What others say about your brand is much more powerful than what you say about it yourself. Today brands are built with publicity and maintained with advertising. The cart is now driving the horse.
The birth of a brand is achieved with publicity, not advertising.
There’s a strong relationship between the two. The news media wants to talk about what’s new, what’s first, and what’s hot, not what’s better. When your brand can make news, it has a chance to generate publicity. And the best way to make news is to announce a new category, not a new product.Most companies develop their branding strategies as if advertising were their primary communications vehicle. They’re wrong. Strategy should be developed first from a publicity point of view.
I remember when we launched our campaign for No One how basically almost all of the media were interested to talk about the movie, just because it was the first Bulgarian feature film in the history of Bulgarian cinema with explicit lesbian scene and sex as a theme.
Once born, a brand needs advertising to stay healthy.
Our advertising budget is like a country’s defense budget. Those massive advertising dollars don’t buy you anything; they just keep you from losing market share to your competition. All of its tanks, planes, and missiles just keep a country from being overrun by one of its enemies.
Publicity is a powerful tool, but sooner or later a brand outlives its publicity potential. The process normally goes through two distinct phases.
Phase one involves the introduction of the new category—the plain-paper copier, for example, introduced by Xerox in 1959. Hundreds of magazine and newspaper articles were written about the launch of the 914 copier. Xerox executives also appeared on numerous television shows to demonstrate their new baby. Much was written about the potential of the new category.
Phase two concerns the rise of the company that pioneered the new category. Again, hundreds of articles were written about the marketing and financial successes of Xerox, a company that rose from the ashes of Haloid, a manufacturer of photographic paper. Today, everybody knows that Xerox pioneered xerography and has become a global leader in copiers. There’s no news story left to tell, so advertising takes over.
Almost every successful brand goes through the same process. Brands like Compaq, Dell, SAP, Oracle, Cisco, Microsoft, Starbucks, and Wal-Mart were born in a blaze of publicity. As the publicity dies out, each of these brands has had to shift to massive advertising to defend its position. First publicity, then advertising is the general rule.
Leaders should not look on their advertising budgets as investments that will pay dividends. Instead leaders should look on their advertising budgets as insurance that will protect them against losses caused by competitive attacks. What should a brand leader advertise? Brand leadership, of course. Leadership is the single most important motivating factor in consumer behavior.
Advertising is a powerful tool, not to build leadership of a fledgling brand, but to maintain that leadership once it is obtained. Companies that want to protect their well-established brands should not hesitate to use massive advertising programs to smother the competition.
So why spend the money? Advertising may not pay for itself, but if you’re the leader, advertising will make your competitor pay through the nose for the privilege of competing with you. Many won’t be able to afford it; those who can won’t bother. Instead they’ll be content to nibble on the crumbs around your huge piece of the pie.
So Which is more effective Publicity or Advertising?
BOTH!!! But one after another. First publicity, then advertising is the general rule.
Just look at Elon Musk and you will see the same pattern.
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