reviews say the rooms are dark, cramped, and smell musty, I’m not gonna stay there. This extends to what we would consider more personal brands too: I might be a huge fan of Seth Godin or (insert internet demi-god), but I’m probably not picking up his newest book if other people say its boring, or useless, or a rehash of old material.

So, if we don’t trust brands anymore, what the hell is the point?

Well, there’s two things brands still do: (1) they convey status, and (2) they grant access.

(1) Brands are obviously still extremely effective status symbols. This will never go away. Gucci purses or Jimmy Choo shoes or Cartier jewelry (or their successors) will always convey a certain message that a grocery bag, some Keds and a cracker jack decoder ring never could. Brands that convey a lifestyle or that immediately identify a person will always be valuable.

(2) If you’re a brand I’ve had a good experience with, or who has a good reputation, I’ll listen to you. If you’re Ritz-Carlton, I’ll open an email you send me, or I’ll talk to you if you call. If you’re the Shitbag Motel, your email’s going straight into the trash. This is why personal brands are still important: if you’re Seth Godin, you’ve given enough and earned enough trust that I’ll read or listen to whatever you ask me to read or listen to. That doesn’t mean I’m going to buy, but it means you always get to ask.