Introduction

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Brands forgot who they are, why they were born and who they serve. They traded affection for reach. Quality for appearance. Purpose for empty promises. They became wax dolls trying to look like something they are not, to sell what people do not even need.

Branding, that business word covered in glitter, was supposed to be about people. It became a vanity display, with recycled speech and ready made strategies. Everyone saying the same thing, everyone dressing the same way, everyone forgetting to be who they are.

I wrote this book to show how to build brands that are more human and less artificial. A brand like a person, with flaws and with the courage to be misread, as long as it is not empty. This book is not for everyone. It is for whoever understands that a brand is only worth something when it can solve real problems for real people.

From here on, will you find technical study? Yes. With soul, anger and clarity. You will find thoughts that kick the door open without asking. Getting this far is like driving the first miles of a long road. There is no turning back.

Enjoy the read.

A word from the author

Before we go on, I need an agreement with you.

In this book I will not reach for Silicon Valley unicorns or cases that live outside our reality. I will not use examples that only work in billion dollar markets, with endless teams and budgets that do not fit the life of someone building a business the hard way.

Here the examples start from the ground. From what is possible. From what happens in the real Brazil, with people who pay the bills, get it wrong, correct it and carry on. I will use brands I helped create and position. Small and medium businesses that had to learn in practice what positioning, limits, choice and responsibility mean.

They are not perfect stories. They are true ones. They show how to build strong and profitable brands. Even when money is short, time is tight and a mistake costs dearly.

Zé Paulo Gomes, brand designer.

Is that everything you know about building brands?

Have a product. Make it look good. Promote it everywhere you can.

Know that there is more under that iceberg:

• Find a niche;
• Size your market;
• Analyze your competitors;
• Build empathy with the people who buy;
• Understand the competitive forces;
• Develop a good product;
• Define your marketing mix;
• Understand the perceived value of your brand;
• Have a clear positioning;
• Develop an identity people fall for;
• Set up channels of relationship;
• Plan institutional and promotional communication;
• Set up processes and sales channels;
• Monitor your results constantly;
• Take care of after sales and support;
• Keep investing in innovation.

If brands are born to satisfy people, why do we forget them when we create brands?

Debating the importance of people in marketing is nothing new. Considering what they feel, believe and value while creating products and brands is. Back in the sixties, Philip Kotler was already talking about the gains of thinking about people. In 1992, Peter Drucker stated that selling becomes automatic when brands develop the ideal product, for the right person, with distribution, price and timing adjusted.

The timing Drucker speaks of goes beyond the calendar. It reflects the opportunities born from social, cultural and economic change. For context: between 1760 and 2010 the world went through three great industrial revolutions. In The Fourth Industrial Revolution, Klaus Schwab shows how technological development changed the way we consume and the way we produce value. Technology keeps bringing down the barriers to entry in many markets.

Developing products and brands, once the privilege of large organizations with millions to invest in marketing, became possible for almost everyone, in almost every economic bracket. The market is global. In one click a customer reaches an enormous variety of products with similar form, performance and cost. That globalization and the unrestricted access to information make the customer more demanding and create a new market, with new rules.

In it, brands still practicing industrial thinking are perceived as barely differentiated and classified as offers with no value. Because of the reputation that precedes them, they get pushed into markets where the only possible competitive model is price. Who sells cheaper? Who gives the bigger discount? Who splits it into more installments?

The price war should belong to commodities alone, and it is common to see brands with potentially innovative products losing ground to worse competitors. Measuring the relationship between those brands and their audiences reveals reputational, commercial and financial losses.

Four signs of a weak brand with no value

Weak brands only sell cheap and on discount.

Cost leadership is a legitimate marketing strategy. Cutting the quality of the product, overloading production or sacrificing margin to sell cheap is another thing, and it compromises the financial health of the business.

Weak brands spend on advertising with no return.

Thousands of likes, clicks and views, and no sales. That is the hard reality of a weak brand. They believe that pouring money into ads will win customers. Worth remembering: an audience can be bought; preference and loyalty cannot.

Weak brands lose customers to inferior competitors.

Since a weak brand cannot position its own values, its customers are left at the mercy of misleading advertising and the false promises of an unfair competitor. They lose ground even with a superior product.

Weak brands struggle to find, train and keep good people.

Weak brands struggle to attract, train and engage employees. And the manager of a weak brand commonly blames people for a lack of qualification and a lack of willingness to work.

In a market of egos, the brands that see people lead

To understand the scale of that, look at Apple. Without thinking about people while building the strategy, even the technology giant came close to bankruptcy. After Steve Jobs was dismissed, the company went through twelve years of poor financial performance. His return marked the era of innovation. With the reputation of the brand rescued, Apple became the first publicly traded company in the United States to pass one trillion dollars in market value. For four years in a row it drew queues of customers at the launch of its most notable product, the iPhone. The demand for those phones shows clearly what a company gains when it balances the practical and the emotional benefits of its products. Making sense of the market and of people was the key to the exponential rise of Apple.

Common sense treats invention and innovation as synonyms, and in business they mean different things. Creating is producing the new; innovating is adapting an existing solution to solve unprecedented problems. The iPhone did not create a new way of communicating, it changed the way we listen to and store music, and the way we share moments. In Brazil, owning one can stand for social position and buying power. Around the world it became a tool for work, for careers, for learning and for spreading knowledge.

To encourage a rational debate about emotion and feeling inside the perceived value of brands, this study presents the problems that industrial thinking causes in a market that demands values. From here on, it proposes a more human view of the needs, the values and the meanings people attach to the brands and products they buy.

So, business owner, ready to explore the singularity of human behavior?