One way to think of your Brand is this: you say some stuff; other people say some stuff; stuff gets heard; other people say some stuff; you same some stuff; stuff gets heard; etc, etc, etc, it repeats. Your Brand exists at the intersection between what YOU say and what others say. The truth is there at the intersection.
Once a few years ago I was asked to brainstorm with some marketers working on rebranding a large ethical investing fund company. I was sharing how Roots had created a brand centered on Canadiana and outdoors. For years the Roots brand really resonated with Canadians who loved Canada and the Camp-outdoorsey lifestyle.
One of the junior marketers seemed very perplexed at what a brand like Roots and an ethical mutual fund company had in common. “Simple,” I replied. “You’re telling one story about your brand while your customers are telling a different story. You see yourselves as ‘ethical’ and ‘cutting edge’ and ‘beyond fiscal results’ while customers are telling you they want strong returns and they fail to see the importance of ethics in their investments.”
This conclusion about how their customers perceived their brand was something they had already realized. But I tried to show that the intersection between what THEY were saying and what OTHERS were saying was so very far apart. They needed to bridge that gap. They weren’t going to abandon ethical investing so they needed to engage their customers so that the importance of ethics in investing moved from confusing to clearly understood. And that the brand dance would be a conversation between what they say and what other say – it won’t ever be perfect.
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Another example where this gap was very wide: Bush administration. That brand meant a lot of different things to a lot of different people. All politicians would love for their brand to be what they say it is, but that’s one field where it’s definitely at the intersection and they can’t argue with election results any more than a business can argue with its revenue numbers.
Erik:
Thanks for the comment. Very true about Bush. I was thinking last night of another example I saw recently in Social Media: Starbucks created and innovative (in their minds) campaign that asked customers to upload a picture in front of the ‘bucks store they love. Starbuck critics (as a brand, the have a lot of haters) grabbed this opportunity to take pics in front of locations with placards against Starbucks labor practices. Those pics got uploaded just as quickly as the legit ones. So right there in real time, social media was making the Starbucks brand intersection between what they were saying and what others were saying a moving target. Really cool stuff for all of us to learn from.
Rich.
Shoot, I meant to post a link to the Starbucks social media campaign. Here goes: http://www.truthout.org/060309LA