Michael Karnjanaprakorn

After working in advertising/communications/branding/etc and jumping over to the other side of building a brand, it often frustrates the hell out of me when I talk to people that work in “advertising.” There’s a bunch of different pieces that go into building a brand with advertising and marketing being one small piece of the entire puzzle. I still read my Google RSS Reader with a list of my old blogs, and I often mutter “no shit sherlock” to myself a 100 times. Everyday, I’m deleting blogs because there’s really nothing truly insightful anymore. Here’s my list of what frustrates the hell out of me (in no particular order).

1) “You need to be all over the blogs. Send some products to ‘influential’ bloggers. Get them to write about it and you guys can grow organically.”

Do people really think that I don’t know that? I usually respond with, “well there’s this little thing called Technorati and it according to that, we’ve had 1,540 blog reactions to Behance.com and 4,789 blog reactions to Behance.net within the last couple of months. We’re not even counting the blog mentions of all our other products and services. So, in reality, there’s a blog that writes about us every couple of hours. NOW WHAT?

2) “You should use your marketing in different ways. It’s not a one-way communication anymore. Offer people some type of utility. You know? Do something for people.”

There’s this little secret called building the brand with those things embedded in it. Most brands were started to fill a market opportunity that had a lot of profit potential. They didn’t really care about the “people” which is why I guess a lot of advertising folks are writing about utility. That really doesn’t matter when you’re a brand that began with a mission to better the world like Google or Apple. What happens if you already have that covered?

3) “You should do a whole integrated campaign. Combine PR with traditional advertising with WOM with sales and you’ll see tremendous results. You’ll need that single thread, that insight, that drives everything through.”

Simple push vs pull strategy. I’ve always been a firm believer in creating something so unique and different that people will seek you out, not the other way around. Why are companies like Method striving to have a marketing budget of zero? So what happens if you don’t even want to spend money on marketing and advertising? What will advertising people say then?

4) “Build a community for people to connect. A strong community equals a strong brand.”

I don’t even respond to that anymore.

5) “Stop interrupting people with communications and advertising.”

We don’t spend any money on communications or advertising.

Much of what everyone writes about is how to fix a broken brand. A lot of agencies talk about moving into “product and brand innovation” but to be honest, I can’t see any of them ever succeeding. They have absolutely no idea of what it takes. I would be surprised to see more than 5 agencies succeeding and doing it right.

It doesn’t happen overnight. It’s not like you do a “viral campaign” to get 20 million impressions in one month and your brand magically takes off. Come on people. It’s really not that easy