Connecting the Dots / An Agency Blog

Reading a great book that a number of top marketing executives have written, including Rita Clifton of Interbrand. The book is called “Brands and Branding” and is published by the Economist.

From the book: ‘As one CEO recently noted, those who move from the traditional idea that brand is about marketing and advertising, to using the brand as an organising idea in their corporate strategy, to touch and inform everything their people make, do and say, may find that they “have made more progress as a business than we achieved in the previous ten years.”

I recently did a deep brand audit including developing a brand DNA and brand mapping for a client. Indeed, the first sets of  assumptions we had to weigh through was that we were simply changing the logo. In fact, whether conscious or not, that was the biggest problem for the owner, who had had the same logo for many years. It was other members of the management team who wanted to drive the process to finally articulate in a consistent way what they knew to be the truth of their brand. Eventually, once the process was complete, the owner came to see an appreciation of what he knew to be true, articulated with more clarity and consistency.

A well managed brand process can give you an advantage in demonstrating to your customer that your brand equals quality, and that it in fact simplifies the buying process for the busy consumer by quickly communicating your key brand attributes and providing a trust in what you deliver in your product or service. In the case of this brand process, we went as far as to map out five pillars of the vision for the company and equated the new brand mapping to incorporate this business vision.

We also looked at the larger brand, and asked “where will we be in five, ten and fifteen years?” The principles laid out about what the brand is today simply become more three-dimensional and realized as time goes on. At the same time, we set about a measurement strategy to determine how we were faring against those goals, and a means of measuring how the brand was continuing to be perceived by customers.

In fact, the entire brand process is now used in all staff training, investor presentations and is referred to for all marketing and communications.

It’s more than a logo. Just ask Toyota and Hyundai, who use their brand vision as a mission to remind every one in the company every day the purpose of the contribution they are making to customers. Next post, I’ll talk about how branding and digital relate.