Your brand is not what you say, but what you do.

Several years ago I was in charge of planning an off site for the senior management team of the business unit I was leading at the time. I typically did this sort of thing about once a year as we head into the strategic and annual planning process period. The CEO of the company was also always very interested in these types of meetings, the agendas, expected outcomes, etc. As such, he asked me to come to his office a couple of weeks prior to the session to review the agenda with him. One of the key areas he wanted to work aggressively on (for this off site) was the “branding” including defining the brand our company already had and the brand we wish we had. Most importantly, how we would plan to change it.

After reviewing this portion of the agenda with him, I paused. I don’t think I will ever forget his comment: “Jeff, please don’t be offended, but the topic of branding is well above your pay grade.” Aside from the personal affront of the comment, from a purely logical and rational perspective, I could not have disagreed with him more (and I still feel the same way).Branding, as a concept, is easy enough to understand. It is the process by which an entity takes certain actions and creates messaging around itself to project an image associated with the entity. The image that a person or company seeks to project is referred to as “the brand” in a company’s or person’s eyes.

That said most of the time there is a gap--especially in a business between its branding activities and its actual brand. You see, a brand is how the marketplace (customer, suppliers, competitors, etc) actually view the business. It’s based on their experiences, inputs and interactions with the company or business and is formed instantly; and reformed, altered, changed and modified continuously over time based on further interactions with the business. Your brand is the image “they” see when they think of your business, not necessarily what you think you are projecting.Frequently the branding activities of a company are driven out of a corporate level program and focused on messaging and communications—and at a simple level, they are already oriented to.

Success in branding is truly about the journey. In other words, a business has to be brutally honest with its own self when it comes to defining a brand. What is the image that comes to mind in the market when your company name is heard or signage is viewed or a product is purchased? That is the starting point. The end result point is aligning an executive leadership team and the employees on the brand or image you wish to be seen in this manner in the future. What do you want people to think? What do you want them to feel? When they hear the name of your company?

This is, perhaps, easily understood; you have a start point and an end point. So then, what do you do? In my experience what most businesses do when seeking to change their brand is assemble a campaign of sorts, mostly focusing on messaging, communications in the professional media, letters to customers, brochures, tag lines, etc. These items and this kind of approach is often necessary, but most of the time it's not all that sufficient.

To illustrate my point, suppose you intend to “brand” your company as a leading and trusted supplier to a chosen industry segment. And in the course of this new “branding,” your MARCOM group issues several press releases, mails new brochures to existing customers with a trust based tag line of sorts and schedules interviews with the top executives in the company and several trade magazines following the industry. This would have an affect of sending out the message you want your market to hear, but herein lies the essence of why most branding exercises are somewhat futile: In essence, what you’re “saying” the market is not always experiencing.

Suppose during this campaign several of your leading customers and a couple of potentially new customers experience dropped calls to your support hot line, long cycle times to respond to RFQs, a significant technical design problem with one of your older products that is no longer supported by the product life cycle strategy you use or your supply chain has just imposed a mandatory annual price reduction requirement to the vendor base during a contracted business cycle.

Regardless of how well crafted your press releases are or how ingenious the tag lines on your new brochures, none of those items will matter in the face of the “experiences” other entities in the market are having when dealing with your company. What truly matters about your brand and how you are viewed in the marketplace, is the interaction and experiences customers, suppliers, partners, etc have when they deal with you.

A company that understands what a “branding campaign” is really about is truly interested in changing or improving its brand. It will embrace this understanding and will actually tie in its messaging and communications with company operations, polices and procedures that reflect and support this message!

A strategic plan associated with annual operating plans and which ties in the desired brand to specific improvements and changes in the company’s operations, policies and procedures that impact the external environment is a key approach. Repeated and clear concise communications to employees which show them how directly and importantly their daily job responsibilities are to the company’s brand is an integral component of tying these two together. Not doing these things will almost certainly lead to your company into “saying something” very different to what the market is feeling and how they are viewing you as they deal with you in the normal course of business. Your brand is not what you say, but what you do.