Jonathan Salem Baskin on Why Branding Only Works on Cattle

Enthusiastic from the beginning of our conversation to the end, it was clear that Jonathan Salem Baskin didn't write a book to pad his résumé or sell a product. He wrote a book because he had something—actually, many groundbreaking things, some of which will ruffle some feathers of many brand marketers—to say.

"Branding Only Works on Cattle: The New Way to Get Known (and drive your competitors crazy)" (Business Plus, Hachette Book Group, September 2008) came after 26 years of working in nearly every corner of the marketing communications field. Baskin currently writes a biweekly column for Advertising Age and runs his popular Dim Bulb blog. In the book, he skewers how brand marketing is practiced yet gives an exciting glimpse of what the future of direct marketing can be. In our interview, he painted what that future can be like for direct mail as well.

Boldt: Why did you write this book?
Baskin: It became increasingly apparent to me that there is this ever-widening gap between what people think and what we think they think and what they actually do. Every year the marketing world seems to get more obsessed by or reliant upon effectively mind reading. "Somehow, some day you the client or consumer are going to use that stuff we inserted into your brain or your heart or soul to buy stuff."

But that approach doesn't jibe with the reality of what is happening, which is the combination of technology and culture and our better education in media and marketing. What, in fact, moves people is a lot more tangible, more tactical, more real life. When you look at the miracle of the Internet, we see images—so marketers think that marketing on the Internet is all about images, but it's not. What's driving all those images and all the social conversation activity is actually reality—the stuff that's chatted about and what really moves communities online are the reaction to real-life events, what companies really do, and people can see them more clearly, more often and also comment on them.

So the marketing world and the branding world are evermore reliant on imagination, when the consuming world is evermore reliant on fact or versions of fact. So I thought, "Jeez, maybe why consumers aren't loyal anymore and people no longer believe what companies say is that we're going about it the wrong way." It's not just that we need to come up with different ways to deliver branding. Maybe the very premise of what we're trying to accomplish with branding isn't necessarily very relevant any longer.

The technology we have now has really returned us to all those drivers of purchase and preference that mattered all along: community, referral, local authority, knowledge, whether imperfect or incomplete knowledge, not just hype. There was a fundamental disconnect that we couldn't fix just by a newer, improved version of how to brand or how to market. It really was that somebody had to step back and ask a different question. And that's the substance of the book: asking a different question of brand and marketing.

Boldt: Facing so many challenges, how can the practice of direct mail be improved?
Baskin: Branding has never been materially good news for the direct mail business because it really distracts and obfuscates the really tangible immediacy that is direct mail. It ends up doing a disservice not only to the budget, but also the customer. The whole beauty of direct mail is that you're getting somebody's attention, even if for a couple of seconds. The immediacy and potential relevance in direct mail is a powerful tool today, just as it was yesterday, but I think the whole branding theology has not used it to its full potential.

For example, almost all of this political direct mail is inconsequential. All of it is almost immediately junk mail, rather than being relevant mail and direct. What it's not doing is giving me something to act upon. What the political campaigns should be doing is identifying those intermediate steps that warrant my attention and give me something to do. Don't give me a list of five attributes that I'm supposed to remember for election day. Give me that single action as a result of holding that piece of direct mail that will be beneficial to your purpose and also relevant to what I want. For example, why isn't the entire piece devoted to getting me to go to their Web site to do X?

The whole premise with direct mail is that it's going to prompt a reaction and the crapshoot is that action is "Buy now!" and that's why the response rate of a half percent is reasonably good because you're really just trying to chance upon instances where the customer may already be predisposed to buy and you gave them a great offer right when they were predisposed to look for one. It's like needle-in-the-haystack marketing versus looking at every piece of direct mail as an opportunity to begin or further your conversation with a customer.

Instead of trying to sell you something, I'm giving you something, some knowledge, access to something. I'm challenging you to do something: vote, register, contribute, win. So the live and die isn't how many direct sales do I prompt with this mailing, but the metric becomes how do I use this channel to either begin or further that dialogue with my customers? So instead of trying to catch them when they're ready to buy, why aren't I giving them more reasons to consider why they want to buy? As a result, I think it's a woefully underutilized channel.

This article originally appeared in the December 2008 issue of Inside Direct Mail, a sister publication to Target Marketing. To learn more about Inside Direct Mail, visit www.insidedirect mail.com.