I've actually started to enjoy it when people ask me if I was associated with the "train wreck" University of Waterloo branding exercise. I was indeed associated with it as lead brand strategist, in partnership with Ove Design, working with the brilliant and courageous VP External Relations, Meg Beckel and a powerhouse team from across the University, and I am very proud to say so. Hardly a train wreck, the initiative has been transformational for Waterloo and has created a new level of self awareness and engagement that will have strategic impact long-term.
I'm annoyed by what I see as the black box at the centre of most large-scale corporate brand strategy initiatives. Especially when there are outside advisors involved there always seems to be a dark cloak of mystery over the key points at which the brand idea is developed. Yes, there is interviewing, and reputation surveys and sometimes workshops and the dreaded "validation research" but are these really proxies for true involvement? Can they begin to tap the deep organizational wisdom that exists around competitive position, values and brand opportunity? Can they begin to set the stage for a brand that helps the organization focus on key business-bulilding priorities? Not in my view. We need to move brand strategy out of the wizardry of brand consultancy and into the belly of the organization where it belongs.
How strong is your corporate brand? Important question. How can you do better than guess at the answer? Well, you could spend six or seven figures on some quant research on reputation (which will do little more than confirm your gut about what people think of you), you can invest in a brand valuation (which will give you a nice round number that isn’t reliable and won’t tell you much about how well your business is performing) or you can put a PR resource on retainer to track the interweb for mentions, sentiment and buzz. Or there is Net Promoter Score, and no doubt myriad other ways to extract your dollars and distract you from what matters. Even after all this expenditure of time and money, I don’t believe you’ll be any better informed than you are now.
But wait, there’s hope.
I'm often asked as part of brand strategies to help with vision and mission statements and values definition. What is it with these things? Every organization seems to want them, but they put the most flimsy thought into them (despite spending hours on successive re-drafts that turn them into deadened sludge). They are usually derided by employees as meaningless fluff and only ever see the light of day on lunchroom posters, bad PowerPoint slides and desktop SWAG.
We made the rounds at London Design Week this year, hoping to see forward into what’s next in design and branding. We weren’t disappointed, but sometimes maybe a bit confused. The festival itself is spread out across London, which gives it a very nice feeling of being a treasure hunt, but it is actually pretty hard to navigate, despite have a lot of talent roaming around who understand wayfinding, visualization and signage. Work on that, okay guys?
Who cannot place their hand on their heart and say that what consumers really want is authenticity? I can’t.
When it comes to competitive brand strategy you can be right in a lot of ways, but you can be really, really wrong in just two: 1) believing that there is no one out there like you and so you own your category and have no direct competition or 2) that you operate in a commoditized category and you'll never be able to truly differentiate, so why bother. I hear both all the time – and shockingly – sometimes from within the same organization.
From Peter C. Newman going on about power games to Naomi Klein dissing brands altogether to Andrea Mandel-Campbell telling us why Mexicans don’t drink Molson beer, we just have not had a lot of optimistic discourse on Canadian brands in the last 40 years. Jeannette Hanna’s and Alan Middleton’s new book Ikonica has changed that. In short, Hanna/Middleton show that brands=values and that Canadian values=good brands and that Canadian companies can win globally on the basis of our own particular brand genius.
