In the wide world of the web, how do you ensure that when a consumer hops on a search engine they find you first?

Bruce Philp, branding guru to ING Direct and co-author of The Orange Code says that the answer is differentiation. Here in the third of three interviews, Philp talks about how the Internet has changed brand management–and relinquished control to the consumer.

Is the notion of differentiation irrelevant in a “Google-search” world?

Bruce Philp: Trout and Ries would have been hailed as geniuses if they’d described the concept of positioning about twenty years later than they did. Search is the reason why.

Positioning stipulates that a brand be recognizable as one of a pool of comparable brands, and that this pool is defined by a particular kind of user.

Can you give an example?

We don’t think about Levis as competing with all forms of lower extremity coverage, or even with all kinds of pants. They compete with other blue jeans, and we consider what makes them different in that context.

That generates more powerful differentiation, because it forces relevance. It becomes not just a matter of being different, but to whom and against what set of expectations.

How do you win at a search?

To win at search, a brand absolutely must think first about the tribe it’s selling to (to borrow Godin’s word) and their particular expectations and definition of themselves. That discipline directs effective search strategies, but it also directs focused branding.

It seems impossible to manage how people perceive your brand. Is that true?

I contend that it’s impossible to manage a brand anymore. Brands are no longer taught in a one-way, didactic context like they were in the age of advertising. Instead, they are observed across the full spectrum of their behavior.

In effect, this means that everything a brand does adds to its meaning. That’s because there are so many channels open–including the Internet–and because the social consensus that advertising is the ‘official’ voice of a brand is broken.

What happens if you try to strictly manage your brand?

A brand becomes a totalitarian state with a massive bureaucracy focused on control. It moves slowly because every single tactic is a decision. It’s an unsustainable approach for any brand that has to do business with consumers in a competitive context, when disruption is coming at it faster and faster.

When Google can tell me not only what people have said about the brand in the last days, weeks and months, but what they’re saying right now, it’s hard to imagine that the brand as a fascist state can stand.

What’s the alternative?

Manage a brand from principle. This is the constitutional model I proposed in The Orange Code. Instead of creating a book of rules, we create a declaration of principles. We hire for it, we reward it, we tell the world about it so that we’re held to account. Over time, the organization begins to organically behave according to those principles. They become its culture.

Thus, in a world where everything an organization does accretes to the brand, that entire organization will very naturally get it right most of the time.

The owner is Greek, the restaurant is Italian. And it serves the best Chicago-style stuffed pizza in the Chicago area.

That’s saying something, given that there’s a pizza joint on the four corners of every major intersection. This restaurant is not a franchise. Not a carry-out-only place. And while it serves other Italian food – I don’t know that for sure, since I’ve eaten only the pizza.

To beat the rush weekend evenings, we order in. That is, my wife or I call about 40 minutes ahead and place our order. We arrive with our three kids, two of which head to a playroom with video games and other toys.

We put our name in with the host, who most often is the grumpy, squatty gray-haired owner-grandma. She barely looks up when you walk up to the podium that she peers over to take your name. We remind her that we’ve already ordered. I don’t think she smiles. She plays no favorites.

The service is slow, the waiters and waitresses are never around when you want another drink. You wait for your check. You wait for the box to take home the leftover pizza. It’s the place to go if you want to test your patience.

In short the restaurant violates pretty much every marketing principle of the last quarter century.

Yet, I suspect that the owners fit the profile of the rich folks in the best-selling book, The Millionaire Next Door. The restaurant mints gold, the pizza is gold.

So I wonder what there is to take away from their success, and the only thing I can think of is this: Great pizza trumps great service. That is, if your product is really, really good, then your service can be average.

That doesn’t sound right to me, but I’m stumped.

Thoughts?

I spent several days near Bozeman, Montana, in mid April, and I passed on the road several glossy orange trucks with large black lettering that read “We Do Anything.” The trucks were about the size of a mid-sized U-Haul; the black lettering looked like it was painted by my 6th grader.

At first, I thought, Wow, these folks could sure use some consulting. Their strategy is too general – they do anything. That means they really do nothing. What a poor way to market your small business!

Then I began thinking about how I might use them at home in the Chicago western suburbs:

1. We have a heavy wooden swing set (which could survive a nuclear attack) that I’d like disassembled and taken to the dump.

2. We have two golden retrievers, and when I get lazy or forget to scrape up their business in the backyard, I might just give “We Do Anything” a call.

3. We have an old shed in the backyard that also needs to be torn down. Yes, I could do that. But why ruin a perfectly good weekend?

4. In the next month, I need to put a seal coating on our paved driveway. How motivated am I to do this, really?

5. I have some large limbs from trees that were blown down from last summer’s microburst that need to be cut up and taken away.

It hit me that the messaging of “We Do Anything” is not general, but very specific. It’s so specific that your mind goes immediately to the projects that you’d like completed but have wondered whom to call. My guess is that not only does “We Do Anything” land the hard jobs – they also get some projects that typically go to painters or sealcoating companies or even carpenters.

Does your brand evoke something specific in the minds of your prospects?

I always toy with whether to tip at coffee shops, $2 coffee already seems way too expensive.

At the local coffee shop, a “competitor” to Starbucks, the atmosphere makes up for the unbranded (but still expensive) coffee. The place has high ceilings, funky art (kind of), wood floors that need to be refinished, and a sofa that looks and feels like its previous stop was the boys dorm lounge of the local college.

