Brands, Brands, Brands

Written by Brook Schaaf

In my forthcoming book, The Affiliate Hypothesis, I enjoy what is surely a rare author’s privilege of quoting his brother-in-law, a neuroscientist, on the subject of attention. As it happens, he just published his own textbook, imaginatively titled Neuroscience of Attention. He begins with “probably the most famous quote” in the history of the field, spake in 1890 by one William James. It begins, “Everyone knows what attention is. It is the taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought.”

In the context of marketing, we might consider brands repositories of attention or attentional centers of gravity, which can, time and again, take possession of the mind (and emotions). Indeed, the term comes from Old Norse brandr, meaning to burn, which came into Middle English, eventually referring to a burned mark (as on livestock), then, by the mid-1800s, to a mark made in other ways—burned into our brains, one might say. 

These marks represent multiple trains of thought or ways of interacting. In affiliate marketing, “brand” is mostly used synonymously with retail clients, as in the brands a tracking platform, agency, or publisher works with. But any of these is also a brand in its own right, recognized in the space, or, with major publishers like USA Today or Wirecutter or Capital One Shopping, widely known to readers and shoppers. There are travel and hospitality brands like Marriott and American Airlines. One can say celebrities and even influencers are brands. At FMTC, a particularly relevant use case is our structuring of manufacturer brands and their sellers, such as 7 for All Mankind, Zadig & Voltaire, and Nike, to name a few among the thousands. 

If you research the definition of brand, you’ll soon find something about emotional identity and resonance, like in this video. This is true, but we affiliate marketers still need some kind of categorization to determine who we might work with under what circumstances. And here is how today’s topic came about and my ask of you, should you favor a reply. 

Do you suppose that we affiliate marketers are properly parsing and utilizing this information? I suspect not. For example, while it’s easy to find something to buy, it’s often hard for me to find exactly what I’m looking for on Amazon. Eventually, the search tires me out until I buy its recommendation.

While many properties have excellent user experience, I think the affiliate channel has not fulfilled its potential to consumers in making this information available for discovery. One reason may be that we’ve generally treated brands as companies, or merely as attributes of companies, rather than as related records with identities and associations of their own. This may thwart both exact-match search and product discovery, forfeiting an advantage affiliate properties should otherwise enjoy over walled gardens, which tend to maximize yields at the expense of clarity and user experience. If the affiliate channel is to remain competitive in the AI era, perhaps even to become the default discovery layer for online commerce, we should first ask whether we’ve organized our information correctly. Only then can we speed the train of thought and commerce along its track. 

As we continue to improve and expand FMTC’s data structure to provide richer content and intelligence to affiliate marketers, it came up that we might structure brand identity as its own record type, which would have otherwise been associated with a company. This would allow for easier accommodation of brand identities that operate in multiple markets (e.g., Canada and the United States) across multiple properties (e.g., sites and apps). 

What do you think? Would this kind of structure be useful to you? Reply and let me know!