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[ April 2004 ]
Everything You Know About Brand is Wrong.
Thank Goodness!
by Michel Hogan
One of the great things about the fallout of the past few years (and yes there have been great things) is that we now know what branding can’t do. It can’t guarantee the success of your company, it can’t make a bad business model work, it can’t transform a company with no value or values into a lasting organization, and it sure can’t magically generate revenue.
As we survey the landscape littered with wasted efforts to “create” brands it’s amazing how many people have failed to learn the hardest-won lesson of all – you just can’t spiff up your company on the outside – a new coat of paint, neatly trim the hedges and a nice flower garden will not keep people from noticing that everything inside your house is still a MESS! “Branding for the neighbors” doesn’t work, has not worked and will NEVER work.
“Brand” has become just another over-hyped, over-used, over-abused term. As long as any brand is considered primarily a function of marketing, it will never deliver on its true potential as a driver of alignment, action and decision across an entire organization inside and out. Brand is not about the cosmetic representation that nearly everyone uses to describe it – the slick new logo and tagline, the sharp new look and feel, the sizzling new Flash web site – all those points of window dressing are a waste of time if what you say have no alignment with who you are – as a company – on every level.
You could say brand is having a brand-crisis! If it isn’t about the cool marketing outputs, what is brand? First and foremost it is how you are perceived – by your customers, your employees, your partners in fact, by anyone who has any kindof experience point with your company.
Everything you do as an organization, every department, every action taken internally and externally, impacts and shapes that perception (ok, yes even how you market yourself). But when the experience changes from group-to-group, time-to-time and action-to-action the resulting brand means nothing in particular to anyone.
It’s About Alignment
What seems to be missing from amongst the brand hype is that your brand is built through alignment. And building alignment is hard work. Understanding how you are perceived, and want to be perceived, and then putting that understanding into practice across EVERY aspect of your company, small and large, inside and out, so the perception IS the reality (see the article Five Principles of Brand Alignment).
A “true” brands power lies within the identification and embodiment of the company’s core values, promise, positioning, and the use of those attributes as a yardstick for all levels of operations. Take the time to truly understand these things and you will have a brand that generates power that will far exceed anything a solely visual campaign can do. You will have a blueprint for strategic growth including such elements as product and service development, personnel policies and operational practices, management changes and even vendor and alliance relationships and perhaps most importantly you will have uncovered a key ingredient for the ongoing success of your organization – a long-lasting connection between you and your audiences. And that translates to competitive differentiation that is truly impossible to copy and a brand worth the valuable investments of time and money.
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