Avoid "Ho-Hum" Branding

If I were to ask you what company is represented by a gecko lizard, the answer almost anyone would give me is "Geico". Of course. Geico did an excellent job (a long time ago in terms of longevity of ad campaigns) of using the similar sounding lizard name to help brand theirs. And that "hook" is still working today. Geico's commercials and advertising are memorable when tied to the gecko.

But you may not recall a commercial with this scenario:  It is night in the city after a rainfall. A small car rounds a corner and runs through a pothole, blowing a tire in the process. The car stops. The pothole begins to talk, in a female voice with a Southern accent, and says something like this:  "Oh noooo. Yer tire's all flat and junk. Aww, did I do that? Here. Let me get my cellular out, call you a wrecker. Oh, shoot! I got no phone. 'Cuz I'm a pothooole? Sooooo...... "Kay, Bye." The asphalt on the edge of the pothole flapped as it talked. I thought it was hilarious the first time I saw it. But it was shortlived. I only saw it a few times. View it at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NjMUfIKktWU But before you watch it, tell me this:

What product was it for? And for what company? Did you know it, too, was a Geico commercial? Well, it was. But although it had a humorous story line, it didn't work as well because it didn't brand strongly enough. For many companies and products, humor is great for drawing attention to advertising, but if it falls short of solidifying your brand in the consumer's mind, it could be considered a failure. Even when not using humor, whatever your message is, whatever genre or approach you use, you will know whether you have achieved success or not by measuring how strongly people are able to identify your brand as a result of it.


Think of all the Super Bowl commercials you have seen. The advertisers spent 4 million dollars for a 30 second commercial. Of the commercials you can remember, how many of them do you remember for their humor or for their "warm and fuzzy"-ness? And for how many of those can you name the brand of the company or product?


For each one that you laughed at, but you can't immediately recall the brand, you can consider that the sponsoring company just paid 4 million dollars for a 30 second comedy, just to give you a chuckle. But in terms of advertising, those same commercials were failures.

Remember that lesson when planning your advertising campaign. "Ho-Hum" branding is any branding that fails to make your business or product name the main point of the ad or commercial. Everything else is just the vehicle used to drive that point home.