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Brand Awareness Wake up! Your brand isn't your savior, and all the goofy ads in the world won't save your company. What can? Well...have you given good business a try?

By Chris Penttila

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

Brand. The hip, catch-all word of the New Economy. It suggestedall a company needed to succeed was awareness. Image, as they say,was everything.

Pat Harpell saw it up close as the CEO of Harpell Inc., anintegrated marketing firm in Maynard, Massachusetts. Over the pastfew years, many entrepreneurs have called on her to create brandingprograms, and she could see that old-fashioned branding strategieshad gone astray. "That's not a branding program;that's a logo," she says. "Basic business principlesfell apart."


Branding turned intoa game of being seen for the sake of being seen, without givingconsumers a reason to buy.