I understand the problem. When I create an ad for them they can see immediate results and know if the ad was worth the money they paid me. i.e. they can see that xxx people decided to click on the ad and that of that number of people xx decided to make a purchase. That's an easy metric to look at and compare other ads to.
Branding is different. It doesn't give any immediate metrics. Having a cool company twitter account or a great tagline or whatever is long term thing. But, it's far more important than an ad, because branding sticks with people long after the impact of any ad or series of ads.
Case in point - global warming. When the concept of the planet changing temperature first started to exist it got branded as "global warming." This has done a huge amount of damage to efforts to fight it - simply because most people will always now know it as "global warming" - and if you are sitting in a snow storm in April and it's been a long cold winter it is going to be pretty fucking hard to take something called "global warming" seriously.
And, like with all other branding efforts, this branding will stick. In the same way that no amount of ads will overcome bad branding for a product, no amount of news stories will overcome the branding of this phenomeon as "global warming."
If, on the other hand it had been called "climate change" in popular culture from the start, people would probably be a bunch more accepting of the concept becuse when it snowed in April they would have been like "shit, yep things ARE changing."
This is why you always have to think out your branding efforts before you bring anything to the attention of the public.
