HOW MUCH IS IT WORTH?

I keep on meeting ex colleagues and so-called marketing experts who rather like defrocked priests seem to want to confess they’ve lost the faith. They look at me with embarrassment and confusion on their faces and say “it’s all bollocks isn’t it, isn’t it?”

A career in advertising and brand management and they’ve lost their belief, all those years in brand prayer and suddenly they’ve become marketing atheists. But of course it’s always been all right to have doubts especially when the language of marketing has been purloined by non-marketeers and especially the media.
Anyone would be confused to hear people talk about the UKIP brand or brand Russia or the Linda Barker brand – she used to talk about herself as LB  not as a person at all, an image, a brand  – for heaven’s sake – an icon.

This week I happened, in the interests of curiosity rather than penury, to visit Poundland and Lidl. Both are doing brilliantly right now and deservedly. They’re great value and they have brilliantly clear positioning. “We are cheap” they say and they are.

 But in either you learn the value and reason for brands, those products with the swagger of superiority like Innocent or Apple or Dom Perignon. There is, of course, no problem with these stores or Aldi which increasingly cater for the Waitrose shoppers in us when we awaken lean, hungry and overdrawn. Our left brain guides us to smoked salmon, napkins, ketchup and chocolate which is just fine and does the job. Eat it and your self-esteem, health and complexion will not suffer.

But there’s more to life than crisps from Estonia at £1.09 rather than £2.50 from a start up in Stoke Poges where the owner has dreams about potatoes and would kill you if you teased him or her.

Earlier in the week I was in Selfridges trying to get my Mont Blanc pencil mended. To my horror I see it’s more than doubled in price from the ridiculous £130 it cost a few years ago. I’m told it cannot be mended here but has to be sent to Germany where it will be assessed and a quotation phoned to me. This whole diagnosis, estimate and complex restoration process (should I care to comply) will take four weeks.

 This is contemptuous luxury brand marketing at its best. But despite myself I can’t resort to a W.H. Smith pencil or a Bic….despite myself I love my Mont Blanc in the way others love their iPhones.
The real truth about marketing and the creation of brands is they cost more because they are better and, more importantly, although they are not that much better, they have a better story to tell about why, how, where and when they are crafted.

Most marketeers have their focus wrong. They need to worry a lot more about the quality of their product than their marketing.

But they also need to remember that in shops like Lidl, brilliant as they are, there are no stories, there’s just stuff.