Let’s talk about brands.
Some people think brands are logos and symbols and a certain shade of blue. But that’s not a brand, that’s a trademark.
Brand is a product’s emotional asset. Brand is the feeling you get when you think about a good or service or concept.
Without brand identity, a good or service or concept is just a commodity. Like salt. Not sea salt. Or kosher salt. Those are more like brands, with an emotional asset, a back story. Salt is more like a commodity, if it’s table salt, say, sold in bulk.
Coffee can be a commodity, if it’s generic. Or coffee can be a strong brand, like Starbuck’s. The difference between coffee in a black and white can labeled “coffee” and a four dollar cup of joe from Starbuck’s is brand value.
A double mocha latte skim half caf is a brand component. A cup of joe is just a commodity.
Coffee from Starbuck’s isn’t even coffee anymore. It’s Starbuck’s.
Before media disaggregation, before the internet and search engines and blogs, before 180 channels of cable tv and pay per view and dvd’s, before ipods and text messaging, brands were usually what the owners of the brands said they were. Now brands are what the community says they are.
Brand marketing used to be a lecture. Now it’s a conversation.
Branding is like dating. It’s seduction. Branding is convincing the consumer to fall for you, in love or lust or like.
Let’s talk about a pound of salt. Let’s talk about a particular pound of salt, sold in a noisy marketplace by an old man with a weathered gaze and blue diamond chip eyes as cold as sea ice, with muscles in his forearms taut like cords of rope under skin like stained canvas as he shovels a pound of salt from a wooden barrel with a scoop carved from an elephant’s tusk. That pound of salt, perhaps, is no longer a commodity. That pound of salt has been transformed into a brand by the experience. The salt hasn’t changed. But now it evokes an emotion, the emotional resonance of the memory of the experience.
El Paso is a brand. It’s a negative brand for people that say “I’m sorry,” when you tell them you’re from El Paso. For some people, like me, it’s a positive brand, with all the emotional assets of home. The concept “home” lends brand value to the concept “El Paso.”
But El Paso is more than home for me. El Paso is my playground. El Paso is one of those sunsets when the sky’s on fire. El Paso a plate of chicken tacos with tomatillo salsa. El Paso is a live band in a dive bar, and bumping into a drunk and both of you saying excuse me. El Paso is the smell of rain on greasewood. El Paso is margaritas at the Kentucky Club. El Paso is bullfights. It’s mussels at Pelicans. Lunch at Cafe Central. Chico’s Tacos. It’s the drive to Chope’s, or Old Mesilla. It’s sushi. It’s sitting on the patio at Desert Crossing on a summer night and listening to the jazz band.
And when I say I’m from El Paso, and someone says “I’m sorry,” I think, No, I’m sorry for you.
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The problem with branding El Paso is that El Paso lacks a cohesive identity. We are the Westside and the Lower Valley. We’re downtown, and Northeast, and the expansive suburbia of the Eastside. Your typical El Pasoan is an old-young, Anglo-Chicano-Syrian-Korean-African-American, who’s an illiterate college graduate. He/she has newly arrived and can trace his/her El Paso roots back for generations. As El Pasoans, we’re fit and we’re fat. We’re on-line and unplugged, and we’re in line for food stamps and the opera. We are the melting pot, but we’re a salad and not a soup.
Even our Mexnicity is not uniform. Our acculturation spans the whole analog range, from the newly arrived immigrants who speak no English to the third and fourth generation Mexican Americans who speak no Spanish. There are Mexicans here who live in the United States because their ancestors lived here when it was Mexico. Yo no cruce la frontera, they say, la frontera me cruzo.
Likewise, there are gabachos who live here who are more Mexican than American, with their feet on both sides of the river.
So how do we tell people who we are? What is the brand identity we offer to overcome the brand image portrayed in the arts and media?
We, as El Pasoans, haven’t managed El Paso’s brand equity. We’ve kept the secrets, and let the consumer muddle through the rough edges. Most non-residents’ experience of El Paso is the view from the freeway, the billboards and concrete slabs, the shacks of the colonias, the smelter and urban sprawl, the gas stations and truck stops. The crap. We haven’t shared our treasures.
A marketer’s ideal task is to design a product from the ground up in the hopes of fulfilling some unmet need in the market. In the big marketing companies, like Proctor and Gamble, products are usually designed and adapted that way. Sometimes an R & D project, coupled with consumer insight, serendipitously leads to an unexpected consumer benefit.
Sometimes innovation surpasses the market’s expectations. Like Henry Ford said, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”
Not too long ago our logo was the three faces, by Cisneros, of a cowboy, an Indian, and a Spaniard. An historic branding icon, but not representative of the contemporary city.
For an existing product, brand positioning is often accompanied by a little tweaking of the product. That’s part of what the city fathers are trying to do with the Downtown Plan. But there’s plenty of good here in El Paso even now, before the Plan. And that’s what we’re here for. To draw back the curtain and show El Pasoans, and El Paso’s visitors, what El Paso has to offer.