All organisations use names for themselves or their products – some become ‘brands’. You must play a part in separating brand from internal organisational identity.
Frequency – constant, it’s existential.
Key participants – all staff whether they realise it or not.
Leadership rating ***
A brand can be a trademark or a name that is associated with a specific product or service. When it becomes widely known, it is said to have achieved brand recognition. For consumers the said brand represents defined added value, and for its owner the brand may command premium prices and have an intrinsic tradeable value, often called brand equity. Successful brands acquire physical characteristics that create a so-called brand identity, which may include a recognisable logo or phrase. Ultimately an organisation becomes the guardian of its brand or brands for its customers, and brand management seeks to align all the organisation’s activities to underpin defined brand values.
A distinction can be made between contact with the brand and the imagining of it – these are often called brand experience (what it’s like to use the product) and brand image (what we think about the product) respectively.
In parallel, the organisation that owns and exploits product brands makes decisions about its corporate identity. In some cases (for example Apple and the BBC) its identity will match its products and services. In some cases the organisation itself will have a defining business brand, a corporate name, as which it is a manager of a portfolio of product brands. The organisation may also state organisational values which are sometimes found in ethics or values statements. In this respect the CEO becomes the corporate brand and values manager.
Brands are an increasingly valuable asset for organisations when many products and services are becoming commoditised. It is therefore vital that at every level an organisation aligns its use of names, its activities and its values with its chosen brands – and that it understands in a hierarchy of brands necessary similarities and differences between who its staff work for and what they sell.
Every leader at every level must see themselves as a brand manager – and recognise how their actions add to or subtract from brand value.
Working for an organisation is like playing in a sports team or joining a club – there is a sense of belonging. The experience of belonging is a very powerful tool in corralling shared team actions in favour of the customer, in contributing to the development of company brands whose reality matches their promise. This is at its most powerful when what it feels like to belong matches what it feels like to be a customer.
Most people want to feel that they belong to the organisation they are employed by. They want the eight to ten hours per day they dedicate to their employer to be ‘worth it’ on more than a monetary level. They are looking for the rewards of self-worth and pride. They also want their organisation to succeed through capturing dominant market share.
Brand can thus be a symbol of value to the customer and of belonging to the employee. It becomes a recognisable but intangible mechanism that binds customers and employees in a shared community.
Brand and identity management can seem rarefied and even remote, especially if you don’t work in a consumer goods business, traditionally the one most associated with brands. But the democratisation enabled by the internet – with far greater access to many more businesses by far more people – has created a ‘flat earth’1 where brands from all types of businesses can very much more rapidly rise (and fall). Businesses have to avoid three major risks.
You may not be in a position where you can directly influence the application of brands but you can:
This is a specialised area, as much influenced by psychology as by ‘management’. You may find it a tough one to engage in – your primary challenge is to be both aware of and sensitive to the issues and risks.
I suggest that to engage successfully in branding and identity you follow six steps.
The biggest risk to branding does not lie in branding itself – it lies in the nature of the host organisation, since in the end the values of brands (designed or unintentional) represent their ‘parent’, since the parent organisation can influence the financial value of brands.
These risks crystallise when, for example:
Your role is to be part of a system of brand monitoring, alert in particular to:
If you do not listen and watch, day by day quite literally, to what is ‘said’ about and done to brands to safeguard their integrity, then you become complicit in potential brand deterioration and devaluation.
1 See The World is Flat by Thomas L. Friedman, 2nd edition (Penguin Books, 2007).