Misunderstanding Branding

Keller says some of the “branding is dead” talk is a result of the term being overused when it first became fashionable. “You’d hire a printer, and they’d be talking about helping you manage your brand,” he says. “That’s stretching it a little far. But at the same time as those things were happening, academia took up branding [as a discipline]. If academia is doing it, it’s not going to go away.”

Companies have always been concerned with the total customer experience—marketing, customer service, operations, distribution channels, pricing strategies, everything. Only now there’s a word for the way companies try to manage that experience: Branding.

Myth #3: Once you establish a successful brand, you should leave it alone.

That myth couldn’t be more wrong. On the contrary, brand needs to be at the front of a company’s consciousness at all times. The initial branding work that a company does with a consultant consists of defining what the company stands for. But at every juncture from then on, the company must be vigilant about the way it projects itself.

“For organizations to do branding work, they have to make a series of decisions that say, ‘We stand for this,’” Tilka says. “That means that maybe 50 of the company’s other activities don’t support the brand anymore. Often it can be a heart-wrenching experience organizationally. So when they get to the point where they’ve ratified what the brand is about, there’s a big sigh of relief—‘Whew, we’re done.’ But that’s when the real work begins.”

There’s a lot involved in aligning a company’s everyday activities with what its brand is supposed to be. Part of it is training employees to understand and advocate the brand. Part of it, too, is making strategic decisions that are consistent with what the company stands for: high quality, hip designs, flawless customer service, or whatever.

“What they really have to understand at the end of the day is that brand work is dynamic and always has to be worked on,” Tilka says. “Within all of those day-to-day, year-to-year activities, you ask yourself, ‘Is this activity consistent?’”

If the brand ever stops feeling true and clear, it’s probably time to retune it. And sometimes, even if the brand is strong, you’ll need to recast it to align it with the Zeitgeist. “Look at Buick,” says Kevin DiLorenzo, managing director and senior vice president at Olson, a Minneapolis advertising agency. “They had a great brand, but it just didn’t take long for it to become a dated, old-man’s brand.”

A core brand should not change according to fashion, he says. Instead, the company should find a way to make its values relevant to society. It’s not about changing who you are as a brand; it’s about how you express yourself in the times.