We've witnessed a strange and disturbing trend seep into even the most sophisticated marketing organizations: marketing professionals and senior executives equate branding with visual or graphic identity. Worse yet, they're convinced that a new logo, typeface, color palette and tag line will actually improve their business. Utter nonsense.

This trend may have started in the mid-1990's when Lucent introduced its bold, memorable visual identity. The business took off and several brand identity savants told us that the business' success could be attributed in large part to the red "bull's-eye" logo. Now we wonder what they're saying as Lucent tanks? "Visual Identity Crisis?"

These marketers seem to have forgotten that what's behind Nike's "Swoosh," Apple's "Apple," and Lucent's red "bull's-eye" are all the activities the company undertakes to deliver a product, service or experience different than competitors.

To build a powerful brand, you need to figure out who the target is and everything about them. Uncover their motivations, their problems, their pains. Then configure your product, service or company, and price it appropriately, so that it addresses the target's motivations, solves their problems, alleviates their pain. Finally—and here's where visual identity comes into play—unleash the power of communications to tell people with words and pictures why and how you do this better than anyone else in the industry.

When you're done, you've got a brand—and you've done true branding. You have something that people are willing to pay a premium for and go out of their way to find. You have something that stands out from the crowd and represents real value. Then, and only then, will you have a logo and tagline that makes people think of the reason to select your brand over the competition. Without undergoing the rigors of this process, visual identity alone represents little more than putting on lipstick.

Nevertheless, some of the world's most sophisticated marketers are convinced that a new logo, typeface, color palette and tag line—in other words, a dab of lipstick—will actually improve their business.

True, solid brands do occasionally need a visual identity face-lift. Merrill Lynch, for example, recently replaced the "Be Bullish" tagline with "Ask Merrill" as the markets began to sink and customers conceivably looked for more advice on investments than they did during the go-go days of the stock market. As Dan O'Donnell, executive vice president and senior director at Thompson New York, Merrill Lynch's advertising agency, explained to the New York Times, if the company continued with "Be Bullish," consumers would, "take it as a sound bite and say: 'You've got to be kidding me. Why would I do that?'"

However if you connote branding with visual design alone, your "branding" efforts amount to little more than cosmetic solutions to serious business problems. The lipstick is unlikely to make any lasting impact in marketing your product or service, especially if the brand is ailing in any way.

So why do so many marketers deceive themselves and their CEO's into thinking that a new visual identity is the answer to their problems?

For one thing, visual identity "branding" projects are relatively easy to do, can be done quickly, and are a tangible MBO deliverable. New logos and tag lines demonstrate marketing motion, but alas, not necessarily marketing movement.

Second, many of the larger visual identity firms are quite effective at positioning themselves as both brand consulting and creative design firms. Their services usually include a "brand audit," comprised of interviews with employees and customers to determine "what they brand stands for." Too often, marketing people misconstrue the value of these interviews; this anecdotal research with a handful of people rarely provides the insights to develop a roadmap for forward-looking multi-million dollar marketing and business decisions. It gives you a blurry snapshot of what is; not meaningful insights into possible new directions for targeting, positioning and competitive differentiation.

Visual identity has little to do with building a powerful brand; at the very most, it may contribute three percent to a brand's overall success. So forget the lipstick and look at your brand in its totality. In the long-run, this is the only means to alter your company's course and in the end, produce a sizable payoff in corporate profitability.

The recent executions of Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh and convicted murderer and drug trafficker Juan Raul Garza, have brought the debate about America's use of the death penalty back to the forefront of public debate. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor even weighed in on the topic recently with her comments questioning the death penalty. Condemned by opponents as cruel and immoral, but hailed by proponents as a just punishment for heinous crimes and a powerful deterrent, the divide between the two sides of the issue runs deep.

Just how different are death penalty opponents and proponents from each other? A recent Copernicus study revealed key differences between the two groups in terms of several demographic, behavioral, and attitudinal characteristics.

Adults who oppose the death penalty are more likely to be female and consider themselves a Democrat. Although they have more liberal views on other controversial issues such as affirmative action, the legalization of marijuana, and prayer in school, this group believes euthanasia is wrong. A small minority of the group has a gun at home and fewer are currently married. Interestingly, death penalty opponents generally believe the workweek is too long, but report only occasionally feeling stressed and rushed.

Death penalty proponents, meanwhile, have more traditionally conservative views on political issues and think the government should spend more on national defense. They support euthanasia, believing terminally ill patients should be allowed to die. Nearly one-half report having a gun at home and only about 30 percent consider themselves Democrats. Although they do not believe the workweek is too long, this group reports frequently feeling stressed and rushed in their lives.

Here are a few of the discriminating traits we found between the two groups:

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Marketers know that keeping customers is a more profitable business strategy than acquiring new customers. To that end, companies are spending more than $23 billion this year in Customer Relationship Management (CRM) investments, according to the Gartner Group and InfoWorld. Yet, most CRM projects don't improve customer relationships!

Consider these facts:

• 60% of customers hang up the phone unhappy
• 40% of customers' emails go unanswered
• Just 3% of Web site visitors will actually buy
• 50% of a company's customers defect every 5 years
• 40% of companies can't recognized a profitable customers

The root of the problem is that most CRM investments are in software, hardware and technology tools. The tools are not solutions, they're merely tools. How you use those tools is the job of marketers. Yet IT professionals —NOT marketers—spearhead most CRM projects. A further cause for disappointing results: almost 63% of Global 2000 companies focus their CRM projects on internal, department oriented operational processes, not on customers.

Many experts believe 85% of CRM projects fail. Unless marketing professionals step up and own their company's relationship with its customers, CRM failure will remain more the rule than the exception.

