Two Brand Fundamentals
And if those two are not done well, everything else won't matter much.
The central tenet of my activities as a brand consultant, and the central pillar of my online Course, is that in order to have a 'Brand' in the marketplace there needs to be a before, a middle, and an after.
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BEFORE: the science of Brand
There's a lot that needs to be done to start a branding process: understanding the client company's organizational characteristics and strategic plans, the Business rationalization, the nesting of Brand with/within Marketing, studies on the client's business & markets & competition & trends, baseline benchmark measurements, Portfolio Management assessments and decisions, the discovery of possible differentiation & distinctiveness & relevance tenets, equity research - plus, hopefully, a determination of how exactly 'Brand' can help it all (which always differ from client to client), and more. And lastly, only because is the latest imperative, the careful framing of the indispensable AI-readability.
All this is serious work that is run by serious people with serious skills doing the science of Brand: business and marketing strategists, organizational consultants, economists, social and behavioral professionals, AI experts, all mostly leftbrained and with an MBA - plus gurus of all kinds.
Myself, I'm in awe of them: I can't do most of that work, but I do understand it enough to be able to then use it.
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AFTER: the pulse of Brand
There's a lot of activities here: the pulse of Brand is where the Brand becomes real and alive: the comms strategy and storytelling, the traditional as well as the AI codification, the crafting of differentiation & distinctiveness & relevance aspects, the actual measurements (to be compared with the baseline benchmarks set in the Before), and then the whole universe of personification: visual, verbal, and behavioral which require three radically different skillsets; and finally, the concerted deployment of it all and its granular Marketing.
All this is serious work that is / must be done by serious people with serious skills: communicators and marketers of every type, graphic and web designers, digital experts, writers and copywriters, media and social media experts, advertising and PR professionals, SEO and every other method-acronym - many of them rightbrained and creative, and many tech-oriented.
I'm in awe of them too: I can't do a lot of that work, but I do know some and by experience understand it all enough that I can plan ahead for it.
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and in between it's ...
THE MIDDLE: the enabling roots of Brand - firmly rooted in the Before and then made real by the After: without the Before there would be no rationalized context, and without the After there would be no life.
Two enabling roots -- just two:
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root 1: MEANING
The central, core concept of what the Brand intends to be about and own. I called it Meaning because different labels can be used interchangeably: positioning, promise, core, essence, etc. (I use Brand Promise).
And for all those who shout "you don't get to decide, Brand resides in the public's mind!" and "AI will decide for me!" ... how do you think it gets in their minds, and what do you think AI reads? On both counts, it's actions, offerings, and expressions (verbal, visual, behavioral) that can and must be planned and led by the C-suite, implemented accurately and forcefully, monitored as to effectiveness and uptake and staying power, and with a willingness and readiness to apply corrective actions as needed - so that public sentiments and Reddit's comments match what you had intended. I know, not an exact science of course - but that's the unassailable logic.
A Brand Promise must have meaningful depth. Using some workproducts of mine as examples (and don't confuse the Concept with a Tagline, although some concepts do lend themselves to be used as such):
- for a Genetics Testing company, they were claiming < revealing the answers inside > ; cool wording, but zero depth: that's simply what they did for a living, just verbalized in an interestingly cool and even somewhat memorable way. - and that's sadly what most Positionings are about today. I gave them < Healthcare. Illuminated. > : deeply meaningful and actionable, forcing a new perspective and requiring new/expanded actions, behaviors, products, services, outreach, and opening up significant business opportunities. And yeah, cool-sounding as well - but that wasn't at all necessarily the objective.
- for Iron Mountain, the concept was < elevate the power of your work > vs what would have been a no-depth descriptive phrasing such as < protect your data and turn it into a competitive advantage >.
And I could give examples of what was given to Xerox, Intel, AT&T, and countess others over the past three decades of my career (as to prior to that, we were doing Corporate Identity - not Corporate Branding). And let me offer one that I didn't work on but absolutely love: Airbnb's < Belong Anywhere >, vs a slogan-ish meaningless concept they could have chosen instead - say, < A New Way to Hotel >.
