9 Important Branding Lessons
When my youngest daughter became a teenager, she proclaimed, "I want the freedom to make my own mistakes."
"Well," my wife and I offered, "if we could show you--from our years of life experiences--how to avoid mistakes, wouldn't that be helpful?" Being a teenager, this didn't quite sink in, but in my experience helping companies develop brand strategies, maybe I can impart some lessons that I've learned and help you avoid some common pitfalls.
Lesson 1: Success is in the process itself
So have one! While the results of the branding process are not predictable, the branding exercise can be. So have a plan. Before embarking on the journey to review, audit, or reshape your organizations' brand, build a process that management or other stakeholders can sign off on. Once you have an approved charter, you can proceed in the knowledge that you and your branding team will be following a "blessed" road map making your destination assured.
If you engage a branding agency or consultant, ask to see their process first. While there are no right and wrong processes, the lack of a plan will certainly have you wandering in the wilderness instead of celebrating your results.
Lesson 2: Build a solid team
You've heard it before: get the right people on the bus. When selecting members for your branding team, your decision will often depend on the size of your company and the depth and breadth of their experience. In larger organizations, branding efforts are typically led by the marketing department, but this certainly doesn't mean the team should be populated with only marketing types. You'll often get more holistic results by engaging a cross-functional team including "front-liners"--staff with customer contact. Keep the team small: six to nine members should be plenty
Make sure your team members can commit to the time and effort necessary to participate and contribute in a meaningful way. Developing a brand strategy is typically a several-months process, but it could be one of your company's most mission-critical initiatives.
Lesson 3: Don't brand in a vacuum
Branding is not about locking yourself in a room for a few hours and emerging with all the answers. Before starting down the road on your quest for a brand strategy, gather any inputs, survey results, or data that will help frame the discussions and shed light into the recesses of your organization, its customer, its prospects, and your industry.
And welcome counsel wherever you can get it. I once had the benefit of working with an organization that had a board member with a personal friend--a top-notch branding consultant. She made herself available to review the team's results http://www.collegecrowd.com/blogs/477/20263/choose-one-pair-of-the-mbt, offer insights, and share her knowledge.
Lesson 4: Determine your deliverables up front
Know what it is you're delivering--and to whom--for every step in the branding process. Having that clarity at the outset will help keep the team focused on what results are expected.
For instance, the team deliverable for your company's logo might simply be a recommendation as to whether or not a new mark is necessary--not developing the new logo itself. Depending on the structure and size of your company, other decisions, like a corporate name change, might require the blessing of the board.
Most companies that I've consulted consider the brand platform document--and the recommendations it contains--as the primary deliverable from a brand strategy session.
Lesson 5: Use best practices to run your meetings
Nothing is worse than a poorly-run meeting. Don't subject your brand team members to unprofessional facilitation. Prepare an agenda for each session and distribute it in advance. Have meeting supplies on hand (Post-it(r) notes, flip charts, a white board...you know the drill). Plan your working sessions with the appropriate tools, exercises, and idea starters to keep the meeting moving smartly, elicit productive discussion, and arrive at actionable results. Assign a timekeeper to help the team stay on task and recruit a scribe to record important decisions or follow-up questions.
One trick that I employ universally is the table-knock rule. While spontaneous discussion and creative thinking is always welcome in a meeting, sometimes teams can get off track and find themselves deep in the weeds or a mile off topic. Anyone on the team can knock on the table and bring the group back to reality...and the task at hand.
Lesson 6: Let results come organically
It's human nature to go into the branding process with preconceived notions about where you want to end up. But suppress the urge to detour from the process. Not only will your team members have input and background that you may not have considered, the process itself will yield results that you may not have expected. Additionally, senior management and board-level input might also provide new directions and counsel that could skew your original thinking. Finally, surveys or focus groups will certainly give you food for thought and consideration.
In one organization I worked with, the team spontaneously--and unanimously--arrived at a tagline solution in the first meeting! It was putting the cart before the horse to be sure (we hadn't even begun talking brand position or essence yet), so we consciously set it aside and allowed the process to lead us to a tagline solution naturally. In this case, after factoring in much discussion and considering multiple inputs, we made a minor modification to the original thought and, voila http://asagicigil.com/jcow/index.php?p=blogs/viewstory/56077, we had a new tagline.
Lesson 7: But...don't sweat the obvious solutions
It's been said that good branding is the truth about you...well told. So when, through the branding process http://yeapy.com/node/247409, you unearth a fundamental truth about your organization, it often comes not as a "eureka http://sharetronixtr.com/view/post:57!" moment, but a disappointing, "that's it?" That could be a good thing http://jerrywong986.smartlog.dk/when-you-get-one-or-more-of-the-masai-barefoot-technology-or-mbt-shoes-post711368! If your branding team arrives at an obvious-sounding position, personality, or brand essence, that means you've discovered an authentic, believable attribute about your company. If it's based on authenticity, you haven't failed; you've succeeding in finding the nugget of truth that will resonate with your customers and prospects.
Lesson 8: Build in validation steps
As conclusive and solid as your branding results might seem, make sure that other stakeholders--especially staff, customers, and prospects--have an opportunity to weigh in on your findings. What may sound good to you and your team might disconnect with your core market or those being asked to live the brand. Build in steps at various stages of the brand work to make sure your conclusions are tracking. Surveys, focus groups, and other inputs will be invaluable as you begin the brand implementation process.
Lesson 9: Keep everybody on the same page...literally
To avoid surprises down the road, update your team members and other stakeholders after every meeting or milestone. Something I like to do is build the "brand platform" document--a record of your results and decisions--in stages or chapters after every step in the branding process. Recommendations and key conclusions are captured in the platform and then distributed to the team and others you've identified as requiring input (like senior management or board members).
When you reach the conclusion of the branding process, you'll have the complete story of your re-branded company in a concise and compelling document that will serve as the basis for implementation and any tactical work that will result (like logo design, style and usage guide, etc.).
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