What is the state of branding in today's marketing? How is it different?

Yes and no. Branding - in its pure sense (not the pretty logo sense) is all about the perceptions that people carry with them of our company and solutions. These are often the "gut" senses of "this vendor is the mercedes", "this vendor is the cheap and cheerful option", etc.

I would argue that the reason we, as marketers, are so intensely focused on social media is that each interaction we see, join, contribute to, or enhance, is an interaction that changes the brand perceptions of those involved. Rather than attempting to change brand perceptions through major tv campaigns or billboards, we're attempting to change them one small interaction at a time.

Interesting question, Craig. Branding is still alive, in fact it's built into everything we do via our marketing strategies. Every content asset, campaign, eMarketing program, trade show, blog post, etc. either helps your company improve your brand (perception in the eyes of your market) or it doesn't.

I think the difference is that marketers used to be more focused on branding based on advertisements and now it's inclusive in all the things you mention above. I think it's become restated more as reputation management than branding. This said, it's also talked about a lot as market positioning.

So perhaps the question really is, what do we call branding or brand management today?

Craig: All great answers and I will try to add my two cents to what has already been written. I do not view brand as dead but actually view brand as a key part of good lead management and demand generation.

One of the key pillars of good demand generation and lead management is delivering relevant content to your buyers to continue a 1-1 engagement dialogue. As this is being done (whether it is early on or later in the buying process) companies are developing a brand reputation and cementing an impression of their brand in their buyers mind. The experience a buyer has while engaging with a company during the demand generation process can either reinforce as positive brand or damage that companies brand.

I do not see brand marketing as something that should necessarily stand on its own as in the days of more traditional marketing, but something that should be considered and certainly be included as part of a corporations lead management/demand generation strategy across all channels - email, social, direct mail, web, etc.

Carlos Hidalgo
The Annuitas Group

Yes, and actually more so than ever. What do all of the last decade's high growth companies (in spite of the fact that they do really different things) have in common? A good brand or position. Take internet companies such as Facebook, Google, Amazon as an example. These are really different companies doing really different things. They share two things in common though: market leadership and solid brands. We can argue about cause and effect here, but in my mind the brand and brand attributes were established before they achieved world domination.

The reason it matters so much now is that in a world of "attention scarcity" where the audience/customer/doesn't have a lot of attention to give to you as a company, you had better resonate with that audience/customer in a really primal, Jack Trout sort of way.

A good brand will definitely increase your response rates. Not having one won't keep you from being successful, but I'm convinced that a strong brand gives you a lift on response, engagement, speed and conversion through the pipeline.

If I was a brand consultant today, I'd do everything I could to try and quantify this. What's the calculated lift in response, close rates, etc. by having a strong brand that people understand, trust, believe in?

If you're an unknown entity, not as many people will give you the benefit of the doubt. Not as many people will take your call. Not as many people will want to stake their success (not to mention their raise & promotion) on giving you a shot.

Direct response still works just fine without a brand. And everyone starts marketing and selling something from scratch before that brand is developed. But a good brand greases the skids, and makes everything easier.

I would agree with these posts that branding is still critical for effective marketing and that the brand is the perception of the customer, which ultimately influences their decisions. The additional responsibility that social media gives organizational leaders and HR. With social media, individuals have the ability to post and communicate with the masses about their experiences, the perceptions and their exposures to a brand. That includes the experiences of internal customers. Social media increases the need for organizations to make sure that their internal brands are aligning with the promises they are making to external customers. If I claim to be a service focused organization with a commitment to the employees, their families and the community, the experiences that are reported from those individuals must be the same. The key to branding is consistency, that consistency goes with internal and external brands. Social media simply increases to an even greater degree than before how important an organization's culture is.

Branding retains its importance in that we humans don't have the luxury of unlimited bandwidth. We have to distill down what we think about a myriad of product choices. Our job as marketers is to make sure the distillation around our own products and company is to something that gives us the market position we seek.

What has changed is buyer behavior in how they go about collecting information around distillation and ultimately purchasing. They now spend more time seeking out information from a broader array of sources. They now come to the vendor as an information source later in the process. Social media, third party websites, blogs...they've made that possible, of course (tapping into an inherent need we have for objective, third party assessments of our options).

So while branding matters as much as ever the vehicles you employ for trying to influence how your brand is formed have dramatically changed. As noted by others here it's true that you have less control over your brand but what's actionable is that you have to expand to social marketing in promoting your brand (including trying to impact and interact with social media activities of third parties).

Brands are all about delivery and trust they have never been aboout just a logo! Every single customer interaction and perception constitutes the brand. What has changed is that the shortcomings of a brand are more visible more quickly to more people and the brand gets to demonstrate how it delivers on its promise in real time every day. There is less margin for error as breaks in trust are more visible.
Branding today more than ever is about the entire end-to-end experience. Great brand marketers have always listened carefully to their customers and eveolved based on their needs. Now they have better tools than ever to do it. The hard part is meeting the expectation.
As far as lead generation is concerned again the tools have changed. However a more compelling proposition will over the long haul always produce a better response much as a more compelling proposition will always command higher margins.
Great brands absolutely need to embrace the new world and new technologies to continue to thrive but ultimately these are still all tools to support, enhance, evolve and improve the brand. Poorly thought out brand propositions with great social media and lead generation tactics will show through quicker than ever.

