Why Marketers Don’t Understand Brand Marketing – Alex Chrisman // Alta Co

When people talk about brands, they mean 1000 different things. But what is a brand, and why do marketers struggle with brand marketing? How is Patagonia doing it that is making them stand out in the marketplace? To know more about these, listen to Alex Chrisman, Creative Director at Alta Co, as he discusses why marketers don't understand brand marketing.
About the speaker

Alex Chrisman

Alta

 - Alta

Alex Chrisman is Creative Director at Alta

Show Notes

  • 02:25
    Marketers don't understand brand marketing; heres why:
    It's a definitional problem. When people talk about brands, they mean 1000 different things.
  • 08:16
    What is brand and branding?
    Branding is about using the company's underlying values to drive alignment in all of our activities. And then surface it with these artifacts we call marketing.
  • 15:28
    The intersection of Patagonias business problem and their mission
    It is about purpose beyond profit.
  • 16:16
    What page can you take off the Patagonia playbook?
    Even though your company is not as mission-driven as Patagonia, you must remember that all companies start with that little spark. There's like a seed of something so important to somebody that they will recall, preserve, and fan that flame. That's where your brand comes from, your differentiation, and your new products come from, the other people wouldn't make.

Quotes

  • "Why do marketers not understand brand marketing? It's a definitional problem. When people talk about brands, they mean 1000 different things. In marketing work, people say this is all the unattributed value we generate from activity." - Alex Chrisman

  • "People realize that the way our brains are built and human psychology, we're not rational creatures that make logical, self-interested decisions, and we're emotional creatures that make emotional decisions. And that's what branding aims to do, exploiting the pattern recognition built into your survival psyche." - Alex Chrisman

  • "Marketers and many business leaders get it wrong when they talk about brands because they only talk about the artifacts of a brand, logos, colors, and what they need to reflect the brand. But that's not the brand itself." - Alex Chrisman

  • "Branding is about using the company's underlying values to drive alignment in all of our activities. And then surface it with these artifacts we call marketing." - Alex Chrisman

  • "You can drive this incredible value with a brand that causes people to part with more money cause to become fanatical about your product. And it has to do with this synchronization problem. Like, do I care about something enough to align everything across the whole company to that thing?" - Alex Chrisman

  • "All companies start with that little spark. There's like a seed of something so important to somebody that they will recall, preserve, and fan that flame. That's where your brand comes from, where your differentiation, that's where your new products come from, the other people wouldn't make there's this X factor that comes from that place, that frankly when big companies start to lose their audience, it's because they've engineered that out of the equation." - Alex Chrisman

  • "The way that brands get built is not by giving them a series of rules to follow, is by giving them some momentum that once they start understanding, what does this feel like when I do this? They can recognize it. And it becomes easier for them to transmute that into teams." - Alex Chrisman

About the speaker

Alex Chrisman

Alta

 - Alta

Alex Chrisman is Creative Director at Alta

Up Next: