I always tell my clients: "This is YOUR brand, not mine. And the more we can get your organization engaged in developing and delivering the brand, the better off we'll be."

Engaging external stakeholders in brand development has never been a big leap – who doesn't want to take a read of the shifting landscape of customers, clients, investors, funders, regulators, bloggers and recruits as an input to value proposition development? Decision makers are willing to spend millions on external research – quantitative, qualitative, ethnographic, reputation, social listening, customer intimacy and so on. But what about employee intimacy? What about creating the employee channel? What about tapping the deep wisdom inside the organization about what we can and should mean to the world?

For the past two years I have been involved in the group: Design with Dialogue (DwD) and now I'm honoured to be one of stewards framing a vision for the future of the network. www.designwithdialogue.com

DwD is a community of practice dedicated to the use of dialogic technique to support positive change in communities of all kinds: organizational, civic and affinity-based.

Thanks to the extraordinary leadership of Peter Jones and Greg Judelman, and the participation of an amazing family of courageous participants, DwD brings us together around the promise that better conversations result in better outcomes and that we can all be agents of these conversations, supporting their germination until they take root on their own.

The methods we have explored have been an education in group process, human psychology and individual behaviour. These lessons have migrated into my practice as a strategist and now influence every corner of the work I do: dialogue in research, dialogue in ideation, dialogue in implementation. I now know that to develop strategy without dialogue is to generate useless paper: or the "air sandwich" as Nilofer Merchant calls it.

I now see my role in organizations as agent not consultant; as facilitator, mediator, coach, mentor, mirror, teacher, provocateur, student. My job is to trigger conversations, nurture them, and make a succession plan for them for to continue after I'm gone. Whether I'm working on a corporate brand, a vision and mission, or a global strategy, dialogue is still why I'm really there.

Why does dialogue matter? Yes, it has a kind of moral authority, and it pumps out group endorphins like you wouldn't believe. But the real reason is that most of the stuff that we don't like about our workplaces, governments, neighbourhoods, schools and places of commerce won't be fixed unless there is dialogue. And most of what we dream of as possible for these institutions won't come to life without dialogue. Without genuine dialogue, ideas won't emerge, change won't stick, fear won't be overcome, action won't be taken, the shy won't be given a voice, the bully won't be quieted. Without real dialogue there is "stakeholder buy-in", carrot and stick, incentive compensation, suggestion boxes, employee engagement systems; and all manner of proxies for people actually bringing themselves optimistically to the task.

Dialogue is my process but it is also my result – laying down track for understanding, respect, insight and action, long after I have left the room. It's the journey and the destination.

I'll be posting some more over the next few months about how I use dialogic technique in brand strategy and what I've found works and what doesn't.

I love Evernote because it's changed how I work, but also because it's a great example of a killer start-up brand. I had the opportunity to speak with Evernote’s head of marketing Andrew Sinkov recently to find out about how they’ve managed this very tidy and powerful little brand for the last five years.

Evernote, whose tagline is Remember Everything, was launched in 2005 and after a quiet phase of development has just passed 5 million users and took in USD 20 million from Sequoia Capital. It’s a cross-platform multi-device note-taking and data capturing service that makes it dead easy to, well, remember everything. It is quickly becoming the standard in this app category.

The ubiquity imperative

According to Andrew their first big insight was that there were lots of memory support apps out there but without total cross-device and platform syncing capability they were too cumbersome. If you want to remember everything, it has to be wherever you are. So, they steadily built Evernote to work and sync across 15 platforms (and counting) and just as steadily added about 12,000 users a day.

Organic growth through social media – on and offline

Then came the second big insight. This was a brand that was going to build on a fan base, not on traditional marketing techniques: Organic growth through organic channels, even before social media was really in full swing. First a great blog of Evernote uses, then an early Twitter foray and then podcasts, and now parties, meet-ups and other offline experiences. Evernote does almost no traditional marketing; not because they don’t have the funds or the capability, but mostly because they now know that users who come in through traditional marketing channels are less likely to transition from free to premium (central to the business model).

These venues have become more than for user development, they are sources of new product and application ideas, feedback and features. Spend some time on the Evernote blog Noteworthy and you’ll see how excited people get about sharing uses. http://blog.evernote.com/ This is a passionate user community.

Total focus on the promise.

Andrew feels that the two simple words: Remember Everything have been central to Evernote’s success. It keeps them focused, reminds them why they matter and is a constant source for new ideas. It is as fresh now as it was when they developed it over five years ago.

Andrew won’t claim too much credit for foresight in how well the name and visual identity have worked out. They were developed in-house in the early days but have got the elasticity to work as the company goes global and expands its base.

There are so many great lessons from the Evernote story for the any start-up. 

• Build the business model on a few defining insights about the behavior of your audience and the state of the competition.
• Develop a clear promise and use it to guide all the choices you make
• Invest in a name and identity that feels right but does not box you in as your scope grows.
• If you’re going to build a community, use it, listen to it, respect and share power with it.

I've recently taken on a new role at the MaRS Discovery District as a volunteer brand advisor. MaRS is a science, technology and social innovation incubator and accelerator of sorts: a place where entrepreneurs can get advice, ideas, space and support to build their businesses.

My role is to advise MaRS' clients on brand strategy, which at the start-up phase, is a delicate matter. While I want to drag them into fundamental questions about how to tell a story about something that no one has ever heard of or thought they needed, they mostly only want to talk about their name, logo and UX design. Or maybe also their feature stream, like kids in an engineering candy shop. It's really hard to ask these mostly very young, smart, restless entrepreneurs to be dispassionate about what they are doing, but my role is to remind them of that need. This is the passion trap.

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.

This was academic brand strategy done right: deep internal and external consultation, senior leadership engagement and patient process of discovery and negotiation. The core ideas were strong and supported.    

Unfortunately While Meg and her team prepared for a three month internal consultation on a new visual identity, a well-meaning student working on the program loved the logo so much they "borrowed" the file and posted it on their Facebook page. Ooops. Not the launch that Meg had foreseen. Within two weeks there were thousands of members on a FB page slagging the logo - a lot of cheap shots, heard 'round the world. Meg and the team went back into listening mode and have now launched a VI that has 90% of the original elements and strong internal support.

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.