« Branding Seminar - DanceNYC - Apr 25-26 | Main | Very Much Worth Reading »
Advice for the Young and the Brilliant
Interbrand’s 2007 Brand Marketing Report has recently been released. The report is persistent in its proof of the importance of sound brand strategy to profitability and to competitive advantage.
While there are not many surprises in the report, there are a few. I want to focus on one particular finding:
“Strict adherence to brand standards creates brands with customer impact, but few companies have been able to secure consistent compliance across their organizations.�
We learn in the narrative of the report that the most profitable and effective companies are the ones that exercise discipline for the sake of continuity.
Help me understand: why would a company - or an employee - choose to be less effective on purpose?
I don’t understand it, but I’ve seen it for decades - over and over again.
I thought that the non profit sector was unique in being unable to persuade employees and colleagues to put the organization’s interests ahead of their parochial desire to do their own thing. Evidently, I have been laboring under a misconception that the private sector’s command-and-control organizations are capable of brand discipline. It seems that capability and competence are very different things.
It never ceases to amaze me that otherwise intelligent and effective people either don’t understand (or choose to ignore) the critical strategic importance of disciplined brand communications continuity.
Give somebody a budget to create their own communication product and they will all too often decide that they’re going to make a unique, special statement - something that will stand as a monument to their taste and brilliance. They imagine that their unique product will be a monument to the rule that rules should be broken. They believe that exceptions must be, by definition, special and effective.
These exceptions are monuments all right - to ineffectiveness, stupidity, and often, to arrogance. (Can you tell that I don’t like this?)
What amazes me more is that the brand renegades who create these off-brand rogue projects find creative people and firms who are willing to produce these aberrations for them. Do these firms think that they’re doing themselves a favor? Do they think that some senior marketing executive is going to look at this work and have an experience akin to the angel Gabriel suddenly appearing? (Oh my GAWD....I’ve found my brand-refresh ephipany!)
If somebody came to me and asked me to produce a communications product for them, the first thing I’d ask for would be their style guide. If my prospective client told me to produce something off-brand, I would politely but firmly decline to take the work.
It doesn’t take a genius to understand that the people who control the really big budgets are going to feel something between annoyance and anger that somebody’s gone off the reservation yet again. When that invoice comes in, they’re going to associate the renegade's creative-firm name with lack of discipline and cluelessness. It’s not going to matter whether it’s good work or not, whether it’s well-executed, artfully conceived, or even effective at producing some results.
It is bad by definition.
I would not want my creative agency’s reputation to be one that is complicit in undermining the larger brand objectives of any organization — especially if I nursed within my breast some tiny hope that I might get a shot at some real business with them.
In my experience, it is often young, inexperienced, impatient (and creative) program or project staff who become brand renegades. These people don’t like convention and they don’t like constraints. They want to exercise their creative muscles, and be given a chance to show what they can do. They take great satisfaction in accomplishing creative tasks and in making things happen. I know these people well because 1) I was once one of them and 2) many brilliant communications professionals emerge from their ranks.
Here’s some advice from someone with a well- and often-kicked ass: Find a way to show your stuff, staying within brand strategy, and you will really go places. It will be you, instead of the research wonk across the hall, that will get promoted.
The brilliant and zany Canadian comic, Sandra Shamas, has a great line: “Are you some new kind of stupid!?"
Take projects off-brand and you’ll answer the question most definitely in the affirmative.
Posted on February 13, 2007 08:11 AM | Permalink
Bookmark with: 
del.icio.us, 
StumbleUpon, 
digg
Comments
"The report is persistent in its proof of the importance of sound brand strategy to profitability and to competitive advantage."
Don't you think this is at least a little disingenuous? Isn't there's a vested interest in pushing this line of thinking? After all, Interbrand (and Landor and FutureBrand and, and, and...) all make their daily bread based on their ability to set brand standards and then position themselves as the only people who REALLY know the brand so the company has to continue paying their fees to oversee all the work going out the door.
My experience is that the big bad branders back at headquarters are very, very far from their customers. A brand is a promise, and it changes over time, based on customer expectation, product offering, etc. Still, the brand group is rarely in a position to know when things have changed on the ground and its that local marketer who might know better, engage a partner who isn't in lock step with motherbrand and yet delivers on the real needs of the end customer.
The balance between global/corporate policy and satisfying customers needs is a delicate one, to be sure. But you'll always be happy with your work if you recognize that your customer's customer is the only one who matters. You might not get hired again, but you'll know you did the right thing.
I've been contemplating this post for the past few days, feeling I wanted to comment and trying to decide how. The other commenter here has added yet more interest to the topic.
In my own work in brand design, albeit on a much smaller scale than what Todd W. refers to as big bad branders, this issue of consistency and refresh are constantly on my mind.
I believe I've been in the position of experiencing both ends of this problem that Neill points out in his post. I've had to closely watch our own creative product on behalf of clients to make sure we stay on brand and I've also experienced clients' marketing staff encouraging us to step outside of consistency.
Continual refreshment within consistent standards is a challenge that I think is still somewhat new in the world where the concept of brand has only fairly recently made its way beyond just consumer brands. I think we're all still figuring it out.
My experience in the work is limited to small-to-medium-sized enterprises. The budgets are smaller, but so are the organizations. The ability to operationalize a brand and standards is proportionately easier, I think, for smaller organizations, while the need to maintain very disciplined consistency of key messages and brand visual language is that much greater. When you don't have the money to spend to saturate a market, in many cases even a small market, you have to make it count that much more.
I agree that things change on the ground and a brand has to be nimble and react, but I do not agree that a core brand promise ever truly changes. If it does, then do you truly have a sustainable brand?
What I think Neill is pointing out is that how that refreshment and strategic maneuvering is approached is a proving ground, and this really falls to the organization's own brand stewards more than to any external agency. They are, indeed, closer to their customers, but one can get too close to be objective and to properly brief an agency, too.
There's widely accepted idea that restrictions (like tight brand standards) inhibit creativity. I believe the opposite... that those standards can and should actually breed creative solutions, and the best kind -- the kind that are on brand.