Is there a benchmark for whether a 'positioning' actually has depth? Some say .. "if it cost you something" - not bad, but let's be more precise: a Positioning has no meaningful depth if it doesn't require the Company to do things differently than in their past. And by the way, merely describing a business in a cool way and then promoting it loudly creates an (often-unhelpful) boundary.
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root 2: go-to-market (and I mean BRAND ARCHITECTURE)
As context, go-to-market has two parts: Portfolio Management and Brand Architecture. The former is part of the Before, while the latter is a Root. They are two distinct matters (I wrote a post about it - see it at https://lnkd.in/edfUmZE7): Portfolio Management (broadly) determines what the Company's Business should be selling into the marketplace and so it relates mostly to Offerings/Products; but the Company at large and the Brand need to go to market as well.
As I see it, taking Company and Business and Product and Brand to market needs to be coalesced into a single perspective, which I define as taking the Branded Proposition to market; and this means mixing the requirements of Company-Business-Product-Brand. That's complex work that's not resolved with a Branded House vs House of Brand chart:
• those two general constructs coexist in many companies (yes, Unilever and P&G included);
• between those two constructs sit the so-called Hybrids that come in countless types, and which in fact account for most companies' structures - and so those two extremes are not even really representative of common realities;
• not only Companies and Products go to market, but also dozens of other assets and properties within those categories and beyond, and which often are even bundled: from programs to methodologies and from technologies to ingredients and much more, and all of them need to be optimized and brand- or no-brand formatted - but this whole universe is ignored in Branded House vs House of Brand charts;
• as a company may go to market with other parties in some areas, there's co-marketing and co-development, partnerships and sponsorships, joint venture and licensing - and more; and finally
• each of these properties/assets has a role vs all others, and typically all of them are geared to serve the revenue-generating assets - which causes inter-relational dependencies and imperatives.
(still think that the House of Brand and Branded House view can even begin to describe, let alone handle, all that?)
All in all, Brand Architecture must tell the world "here's how I can serve your needs" rather that merely "here's what I do/make". Having said that, there are indeed situations where the sheer clarity of the latter is what's needed - and I myself have done Architectures of that kind.
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And, importantly, in this day and age Roots 1 and 2 must be codified for AI prior to getting into the After.
BUT ... don't do Root 1 and 2 <for> AI:
do Root 1 and 2 in deeply meaningful way -- and THEN codify them for AI.
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In closing,
Michael Jordan famously said “get the fundamentals down and the level of everything you do will rise”. It’s the same in Branding:
the more deeply meaningful the roots of Brand are,
the more efficiently they’ll frame and direct the business,
the easier and less expensive will then be for the Brand's expressions and for Marketing to work,
and the more inevitably aligned it all will be.
In so doing, there will be no disconnect between what you decide to promise, how you promise it, what you’ll deliver, and what they’ll perceive and experience.
And the opposite is true: the shallower the Brand Fundamentals, the harder Marketing will need to work, the more it will cost, and the more disconnect will ensue.
And as to actually do all this ... can anyone do Brand Positioning and Brand Architecture well - that is, as defined above?
The answer is a qualified No:
(most of) the BEFORE professionals ...
• tend to think of Positioning in terms of explaining the business in beneficial terms: accurate business pragmatism dominates, and impedes letting Brand transcend facts/realities;
• tend to think of Go-to-Market / Brand Architecture as Portfolio Management, as in taking the Business to market; and the Brand? oh, the creatives will make it sing via uniquely compelling visual and verbal expressions.
(most of) the AFTER professionals ...
- tend to think of Positioning as a shiny verbal concept: uniquely memorable and impactful words (regardless of the degree of meaningful depth);
- tend to think of Go-to-Market / Brand Architecture as static, cast-in-stone visible relationships between Corporate Brand and Subsidiaries and Product Brands, and completely ignoring the rest of the supporting iceberg.
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Thank you for reading me. And regardless of whether you agree or not with my professional observations, we should all examine our talents and work experiences, and come up with some personal stats. Mine are that I don't know about 80% of the Before and about 50% of the After: I have some expertise in my team or I hire as needed. But I can confidently say that I'm at 150%-to-200% of The Two in the Middle.
Happy Branding.
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