"To Brand Market or Product Market?" That is the Question...

Had the internet, radio, or TV broadcasting been around during the Bard’s day, perhaps we may have heard Shakespeare’s publicist say prior to Hamlet being ready for performance:

“To brand market or product market? That is the question. Whether tis nobler to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous product advertising, or to take arms with brands against the distractions of daily folly…”

While Hamlet was not written until later in Shakespeare’s life, he already enjoyed a popular fan base with his cannon of comedies and histories. Marketing during his day would have been with printed fliers, handbills, and word of mouth. Many people had already been adept to William Shakespeare’s celebrity through his personal appearance around England and so his face became his own brand marketing of developing a buzz on any upcoming new plays.

Jump forward three hundred years in the US and we see the appearance of what would later become the most highly identified product branding in the history of the United States, the Coca-Cola logo. The white cursive lettering on a red background became synonymous with not just a soft drink, but a way of life in the American culture that it exported. As Coca-Cola grew as a company and it products were shipped all over the world, the term “Cocacolonization” became synonymous with all things “American.”

The question in today’s book industry of what is more effective and logical form of marketing, brand versus product is one that can be asked in context to the type of product that is being sold. Books are not your “typical” products in that their value is not immediately visible the way say a chainsaw’s immediate value is measured in how it clears trees. The intrinsic value of books takes place inside the brains of each reader and the information that is dispensed. Books also cover as many different topics as the human imagination can muster and so do very different things in their dissemination of information. While the publishing industry continues to market books for their own bottom line, I believe that most publishing houses rely specifically on the “product” of each book since most readers are looking for specific information and not the brand of the publishing house overall. There are of course exceptions to the product marketing rule in that Harlequin books developed a very unique brand with their serial books and consistent graphic covers and became known as a publishing house of romance readers. When a reader heard the name “Harlequin” he or she would have an immediate impression of the type of serial romances that the publishing house was pushing instead of individual titles. One publishing house that effectively uses branding and product marketing are the “For Dummies” series by John Wiley & Sons who acquired the series from the publishing company Hungry Minds. While many readers of the “For Dummies” series couldn’t tell you the name of the publisher, the brand of the publishing company to use consistent design graphics of yellow background with a black band and white and yellow texts and a triangular cartoon face is immediately recognizable and is considered a media franchise success with over 1700 titles of various title and topics in the “how to” types of series.

While Harlequin effectively developed its name and serial graphic images and the “for Dummies” series has the name “for Dummies” (not John Wiley & Sons) and the yellow and black design with the cartoon face on each cover, brand marketing has worked effectively for these two particular publishers. The challenges ahead for small and medium publishers in the long tale of the internet will be to ultimately develop a kind of brand with the niche market that they hope to sell, but early on will need to product market the individual titles in order to stand out. Readers will continue to search for individual titles to fulfill their information needs so the most immediate marketing will be product marketing for individual titles.