BRANDING: IT ISN’T JUST FOR CATTLE, ANYMORE!

Build a better mousetrap, the saying goes, and the world will beat a path to your door.

Unfortunately, in today’s business world, building that better mousetrap usually takes a back seat to building a better mousetrap “brand.”

In the modern world, marketing has replaced innovation and innovation is not always synonymous with improvement. Today’s business is all about building a brand.

So, pity poor Ralph Waldo Emerson! A philosopher, poet and essayist, Emerson is generally credited with coining the ‘build a better mousetrap’ phrase, but in today’s world, his words would probably have never seen the light of day. At least, not if a modern marketing department and its battery of focus groups came into play.

“Let’s face it,” they’d say, “a name like “Ralph” is not going to attract that all-important 18-25 year old audience of today and as for “Waldo,” well, the only Waldo with enough name recognition to dent that demographic group wears a red and white striped shirt and likes to hide in crowd scenes inside children’s books.”

Sure, sure. Those of us who grew up before Blu-ray replaced DVDs; (which replaced video cassettes, which replaced Super 8 movies, and so on and so on); would like to think that Emerson’s basic concept was correct: build something better than anyone else and you will succeed…but today…businesses want to build their brand even BEFORE they build an actual product.

Take, for example, Rachel Zoe. Please!

A borderline bulimic fashion stylist in California, Zoe cashed in on a burgeoning crop of cable TV clothing shows such as “Project Runway,” “Tim Gunn’s Guide to Style,” and “What Not To Wear,” by first landing her own show, “The Rachel Zoe Project.”

It was only after Zoe’s show had been in near-perpetual reruns on Bravo TV for almost a year that the famished-looking fashionista actually created and launched a product line. Now she can be seen all over the cable shopping networks, hawking her wares.

Are Zoe’s clothes any better than anyone else’s? No, but because she had a brand, she was able to attract the money to finance the manufacturing and promotion of a product.

So, let’s have a moment of silence for poor, old Ralph Waldo Emerson. If he had it to do over, I bet he’d change his name R.W. Emerson and advise us all to forget about building mousetraps and start working on getting our own cable TV shows.