For more insightful marketing discoveries, visit http://www.copernicusmarketing.com/discover/index.htm

Have a hot discovery for our next release? Contact us at info@copernicusmarketing.com

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With so many books and so little time, what is the time-strapped summer reader to do? We recommend you pack a mix of business classics and great literature to inform and inspire during the dog days.

Begin your summer sojourn with one of these business classics:

• Building Strong Brands, by David Aaker
• Competitive Advantage: Creating & Sustaining Superior Performance, by Michael Porter
• Driving Customer Equity: How Customer Lifetime Value is Reshaping Corporate Strategy, by Roland Rust, Valarie Zeithaml, and Kay Lemon
• Positioning: The Battle For Your Mind, by Al Ries and Jack Trout

Nothing puts abstract ideas into context better than a real-world example, and these authors all offer plenty of examples of companies in different industries, categories, and situations to show their words in action. The authors are seven of the most quoted and most referenced in business, so reading their books offers important professional development.

But when you are in need of a break from traditional business texts, don't feel guilty about reaching for a novel instead. In an interview with senior editor Diane Coutu of Harvard Business Review literary critic Harold Bloom, the Sterling Professor of the Humanities at Yale University and Berg Professor of English at New York University Graduate School, discussed what business people can learn from literature, making the case that great literature may actually offer even more professional inspiration. Here are some excerpts we found particularly insightful, as well as a recommended reading list from Bloom.

Interview

Coutu: Let's move on to specific issues that concern businesspeople. One of the most vexing topics in business is change. What can you learn about change from literature?

Bloom: Businesspeople are fooling themselves if they believe that the self can change easily. But if they are so interested in the topic, then they should read Shakespeare, because no one before or since has captured change so effectively.

For me, the paradigm depiction of a moment of change is in the final scene of King Lear, when the dying Edmund, who has ordered the deaths of Lear and Cordelia, experiences a sudden and complete change of heart. Lear's two wicked daughters, both madly in love with Edmund, have just died—one slain by the other, who then killed herself. Up to this point, Edmund has not experienced a single emotion throughout the play. But when they bring in the corpses and Edmund looks at them, he utters an amazing line: "Yet Edmund was belov'd." It's as if Edmund has overheard himself for the first time and, as a result, an amazing change comes upon him. "[S]ome good I mean to do/Despite of mine own nature," he says, hoping that it may still be possible to save Cordelia and Lear. I've always been utterly fascinated by that transformation because it is the most extraordinary single moment of change in all of Shakespeare, and it comes out of pure self-overhearing. Your reader might reflect how often she herself is conscious of the will to change after she has the surprise of overhearing herself.

Coutu: Are you suggesting that through change you become a better person - perhaps more caring or even more productive?

Bloom: No, not at all. Edmund changes so much that in the end he has no identity. As he dies, he does not know who he is, and we do not know either.
At the same time, I believe that literature does have a fundamental truth to teach in regard to change: change always arises out of the unexpected. It may be the unexpectedness of self-knowledge through overhearing yourself or it may be something imposed upon you by external events. By reading great imaginative literature, you can prepare yourself for surprise and even get a kind of strength that welcomes and exploits the unexpected…I believe that literature can increase our capacity for mastering change.

Coutu: To learn from literature, it seems as if you must be a "good" reader. Yet not everyone can recognize in Shakespeare or Cervantes what you see. What can you tell our readers about how to read well?

Bloom: There's no single right way to read well. I was teaching Emerson's essay on self-reliance the other day. And I came to that great passage, which has fascinated me for years, where Emerson says that in every work of genius we behold our own rejected thoughts—they come back to us shining with a certain alienated majesty. If something can touch you, if it can reach you, it's because in some sense, it was already your own. Reading well, I think, is seizing upon something that is already your own property.

Book List

Here is a very basic self-help guide for businesspeople who want to sample the classics…these texts share a strangeness and originality that make them truly indispensable.

• William Shakespeare: The Complete Works
• Miguel de Cervantes: Don Quixote
• Ralph Waldo Emerson: Essays: "Self-Reliance", "Experience", "Politics", "Power", "Wealth", and "Illusions"
• Sigmund Freud: The Psychopathology of Everyday Life; A Primer of Freudian Psychology, by Calvin S. Hall; Character and Culture, by Philip Rieff, editor
  

Happy reading!

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This past April, we opened the virtual doors to the Counterintuitive Marketing Hall of Fame and Shame, a place where CEOs, CMOs, and fledgling marketers of all ages can see—in all their glory—the marketing blockbusters and disasters of the recent past and present. We had planned to make nominations to the Hall an annual event, but we've seen so many examples of companies that are getting marketing right and those that are getting it horribly wrong since we first opened, we figured why wait 'till next year?

Starting in August, we'll offer our vote for Counterintuitive Marketer Hall of Famer and Hall of Shamer of the month at www.counterintuitivemarketing.com.

We'll take your nominations for companies, products, and people as well at info@copernicusmarketing.com

Our nomination for a Hall of Shamer for July? The state of North Dakota. Yes, that's right. Apparently, the Greater North Dakota Association is supporting a proposal to change the state's name to "Dakota." The group believes the name change will alter the state's image as a cold, barren, treeless prairie and help attract businesses to the area. As we talked about in Industry Insights, it takes more than a name change to build a brand.

Thankfully our Hall of Famer for July lives in North Dakota. Lee Peterson, the state's economic development director, says it's not the name that is a marketing drawback and questioned other state leaders including the Governor whether the name change will have any impact. "The problem with North Dakota is that no one knows about us," he reasons. Hopefully others will come to their senses as well and recognize that it's communicating what's behind the name—the benefits to doing business in North Dakota versus another state—that will make the difference.

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