Why should we have to concern ourselves with branding, anyway? Isn’t branding mostly fluff — soft stuff that doesn’t really affect the bottom line? Shouldn’t we be working on more important things, like sales and marketing and communications?

Yes, of course we should always be concerned with sales and marketing and communications — and we should be concerned with branding only if we’re concerned wih our reputation and all that’s associated with it. Here’s how AOL’s Robert Friedman puts it:

“. . . in the truest sense, the synonym for brand is ‘reputation.’ It’s the power of a blend of ideas, a sense of identity, and it helps consumers make decisions in a crowded marketplace.”

If your brand is your reputation — whether it’s the brand of your organization, a product or service brand, a brand of an internal department or initiative, or a branded event — it’s pretty clear that you’ll want to be concerned with shaping it, isn’t it?

Listen also to what Danielle Blumenthal, Ph.D., has to say in her book, Blumenthal on Branding:

“Branding the organization is inevitable . . . Simply by virtue of existing and interacting with others, the organization is branding itself. Therefore, branding is going to happen whether the process is managed or not. The choice is only whether to approach the brand proactively, or ignore and deny it and hope that the issue goes away.”

Guess what? The issue never goes away.

If anyone interacts with your organization, product, or service, in any way, your brand is being shaped. And your audiences are making decisions about you.

How can you tell if you’ve neglected the management of your brand? It will show up in one of the following three ways:

1. Your brand is a jumbled collection of mismatched looks and messages. Sometimes this happens with decentralization, when, under the guise of pushing down authority, the brand has run amok. How do customers and prospects know which “you” is you? Is this the best use of your resources?

2. You think you need to be like your potential customers in order to connect with them, so you bend over backwards trying to be what you think they want you to be. You try on many different looks and change with the trends, having many different images and personalities at the same time, or one after the other. Your customers are smart and savvy and they can smell when you’re “trying” to be like them — they know something’s off, and they respond by being luke-warm with their loyalty.

3. You get mired in analysis paralysis — over-thinking market segmentation, competitive positioning, value propositions, long-term objectives, short-term objectives, qualitative research, quantitative research, etc. etc. etc. (All of this is very important, of course, let’s just not get stuck here. Branding is organic, it has to move and breathe!) If you’re mired in analysis paralysis, you never get anything done with your brand — you’re always “working on it.”

Do you recognize your brand on this list? If so, it’s not too late to roll up your sleeves and dig in, and get hands-on with the management of your brand.

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This entry was posted on Saturday, January 6th, 2007 at 12:44 pm and is filed under Brand Strategy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.