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?

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."

What ultimately fell apart was the connection between companiesand consumers. Branding turned into a game of being seen for thesake of being seen, without giving consumers a reason to buy."There's been a tremendous abuse of branding," saysJeff Dufresne, managing director of BrandStorm, a brand consultinggroup in Cincinnati. "I think people got confused and thoughtbranding was just throwing some ill-conceived advertising out thereto gain awareness."

With the dotcom fallout, companies are relearning the basiclessons of what makes a successful brand-mainly, that you can'tlive on image alone. Eyeballs don't equal sales, and logosdon't create loyalty. Consumers want to know what you'reall about and why they should trust you enough to purchase yourproduct. This will never change, no matter how much technologyalters our lives.

Remember Me? I'm the Customer

Many companies today are refocusing on something they'd allbut forgotten: their relationships with customers. After all, ifyou had a lot of venture capital and a plan to take your companypublic and sell it in six months, did you really need to spend timefiguring out your product's value to consumers? The answer wasno for the dotcoms-and the consultants they hired to create theirbrands-that never did in-depth market analyses.

"There are a tremendous number of brand experts andconsultants in the world now who know nothing about the product,nothing about the development of information technology that allowsyou to interact with customers in the marketplace," says RegisMcKenna. Chair of The McKenna Group, a Silicon Valley-basedinternational consulting firm that works with technology companies,McKenna helped Intel launch the first microprocessor and workedwith Apple to get the first PC to market. He even designedApple's famous logo. "When brand becomes abstracted fromwhat [your company does] from day to day, it loses meaning,"he says.

Of course, building a brand is still as important as ever.Brands simplify and add comfort to consumers' purchasingdecisions. Good brands deliver on a promise. (See "Case Study: Trader Joe's" below.) Infact, it's rare to succeed long term without branding, Dufresnesays. "[Brand is] your fundamental relationship with an enduser, who is buying your service and creating revenue," hesays. "It's what sustains you."

We Just Don't Talk Anymore

Nancy Koehn, a business historian at Harvard Business School,researched the lives of six famous entrepreneurs for her new book,Brand New: How Entrepreneurs EarnedConsumers' Trust From Wedgwood to Dell (HarvardBusiness School Press). She learned that those entrepreneurs wereobsessed not only with an idea, but with meeting a consumer need.Consider Josiah Wedgwood, an 18th century British potter who sawthe average Briton yearning for social status. He positioned hisproducts by targeting the aristocracy, knowing this would attractcustomers from lower economic brackets as well. His strategyworked, and still works today.

The entrepreneurs also kept their ears to the ground. EstéeLauder constantly updated her skin-care formulas based on whatcustomers told her. Though Howard Schultz of Starbucks initiallyresisted using skim milk in the company's authentic Italianlattes, he finally gave in after spending time in a Starbuckslocation listening to customers repeatedly ask for it.

What those entrepreneurs did so well, Koehn says, was createongoing, two-way dialogues with consumers-and alter their productsbased on what they heard. Wedgwood met a need for status, Lauderplayed into the post-war 1940s glamour boom, and Schultz tappedinto the need for community in a disconnected world. Along the way,consumers got the branding message: This product is unique, andtherefore better. Advertising didn't buy consumers'loyalty. Instead, long-term loyalty came from consistentlyfulfilling a promise and creating a great customer experience.

It's that dialogue that's been missing lately, Koehnsays, and it's essential to any branding strategy. Branding hasbecome a monologue instead of a dialogue. Entrepreneurs need toleave their ivory office towers and talk to people. They need to beresponsive to their customers. (See "CaseStudy: Krispy Kreme" below.) They have to make sure theirbranding messages are understood by everyone inside the company."Over the last few years, people [didn't realize] how hardbranding really is," Koehn says. "But its rewards areequal to its difficulty."

Harpell recently studied a group of new companies to see howingrained their branding messages were inside those companies. Shefound that many employees weren't aware of their companies'branding messages at all. "There was no brand connection, noteaching of employees and no communicating with consumers,"Harpell says.

The Web's a problem, too. When management and technologyconsulting firm Accenture and technology research company OnlineInsight surveyed 2,000 online consumers last year, they found thata lot of the givens about the Web that marketers operate under arefalse. While most marketing is aimed at youth, the average onlineshopper is 35 to 44. Entrepreneurs also assumed that ads drewconsumers to their sites while customers surveyed relied on searchengines. And the low prices companies touted weren't whatcustomers were looking for: They wanted a satisfying customerencounter that was fast and convenient.

"[Branding] is about more than the sock puppet. It'sabout the total customer experience," says Kelly Dixon,co-author of the study and director of e-branding at Accenture inChicago. "Companies haven't focused on the entirepackage."

Consumers developed a love-hate relationship with late-'90sbranding strategies, observes David Schumann, consumer psychologistand associate dean at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. Onone hand, seeing logos invade every inch of public space has leftU.S. consumers over-exposed to branding. On the other hand,consumers are paying attention, if only briefly, to discoverwhether you'll reveal that one clear benefit your product orservice offers that'll make them try it. The problem is, this"one clear benefit" has been missing in plenty ofbranding campaigns, and Schumann sees companies facing the fallout:consumers sticking with the products they've trusted for a longtime instead of taking a chance on products they don't reallyunderstand. When the value proposition is missing, Schumann says,risk-averse consumers will go with what they know.

Back to Basics

Suddenly, branding isn't as much about generating buzz as itis about fundamentals. When Harpell surveyed marketingprofessionals and CEOs in February, she found generating leads,making sales and developing new channels were the new priorities,not branding. Only 19 percent listed branding among their topchallenges. "People are starting to get it that it's notenough to get out and bang a gong as loudly as you can,"Harpell says. "You have to have some meat behind thesizzle."

Companies are rediscovering direct mail, focus groups andcustomer surveys as ways to tap into customer tastes. But in aslowing economy, they need to connect with consumers on anemotional level, says Marc Gobé, CEO of New York City-basedinternational brand consulting firm D/G* New York and author ofEmotional Branding: The New Paradigm forConnecting Brands to People. "People are going to bemore selective in what they buy, where they buy it and how they buyit," Gobé says. "There's a tremendousopportunity for [businesses] to stand out and demonstrate that theyhave a strong commitment to people."

Better hurry...your customers are waiting.

Chris Penttila is Entrepreneur's "StaffSmarts" columnist.