Relaunch? Relaunch What?

Before I became a titan of finance (hah!) I was an internet business development executive during the dot-com bubble at a large, very well-known financial institution. I was also a part-time Marketing professor, teaching MBA students at a crappy business school (more accurately a business school with crappy students). I drew extensively on my business experience during the dot-com era to drive home one of the fundamental lessons in marketing that I wanted to impart to my students. First the experience. I worked on opportunities for this large financial institution to partner with and/or invest in internet companies. As a result I saw numerous business plans whose marketing plan was essentially this: 1) do an IPO to raise millions of dollars, 2) spend said millions of dollars on advertising to 'build our brand', 3) sit back and watch customers flock to us due to our market leading brand. The fundamental marketing lesson is this: advertising does not a brand build. A brand is the result of product superiority, reliability, service excellence or a combination of these attributes over a sufficient period of time. A brand is built by virtue of success, not the other way around.

Obama's team has the dot-com marketing playbook. They are sitting on boatloads of IPO capital (political) and are spending it on advertising with abandon in what they think is a brand building strategy, all the while without a substantive product to speak of. This headline brings it home. They're relaunching. Re-launching what? Re-launching more advertising, that's what. They are, by analogy, firing the old ad agency and hiring a new one to recraft the campaign. This too happened in the dot-com days. Faltering companies didn't believe that it was an inferior product, or failed execution, or a lack of relevancy in the marketplace that was the source of their problems; it must be the advertising, so they thought. Without a competitive product, no amount of advertising will save you. I predict that the coming relaunch, if it lacks the substance that has been the hallmark of this administration heretofore, won't turn the tide.