What makes a brand?
Not a brand designer.
Not a piece of comms.
And certainly not some lame message map or brand expression guidelines dull enough to get you eating your own hair.
In these times when people are more connected to their favourite brands than they are to their neighbours, the notion of brand is much bigger. And even as I type that, I question whether brand ownership was ever actually possible. For me, great brands are shaped by promises and the delivery of those promises.
promise + delivery of promise = brand equity
And it is the perceived delivery of the promises that makes this interesting – it could mean first class engineering for Jaguar or really cheap, no frills service for EasyJet. That’s not the point. The point is that a company expressed themselves in a certain way, and the actual, real life experience was in keeping with that expression.
If this is true and I obviously think it is. Why then does branding work typically only focus on the one part of what makes a brand?
Surely it stands to reason that the way we approach our work should change as the world does. And technology has made a bunch of stuff possible that never was before.
Our consumer experiences are out there in the open place and we communicate with eachother at warp speed. What does this mean for the people that work on strategy? For the people who make it their daily business to find insights for their clients?
I think they should be right in there with the companies they’re working with, defining the most ‘on brand’ customer relations behaviour, helping to define the personality that embodies every single interaction with the company.
Why do I think this is a good idea? I spent the past year of my life launching a start-up. It was self-funded and self run. So the three partners had to do it all. What we found, as the people who designed the brand and did the community management and everything else was that we started to judge ways of handling situations – and that includes things like invoicing and payment – by asking which option was most on brand. We created the brand, honed its expression and ensured that the promises within our expressions were kept. This holistic approach worked well for us. And I think it would be very interesting for marketing minds to get more involved in their clients’ businesses.
What do you think?
