The Minder

While corporate brands rely on current equity, the best brand strategy will be built on the equity you can create in the future. This idea usually makes organizations nervous as they quite rightly measure the risk of going live with a promise they cannot fulfill. In my view, it’s best to explore the far corners of where your brand can take you and to work towards that vision with the help of your customers.

Never overpromise. This is a standard branding mantra that needs to be questioned, at least with respect to corporate brands and products and services that involve deep relationships including professional services, healthcare and business services. Instead, be responsibly aspirational: do something very bold, and then make it clear to customers and employees what part of this promise you still need to build.

Take for example the case of FGI World, the world’s largest provider of EAP (employee assistance programs) now part of the Sheppel.fgi merged organization. In a 2004 brand strategy exercise it became clear that FGI World had a lot of permission from their clients to extend their mandate into a broader set of workplace health issues and to elevate their influence in their clients’ organizations to the CEO level. By capturing executive attention with new ideas on the relationship between workplace health and corporate performance, FGI World sought to redefine its value proposition from EAP to creating healthy and productive global workforces. Could they wake up Monday morning and do it? Not even close. Could they get clients excited about building it with them? Yes indeed, and one of the major banks was the first to sign on and went right to work on piloting the new integration. Since then FGI World has been building the capabilities and systems to handle the proposition and carried this idea into the Sheppel relationship. They pioneered the bold idea of an integrated approach to workplace health—a value-creating innovation that would not have occurred if they were afraid of over-promising.

Malcolm Allen of Placebrands, a UK firm that articulates brands for places including neighbourhoods, cities, countries and regions, talks about “future authentic” as a way to help his clients get over the hump of “we’re not there yet, so how can we promise it?” This idea matters a lot in placebranding where you really are working with developers, city planners and local business-people to create a vision of a place in the future, not just an historical sketch of where a place has come from. Malcolm says this is a liberating notion for the city and country-builders with whom he works. You still have to be authentic, but you can define future authentic and build it in a coherent way through development, planning and zoning, public policy and private enterprise.

So, go ahead and over-promise. Take what you know to be true about what you are good at, and extend it out to what you think you can be the best at. Then, do your homework about how to get there, and start talking to your customers and clients about why they need to help you make it happen.