Being a brand manager has to be one of the most challenging roles in marketing today. We no longer have full control of communication and touch points with customers. Brand Managers can shape the brand but now have to relinquish much control to the social world. It's like growing a sales and marketing team from 50 people to 50,000 and expecting them to know your brand standards. Very difficult.

It does still exist and is more important than it ever has been.

I think that branding is more important than ever. Why? Because the internet has required companies to be more accountable than ever before. Technology has made it impossible to hide the warts and missteps that companies could sweep under the rug in years past. Quite simply, it's harder to hide, so a company's brand is more exposed.

What's changed is how people engage with brands. Again, technology has pioneered new ways for companies to interact with prospects and customers, giving them more opportunities to build relationships with customers. The flipside to this access is that people are bombarded with so much messaging that brand perceptions often translate into brand realities for many consumers. Thus, having a "good" brand in the marketplace (whether it's justified or not) seems to be as much about word-of-mouth as something more substantive.

I think it depends on your business model and maturity. Branding still has its place but that piece of the pie may be smaller than is used to be, at the expense of more lead generation oriented activity, and brand activity is changing.

In my opinion, if you know that certain lead generation / direct marketing programs are going to bring in positive ROI, then you should absolutely max out those investments first before spending money on less measurable and predictable brand building activities. On the other hand, if you have reached that point of diminishing returns with your lead gen activities where, as you increase spend, you can no longer get high enough ROI, then I think those incremental dollars are better off spent on activities that will have a one-to-many and longer term impact (branding).

The nature of branding has also changed. Social media marketing is certainly not a lead generation activity and is really much more about buzz creation and brand protection and engagement, but its very different than traditional brand building efforts. The company website and blog are also brand-related functions and those are essential parts of the mix.

Brand iis definitely more important as channels change the nature of interaction of brand to the public. Digital Media offers a great opportunity to strengthen branding IF brand managers have the discipline to stay on-message within interactive channels.

Traditionally, Branding was dictatorial in nature, now it is interactive and almost democratized. Is the message and image strong enough to hold up to two-way communication?

Knowing the tools of technology and expanding the definitions of brand to suit new media are the challenge for traditional branding minds. They will be successful if they can adapt, or go the way of the typographers...extinct.

The Brand is something for us to recognize and to create a perception from. It is of course important to have a well recognized brand which is well regarded and has a good reputation. So we should throw everything we have at it right?

Rome was not built in one day and so can be said for all the well known brands. It is obvious that consumer brands need a lot of media attention, while a specialist drilling equipment manufacturing company for subsea drilling, most likely do not need to be known by the public whatsoever.

Social media will - social as it is - be great for consumer goods and commodity product brands (e.g. the iPhone), but the brand awareness also means you become more vulnerable towards problems (like with iPhone 4 which struggled with their antena). But being in the social media space is not necessarily going to mean anything to a lot of businesses as well.

I have enjoyed guidance from a person with a lot of business experience who is now based in Mallorca and talks about web 2.0 - which I have yet to understand the concept of - but he has really thought me about good guidelines for how you expose yourself and the company on the various social media available to you. His competencias20 (2.0), although in Spanish, is a very well educated guide to how to deal with it.

For you Craig, if branding is alive or not, I think it will always be. Like with most other type of information, however, we are able to get too much from too many places and brands therefore becomes very deluted. In the days when IBM, Kellogs and LEGO was great it was easy to say who was a good brand, but with Apple, Microsoft, Google and god knows who else is fighting for our attention, it is harder (Sorry Larry, since you stepped down as chairman Oracle is not up there anymore). It is also a paradox that the better they become, the less we see them. There is a 'branding' overflow which means it is hard to become visible. Some companies also do not care. The bigger a brand you are the more vulnerable you are and for many it becomes a problem to accelerate business when you have to keep the handbreak on.

Many successful companies today have kept companies from mergers and aquisitions with their original name, some mix them (Lotus Tesco in Thailand is a good example) and some are so proud that they make a streamlined impression of totally unsimilar and unrelated products into a family (like Microsoft Dynamics). As a consumer of products and services from these companies we become unaware of facts like sharing the same gearbox between a Skoda, Volkswagen and a Bentley. Not sure it is great knowledge for the Bentley owner! Not even sure if it is true. And there comes the 'brand' problem. Is the brand worth its recognition or do we miss out on a lot of nice products in this world because they overshaddow the quality of the less branded companies and products? And is the information real? I - at least - am willing to give a try to not so well known establishements as well and my favourite Italian restaurant is not La Strada. The world - and espcially Maurizio in Manchester - fortuantely has more to offer!

So for the brand and its importance? Who cares? I do not know how important it is and if it remains in focus or not but am of course supporting building a good brand.

Branding in today's market is as kool or as hot as it used to be yesterday. Perceptions or Conceptions do not go without the brands being intertwined and influxed into the minds, to give an example here, the coke or the pepsi have branded themselves to an extent that a child in the lap of a mother percieves that any drink available is either pepsi or coke and that is the point where we see today's branding.
As far as the difference is concerned, I do not see any difference less the gadgets being used. With an improvement and innovation in the tools the things have gone better.
a newer way of branding which can commonly be seen now is the "Social Engagement Activities". Brands are out to engage the target audience in such activities for promotion of their sale and create an impact on the mind slates so as to be the best out in the market.

Besides everthing, I found it to be a good participative question and informative too. would love to carry on with such activities.