The Education of Borepatch

Sometimes, if you don't pay close attention, you make bad assumptions. This has been commonplace down through the ages, and has given us some of the great film lines:

Captain Renault: What in heaven's name brought you to Casablanca?
Rick: My health. I came to Casablanca for the waters.
Captain Renault: The waters? What waters? We're in the desert.
Rick: I was misinformed.

I had thought that the NRA was, as I've read somewhere, "the world's oldest civil rights organization." It seems I was misinformed.

Marketing folks can tell you that branding is a funny creature. It's all in the head; intangible, it's about what people think when they hear or see the brand name. Good marketing people are fierce when protecting their brand. Johnson and Johnson is the classic example, taught in Business School. The 1982 Tylenol Scare ended up strengthening the Johnson and Johnson brand when the company moved aggressively to protect its customers by removing all Tylenol product from the market - destroying roughly $100 M worth of inventory.

Three decades later, Johnson and Johnson is one of the most trusted brands in the country. Their rapid, aggressive actions strengthened their brand, reinforcing customers existing trust. They reinforced what people already thought.

But what happens when customers have an inaccurate impression of a brand? I think that's what happened to me with the NRA. I simply had the wrong mental model of the organization - not entirely wrong, of course, but enough to get some marketing vertigo over the recent flap over their convention being held in a location that bans firearms.

This cannot be true, I thought. The NRA is all about Gun Rights. Or is it?

And so I went and looked at their web site. Marketing organizations jealously guard control over the web site, because it's one of the main avenues for their branding. I assume that the NRA is no different than anyone else, and an examination of their site reveals the following:

• An obituary in the center of the page (the most important real estate on the site).
• 22 Navigation links on the left hand side, broken down as following (with % of the total): Fundraising and Membership (40%), Links to other NRA web sites (18%), Education (13%), Hunting (9%), Info about the Annual meeting (4%), their blog (4%), Support the Troops (4%)
• They have interactive graphics or buttons for: get the NRA iPhone app, Join, and Shop
• They have a couple of News Feeds on the right hand side of the page
  

Remember, this is what the NRA tells us about them, and why we should care. Actually, they don't tell me why I should care, which is one of my pet marketing peeves - their web site is all about them, not about why I should care. But I digress.

Marketing folks hate it when people start questioning existing perceptions, because it opens up all sorts of questions which can lead the prospect far from where you want them to be. And so it was with me - I was positively shocked to see that the work "right" appears precisely twice on their main page: a link to the Civil Rights Defense Fund (send us money!) and a link to Hunter's Rights.

That's it. And this is on the the NRA's most valuable Internet presence.

I'm not a hunter (although I'd like to go sometime), so hunter's rights is at best tangential. I'm already questioning what the NRA will do for me, so I'm not about to send them any money, at least until I'm more in my comfort zone. So that leaves me with precisely bupkis in perceived value, based on the NRA's own web site.

Dang - I was misinformed.

So holding their annual convention in a venue that requires their members to be disarmed does not in fact seem to violate the NRA's own branding and principles. It's not Marketing FAIL at all. It's a mismatch between my expectations and reality. Fair enough, and full apologies to the NRA for me saying their marketing team are a bunch of buffoons. I was wrong.

But I'm mystified as to why I should renew my membership. After reading their web site, I honestly don't see what is compelling about them. Now that I'm asking questions, some thing I''d like to know include what percent of their budget do they devote to firearms rights?, and what percent of their budget goes to fundraising?

Marketing people know that once the prospect starts asking questions like this, they're much more difficult to bring back. I'm not sure just how I picked up the notion that the NRA is a gun rights organization, but if they're not just what are they? And why should I care?