Branding vs. Direct Marketing

You may find this topic very useful for your business.

I came into Internet marketing business from the world of branding. Officialy I have been "online brand consultant" for some of the top companies in my country. Last ten years. When I say "top", it means companies like Coca-Cola or Pepsi. I think that's enough for you to trust me and continue reading.

The world of their marketing is very different from this one. Of course they are interested in increased sales, but the main term that differentiates them from this world here is the keyword "long-term".

Those people see Internet marketing and most sales pages as too direct, short-term marketing whose main focus is on increased sales. Their focus, however, is on branding.

When I first came into their world 10 years ago I was a bit confused. "Our focus is not on sales, but branding", the expirienced brand managers kept repeating, and I was like "Why in the world would a company who sells a product be interested in something other than sales?". Took me a few years to collect the pieces and get the picture.

They are buliding a brand.

Here is the secret.

When you are building a brand, you are losing money. At that very moment. You could change approach and prevent that money from being lost. But that is wrong.

You see, building a brand will give you much, much more earnings in the distant future, than without a brand building. The difference is like building a house of bricks and building it of ice. The ice house will melt when the summer comes. The brick house stays.

Here's an example. Let's say you have a "niche" and a product in that niche. And you have found the ways to get traffic. The earnings are not important. They may be $100 a month or $100.000 a month. This story has nothing to do with current earnings.

But the question is - how long willl it survive? Two years? Five?
Your product will have to die someday. Your grand-grandfather did. All living creatures will. Your product is no different.

When it dies, what can you do?

Well, you are intelligent. You will repeat the process - research the market, find a niche, create a product, and start everything from scratch. You will also have more money to invest in launch.

But once again that will require a lot of time and stress. Uncertain and unpredictable parameters may happen. New technologies and trends may have emerged, and you will probably be more reluctant to try new things then.

But, if you have a brand, everything is different.

The brand is not your product. It is the idea of something, and a lot of emotions that people have connected to that idea over time. Trust is one of them. It is being built by many connected actions that has nothing to do with sales directly.

When you have a brand, you have security. Everything may collapse, your product may become obsolete over night, you don't care. Because with a brand, you would just launch some other product and it will succeed without a fuss, (if it has quality, of course).

Look at Frank Kern, for example. He is building a brand out of himself. When he plays a guitar or sends you a funny video on his mailing list, he is basically losing money, right? Because he could have spent that amount of your time convincing you to buy yet another affiliate product and earn ten or twenty thousand dollars from that. But no, he just stays there, plays the guitar, and tells you some cool story of some guy. No affiliate links, nothing to buy whatsoever.

This is the key. At that very moment, Frank is going under your skin emotionally. He is building a brand. He is basically losing money at that moment, but he knows he is seducing you to fall in love in him.

The consequences? In a year, Frank Kern could launch a stock market course for example. Or a self improvement course. He's got a brand, he has your trust and people will buy anything from Frank. Because he got you emotionally attached to him. That's branding.

The story about branding is too complex to fit in this post. There are many books on the theory of branding and you should read at least one of them. Go to Amazon and see what are the bestsellers.

I realized many people on this excellent board need to read this story, because there are just too many topics like "Earn $1000 in 24 hours", or "Build and launch a product in under 6 hours". It doesn't matter if these methods work or not. They are all short term businesses. You don't want to do that.

Looking forward to your comments.