Know, live and build your company's brand
By Dawn Morais Webster 01/18/08

There may be as many “branding experts” as there are brands. Maybe more. Each offers well-intentioned advice on what it takes to brand a product, a service, an institution or an idea. Unfortunately, the busy executive can easily feel overwhelmed by what must seem like an avalanche of prescriptions to create a well-managed brand management and marketing program.  So, in the spirit of simplicity for the New Year, offer a list that summarizes the rules of branding in this three point mantra:

1. Know Your Brand
2. Live Your Brand
3. Build Your Brand

Whether you are an educational institution, a car rental company or a nonprofit dedicated to addressing a specific issue, a commitment to branding is critical.  Some organizations have a head start in that they have a very clear mission. And they know their brand. Or at least the key custodians of the brand do: the executive leadership, the product line managers, the marketing directors.

But knowing the brand does not always translate into living the brand. Because living the brand demands organization-wide acceptance of the idea that every employee, every customer and every vendor is a brand ambassador -- or could be one. Conversely, each of them could also be working to wear down the brand. The reasons are so simple as to be over-looked. The executive leadership assumes that everyone has the means and commitment to translate the brand effectively in their everyday interactions. In how they handle email—or not handle it. In how they answer the phone –or not answer it. In how they run a meeting. In how they treat –or mis-treat--a vendor. In what they tell their families.  An intern told me recently how demolished she felt after an informational interview. That intern will repeat the story of her experience to her family and to others. It was a simple opportunity for branding that was squandered because the “intern” was not seen as being important enough to be taken seriously. Another reason why knowing the brand does not translate into living the brand is complacency. Success encourages complacency. Growth and success breed turf battles. Living the brand demands a daily vitality, responsiveness to opportunities and reinvention of personality that can be time-consuming and occasionally messy. And it is sometimes undermined by the great comfort of having survived by doing what has been done for years. So why change?

The answer to that is because in the absence of continuing and pervasive brand-building, others will seize the opportunity that your silence or predictability creates to monopolize the conversation with the people you should be talking to. But in a market like Hawaii, one of the frequently heard laments is “We don’t have the money to spend like others.”  The truth is one does not have to out-spend the competition. One does have to make the competition irrelevant. And that kind of brand-building and marketing actually has a name that should resonate in Hawaii:  blue ocean strategy. In their best-selling book of that name, W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne made the case that organizations can and will succeed, not by approaching the competitors in a head on battle that would bloody the oceans, but by creating “blue oceans” of new market space in which they attract customers by demonstrating the unique value that they can deliver both to the buyer and to the organization. It is an approach that the creators of the term say demands what they call value innovation, tipping point leadership, and a fair process to enlist employee buy-in.

Building your brand calls for the same kind of long term commitment that any worthwhile relationship demands.  The tools are many and the opportunities for engaging in inventive brand-building efforts are varied.  Not having a budget to match the competition is not the end of the world. Not having the energy and commitment that matches the competition is. Energy is expressed in the steady commitment over the long term to building the brand. And building the brand entails a carefully calibrated and integrated mix of internal and external strategies. It is a whole lot more than mere advertising which increasingly should be just one piece of a much larger repertoire of communications in which integrity and consistency of message and integrity and consistency of the messengers who come bearing the message are unwavering.

It has become trendy these days to speak in terms of integrated communications. Advertising agencies that once scoffed at the term as little more than a sop to clients have belatedly come to realize that embracing the idea of integrated communications is critical to staying relevant to their clients. And embracing it has to mean more than simply creating silos within the agency, each jealously practicing – and protecting their field of communications instead of intertwining it with every thing else that is going on.

 Ultimately, commitment to living and building the brand is expressed in the realization that brands, like people, generally do not live in isolation. One cannot afford the luxury of being a hermit in the marketplace. Hermits retreat. Retreating into silence can be great for building character, not market share. So make sure that the people you entrust to help you build your brand are focused, not on how big your budgets are but on where and how you need to be heard. Ask yourself if they know your brand, if they are living your brand and if they are working to build your brand through every channel of communication available, even the ones you take for granted. Because in so doing you can keep your brand from being taken for granted.