Advertising will not kill off great brands

A Differentiate product story

Edited by the Marketingweek Marketplace editorial team Mar 7, 2008

Chris Radford, director at Differentiate, challenges Sir Tim Bell's astonishing presumption that a great brand could not survive without advertising.

Lord Bell of Chime Communications was quoted as saying at the ISBA conference: "If we don't take action, fabulous brands that spent millions building their reputation will disappear overnight".

The issue referred to is action to dissuade the government from imposing further restrictions and controls on advertising in areas such as unhealthy foods, cars that are bad for the environment, alcohol and the like.

Yet some of the greatest and most fabulous brands of the 21st century became great brands long before they invested in broadcast advertising.

How did they do this? They created products and services that people wanted and executed them better than others.

For example, here are a just a few plucked from the Superbrands top 500: Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Rough Guides, Facebook.

Brand reputation and durability is built upon people's day-to-day experience of the brand or what they hear about it from other people.

How did people discover these brands and services before they started advertising? It will be different in each case but we know that while TV ads can be influential, word of mouth, previous experiences and being available in the right places are often the drivers of growth.

I would beg to suggest that the "fabulous brands that will disappear overnight" are not really so fabulous.

Great brands that deliver things that customers want and make themselves available in the right places will be sought after and customers will find them.

If advertising is restricted then brand owners will create new ways to make themselves famous.

Their destiny is not tied to the availability of mass market advertising.

Having said that, advertising is a powerful tool and persuading the government to back off is a good idea.

But to do this we will need more powerful arguments than this one as advocated by Lord Bell at ISBA.