Brand Matters

I believe there is a big difference between marketing and branding. Marketing is a strategy whereas branding is a symbol of who you are as a company or a personal brand. Marketing can be implemented over night whereas a brand could take years to establish.

A brand is the foundation to any great company. When a brand is established, the marketing changes and becomes much easier.

I was recently going through the process of purchasing new vehicles and one of the vehicles was going to be driven mostly by my wife. As I worked through the vehicles, I knew the "features" that she wanted. I could find vehicles with all the features she wanted (plus more) but when I showed her them, she was not really interested. She would have happily driven any of them but they were not her first choice.

I worked through the new vehicle options at the dealership and then started working through the used vehicles. Eventually I came across a beautiful car. It was 5 years old but priced very well and had fairly low mileage. It did not have all the features my wife wanted but it did have a few additional ones that could offset those.

The morning after I found this, I was sitting at my computer and I called her over. I said, "What do you think of this?" as I showed her the picture. I watched her as she looked at the pictures and started to scan the details. He first reaction was, "Meh, it's OK..." But not 2 seconds after she said this, she followed it up with "OH! It's a Mercedes?"

Needless to say, she became interested and was very happy when I showed up that day with the car for her to test drive. I'm pretty sure it was sold before the test drive but that was more for me ;)

Brand trumped everything in this case. The prices, the features, the interest rates, none of those mattered to my wife. They did to me and this particular car checked the boxes but if my wife didn't like it, I was not going to buy it.