Most visits, I drink plain old regular $2 coffee. In a mug. I never tip. But occasionally, I’ll splurge and request a cappuccino in a mug. I hesitate, inwardly, as I sign the debit card receipt: Should I add a tip?

My head screams no – I shouldn’t have spent this much money in the first place. My heart says, “Well, she doesn’t make much money making coffee in this ostensibly struggling small business. I bet she doesn’t get health insurance like the folks across the street at Starbucks.”

But my head always wins: The server is emotionally flat, barely grunts when I tell her my order, and never brings my foo-foo coffee to where I sit. There’s no real value to the service. The other day, about five minutes after I gave my order, the server essentially walked by the table where I was tapping away on my laptop and pointed back to the register, where my medium, frothy cappuccino sat: “Your drink is over there.” She wouldn’t bring it over, even though my table was on her way.

It ripped me that I had to get up and walk 7 paces to grab my cappuccino. Then I remembered that I didn’t tip her. I then asked myself, “Would she have brought me my cappuccino if I had tipped her?”

So, the question is, “If I’m the server, do I go the extra mile for only those people I think will tip me?” Or, do I serve everyone with the same level of service?

So much of, maybe all of, branding comes down to execution of the little things. It’s easy for pretty people in large conference rooms to wax on and off about branding. But branding comes down to the person on the front-line, who is or isn’t executing on the brand promise.

The person who answers the phone. The receptionist. The student who is leading your campus tours. The assistant who prints out your reports and sends them to the client. The person behind the counter at the cafeteria in the food court of your museum.

So does your assistant know how important his/her job is to the brand of your organization? Or, is she just doing “administration” work for $13 an hour?

I love Steve & Barry’s. I just bought two pairs of Starbury tennis shoes for my 12-year-old for $8.98 each. You get two trendy, colorful pairs of shoes that an NBA basketball star wears for work for only $19. I wanted to buy more – just because I could.

Steve & Barry’s is a recent addition to the world of sports apparel. In 2006, Steve & Barry’s recruited NBA® star Stephon Marbury to develop the Starbury™ Collection of urban-inspired apparel and footwear. The killer product is the Starbury II, a “high-performance basketball sneaker that Marbury wears on NBA® courts. The Starbury II boasts a sleek design and is engineered with the same comfort, stability, and durability found in basketball sneakers that retail between $100 and $150—and it’s just $14.98.”

That’s what Steve & Barry’s web site promised.

But I got the shoes for just $8.98. Each. Steve & Barry’s had a sale!

The Steve & Barry’s I visited was trashed. The shoe section had empty boxes strewn on the floor, mismatched shoes in boxes, 7 1/2 shoes in boxes that were marked size 10. And the clerks (who can’t be more than 19) shrugged their shoulders when I ask for help. “Yeah, it’s a mess here.” No apologies. No real anxiety.

And I wasn’t bothered by it, the prices too amazing.

Across the corridor in the mall, only 10 paces or so from Steve & Barry’s is another sports apparel store: Finish Line. It is filled with $70, $80, and $100 tennis shoes in boring colors, and other expensive sports apparel. The store was almost empty of customers when I walked by.

It must suck to be Finish Line. There’s no way you can sell your products for the same as Steve & Barrry’s. An upstart comes along and changes the rule. New companies don’t play by the same rules – ergo, that a tennis shoe has to be expensive to be fashionable. I don’t know yet whether the shoes are any good. And does that really matter?

At this point, traditional marketing itself doesn’t matter. Finish Line could spend millions trying to get customers into its store, but for what purpose? To buy boring, expensive, branded apparel? Good luck with that.

I realized that as I left Steve & Barry’s, with my 12-year-old ecstatic, that I had just experienced a “Purple Cow,” a phrase that marketer Seth Godin (www.sethgodin.com) writes and talks about. A Purple Cow is only a Purple Cow if the consumer experiences your product or mailer or service as a Purple Cow. You can’t talk your constituents or clients into thinking that what you are presenting them is exceptional. It either is or isn’t.

I suspect that one of the most overused movie illustrations comes from City Slickers, the 1991 movie starring Billy Crystal and, among others, Jack Palance.

Remember that movie?

It’s the one in which Curly Washburn (played by Palance), the flea-bitten cowboy, raises his index finger and croaks about the “one thing” that the three “city slicker” characters must discover to find life’s meaning.

Marketing strategy folks often preach the gospel of the “one thing” or “your point of difference” (a phrase I borrowed from marketing genius Harry Beckwith) for organizations, as they attempt to grow in today’s highly competitive climate: You need to be known for one thing, especially if you’re not the leader in your space.

Knowing your “one thing” gives you focus for your marketing communications and serves to position you in the minds of your prospects. It gives them a mental hook.

The problem is that the “one thing” is not one dimensional. Often it’s not merely one thing; it’s a matrix of things that creates the focus.

For example, universities often try to distill their point of difference to one strength: Value; or Academic Rigor; or, Class Size.

But you never own only one strength; it’s often a combination of strengths that make up the One. To make it even more complex, that combination of strengths has meaning only as it relates to your competitors. Your context or environment shapes your point of difference.

We recently assisted a university with their messaging strategy. The university has a combination of strengths: affordability, academics (in relation to its competitors), and size of enrollment. All three formed the foundation of the school’s unique position in their competitive space. There were other layers to the school’s messaging strategy, such as location, but the three dimensions gave the school’s marketing program focus and power.

So, what are the different dimensions to your point of difference?
And how do your competitors’ positions shape yours?