The Minder

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.

Full disclosure: Jeannette is a long-time collaborator of mine, and my sister-in-law, and I was very lucky to have been able to watch and cheer from the sidelines as the ideas in Ikonica took shape. The end product - which I hope is really just the beginning of a national discourse - is a treasure.

The book - structured as a field guide, beautifully designed by Paul Hodgson and written to be read with pleasure - opens by putting Canadian brands into their historical and cultural context. The authors propose an 11-point model of what makes Canadian brands Canadian. I love this part. Communitarian, chameleon-like, sceptical, collaborative….for example. When I think of the great Canadian brands I’ve worked with, these attributes are not just accurate, they are at the heart of what has made them successful.

Then come the stories. 24 interview-based stories - some with the usual suspects (Timmies, WestJet, Roots) - but also some lovely surprises (Dynamic Funds, TIFFG, Environics, McCain Foods). All the stories come across as intimate reflections by these organizations’ leaders about what has motivated them and the values they have built and modelled in order to succeed. These stories are at times funny, moving and silly but always persuasive.

The book will not disappoint practitioners with its very tidy little model that uses Community, Culture and Commerce as filters for values-based brand strategy. It’s just such great and useful stuff.

Ikonica is not going to change what it means to be Canadian. So much of what is in this book feels like us and is reassuringly familiar. What it could change is how we see the potential of our values to change the way the world thinks about brands, about Canada and about our role in shaping modern commerce.

The world is looking for what comes next after the monolithic all-about-me phase of American-style branding. Look no further. The future of the truly global brand starts here.

I am fascinated by the presence of intense contradictions in organizations. It may be possible that the highest performing, most innovative organizations are the ones that can manage the greatest degree of internal paradox, and not spin out of control, or lose their centre. (Read on …)

I was reading Richard Florida’s latest book Who’s Your City? and really liked the chapter on how the Big Five personality types (Openness, Conscientiousness, Extroversion, Agreeableness and Neuroticism) cluster geographically by region and in doing so, create geographic personality-scapes that one should be aware of when choosing a place to live. In other words, if you are a high Agreeable you will eventually feel out of place in a high Neuroticism place. Florida does not say that nice people shouldn’t move to New York, but that is what he means.

The “Big Five” types have been proven through extensive research and testing to be highly accurate descriptors of human personality. Florida says cities have personalities too….that stem from their economic structures and inform and constrain their futures.

So, I asked myself, as someone who thinks about how organizational values and culture drive brand, do organizations have personalities too? And I don’t mean the Aacker-style brand personality profiles that all seem to run together into the same words over and over. Everyone seems to be Innovative, Caring, Bold, Assertive, Rugged. I mean deeper personalities that determine what the organization can and cannot do well. And do these personalities also stem from the organization’s economic structures and inform and constrain their futures (brands) as with cities? (Read on …)