by Q. Malandrino, Chairman & CEO - BrandLink Corporation - q@brandlink.com - http://www.brandlink.com (see the Q Notes!) - 001.212.431.0802
Everyone's a Brand Consultant today – choose wisely.
Get a true Brand Consultant to create a brand’s foundations. Then let other
specialists bring them to life.
It’s a fact that how a company is perceived is important toward business
success, and many different professionals claim that they can help with
optimizing perception. Ergo, everyone does ‘branding’, and everyone is a
‘brand consultant.’ How’s that possible? Just a few years back everyone had
a specialty. Did they all study ‘branding’ really hard and become an expert?
If that’s the case, please tell me where that textbook is – I’d love to read
it! But there’s no textbook, and there is a reason.
Once upon a time, there were many specialist communications professionals,
who respected the others’ unique skills, and clients knew who was good at
what. Branding as a discrete discipline didn’t really exist, and the word
Brand was used only in reference to trusted consumer products. In the early
1990s, the term Brand started to be applied to corporate entities as well as
to b2b companies – and the revolution began. Every business organization
wanted to become ‘a brand’, and all communications professionals rushed to
add ‘branding’ to their names and become ‘brand consultants’. Mind you,
virtually nobody bothered to define this new discipline, nor its precise
components; everybody just grabbed the term and made it the umbrella for
their own historical competency.
As a result, today countless practitioners say they do ‘Branding’, and
‘create brands’: Identity and Naming firms, Ad agencies, P.R. firms, Promo
Agencies, every type of Design firm, Management Consultants, Research firms,
Marketing Strategists, College Professors, HR and O.D. experts, Licensing
firms, and more; and the vast majority of them comes from consumer goods
marketing – where Branding has a different meaning and uses different tools
than in the b2b universe. Finally, to round out the cast of characters,
there are many 'brand thinkers’ - people who present credible-sounding
theories but cannot show you real-life case histories from paying clients,
plus real-project client references. Oh yes, virtually all of these
professionals have written a book on Branding.
“OK”, you might say “enough with the history lesson. Tell me who is entitled
to use the label ‘Brand Consultant.’” Glad you asked. A true Brand
Consultant creates the strategic foundation of a brand, which is composed of
four conceptual components (Brand Positioning, related Message Segmentation,
the internal Brand Culture framework, and Brand Architecture), and two
visible components (Verbal Identity / names and Visual Identity / logos,
etc.). The term ‘Branding’ is the umbrella term for all of these components.
(On this basis, then ad agencies and the like will work their magic.)
True Brand Consultants believe in those components and in their sequence,
can clearly define them, can explain the interrelationships, and have case
histories that show how they worked in real-life. Also, they will have their
own Brand Positioning. Most importantly, true Brand Consultants believe that
the four conceptual components must be created on the basis of what’s
strategically right – without being influenced by how they might eventually
get communicated. That’s why ad agencies, PR firms and designers are
ill-suited to create a brand foundation: they will create it (that is, if
they do) on the basis of its communications potential, on how unique,
memorable and different they can make it, and within their own purview (if
they want to stay in business, they have to sell you their design,
advertising, research, PR work.).
“So”, you might add “what is it they do, if they are not ‘brand
consultants?’”. Here it is:
– create a corporate visual/verbal Identity (Identity firms)
– create logos, packaging or brochures (design firms) and create brand names
(naming firms)
– shout about + promote a brand (ad agencies) and craft & get brand messages
out (PR firms)
– gather loads of ‘brand-related’ data and then derive brand recommendations
from it (research firms)
– market a company while talking about the importance of ‘brand’ (marketing
strategist)
– address strategy & operations while talking about the importance of
‘brand’ (business consultants)
– address corporate culture (HR and O.D. experts).
Each of their propositions goes something like this: “I am a brand
consultant, the engine of Branding is ... (insert one’s own competency here)
... and as a result of my work you’ll have a strong brand.” Branding and
Brand for them is a by-product of what they actually do and have always
done. Very convenient. A suggestion: if one claims to be an expert, one
should be able to answer a few simple questions:
“Hey, ad agency, have you ever done a 'branding program' that did not
include advertising?”
“Hey, identity firm, have you ever done a 'branding program' that did not
include a new logo?”
“How do you define the discipline of ‘Branding’?” “How’s that different than
Identity?”
“What are the components of Branding?” “Can you define (in plain English,
and in five words or less) each of them? And how do they relate to one
another?”
Also, ask them: “what can you do for me and my Company?” I bet that they’ll
have a prompt answer, because they heard you according to where they sit –
i.e., an ad agency will hear your question as “what can advertising do for
me and my Company?”. Conversely, if you ask a true Brand Consultant s/he
won’t have the answer, because s/he may not know enough about your
challenges, and s/he fully recognizes that the discipline of (true) Branding
may or may not be what’s needed to solve them.
Finally, the promised deliverables from various practitioners all sound
similar. But we all know that talk is cheap. Look more closely – there are
very substantial differences. More specifically:
If you are discussing Brand Positioning:
– did they show you examples like “a global leader committed to performance
with unmatched resources?” (That’s not Brand Positioning; that's "cramming
as many concepts as you can in as few words as possible". You’ll have no use
for it.)
– did they use the words “exceeding expectations”? (an entirely
un-deliverable concept)
– were they only for external audiences, or were they 'slogans' (ad agency’s
typical m.o.)? (if employees don’t ‘live’ it, Brand Positioning has limited
value.)
– were they the result of extensive research (that’s a marketing
strategist’s or research firm’s typical m.o.)? (Positioning is created on
the basis of solid data; it’s not the automatic and direct result of it.)
If you are discussing Brand Architecture:
– did they show you examples of homogeneous sets of branded properties?
(that’s not necessarily good: it’s often the easy way out, it flattens
marketing power, and it’s often simply about organizing your closet, as
opposed to organizing your closet on the basis of what you should wear and
when.)
If you are discussing Brand Culture:
– how did they explain the difference between Corporate Culture and Brand
Culture? (hint: “Brand Culture” is NOT simply “corporate culture + brand.”)
Bottom line(s):
1) get a true Brand Consultant to create your brand’s foundations; it’ll
cost a small fraction of your marketing/ad/PR budget, but it’s money that
will go toward deciding what to say with all that money.
2) don’t let an expert in consumer goods marketing touch your b2b brand
(unless s/he recognizes that it’s a different world, and can articulate the
differences.)
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