Accidental Branding: A Mistake You Can’t Afford to Make

July 17, 2008 By 1 Comment

I live in Colorado Springs. And, God I love this town. The sun shines on 300 days of the year which means we have sunshine immediately after cozy snowstorms, as the leaves turn and after the mountain rainstorms that make the flowers bloom. Colorado Springs is located squarely at the base of Pike’s Peak and I can get on my bike and be in the mountains in 20 minutes. People are healthier and more active in Colorado Springs than many cities in the US. This city is small enough to feel like you know people but big enough to have a solid economic base and cultural options.

Recently, however, I noticed that when I tell people I’m from Colorado Springs, I’m often met with silence and a little suspicion. A few of the more intrepid souls have clarified their reaction by asking the follow up question: So is Colorado Springs really as conservative as it seems?

Ah yes, Colorado Springs and conservativism. We’ve got all the popular signs of “conservative” values. During the 2007 Patrick’s Day parade, I stood on the curb with fellow residents and watched as people marching under a banner of “Peace” were literally dragged off by police as some of the bystanders yelled things like: “If you want peace, move to Boulder.” We’ve got two active and growing military bases and the US Air Force Academy. We’ve got Focus on the Family and its vocal leader Dr. Jim Dobson. We’ve got New Life Church, which used to have Ted Haggard until he was outed by gay escort Mike Jones. 

All of this begs the question: Do all Colorado Springs residents support a conservative evangelical, pro-war , traditional family values agenda? No, of course not. I live in the downtown area where the average neighborhood leans to the left. We’ve got pinko-commie liberals just like any other town. But Colorado Springs is the perfect example of what happens when an entity neglects to purposefully brand itself.  We, as a city, have come to be known as the hyper conservative town because we’ve got big, squeaky wheels getting a bunch of press as the rest of us are busily going about our neutral lives and yet we find it a little stunning when we’re lumped in with the ad hoc reputation that has been created about this city and by extension, its people.

Here’s how it happens. With few notable exceptions (Here’s to you, Lakota and Mary and Lyn), most business leaders see brand marketing as optional, something best accomplished with as few resources as possible. Large organizations approach it in a disorganized and often decentralized process. Small organizations are so busy putting out fires that they don’t have the time or energy to strategically think about their identity. But here’s the thing: you are building a brand whether or not you pay any attention to it. The human brain requires categories in which to organize information and when none is provided, it looks for clues of its own. The lack of a purposefully directed brand does not mean that your organization doesn’t have a brand. It does, it’s probably just a collection of impressions, experiences and hearsay that may or may not be true and may or may not (often not) position your organization to meaningfully stand out from competitors in a positive way. The rest of the United States doesn’t have the time or interest to really get to know Colorado Springs, so they take what they’re given and form over-simplified impressions.

I think that rather than letting its brand be something that just happens to it, the city of Colorado Springs should do a better job of taking control and steering its identity.

What about your organization?

Kyndra Wilson, KW Brand Translation

Filed Under: Brand Communication, Strategic Brand Management Tagged With: ,

Branding is a Relationship

March 28, 2008 By Leave a Comment

I wear big silver hoop earrings all the time.

smiling shot

There is something about those silver hoops that keeps me coming back. I think it’s because they’re funky and feel hip to me and, if I’m honest, that’s probably not the only thing. When I was a teenager, my father, a physician, prohibited me from wearing hoops because he’d seen one too many young woman whose hoops had accidentally gotten caught and ripped through her earlobe. As a good dad, he was trying to protect me. I obeyed his rule at the time, but always thought it was a risk I’d be willing to take. Now, as an adult and as something of the family black sheep and an enduringly obstinate person, I suppose it gives me a certain naughty thrill to put on my giant hoops knowing that I’m breaking an old rule.

So, in a weird way, my silver hoops are an expression of a complicated personal response—they represent both the role I typically play in the family and a foible of my personality. Are they the whole of me? No, but they are a small expression. They’re also a small expression of what I look for in other people. I tend to be drawn to people who I sense are a little stubborn, a little wicked. Like naughty ducks of a feather, we like each other, we “get” each other.

When people think of a “brand,” I have learned that they typically think of the trappings of a brand such as the logo, the corporate colors, the tagline or jingle. Indeed those elements are an important part of conveying the brand—they are the silver hoop earrings—but they are not the brand.

So what, really, is a brand? A brand is an expression of a relationship and that’s why they’re so complicated. Relationships, with self, with others, with community and with competitors, are inherently human, emotional, organic and really, super-freaking complicated. [If you don’t think of relationships as complicated, hearken back to your last family holiday; what were the issues? The baggage? The family pet peeves? What about the power struggles and relational politics? See? Complicated.]

Now, think of the last time you developed a new friendship. What was it about that person that appealed to you? When did you know that the person scored high on the “friend-O-meter?” Were there certain words they said that you also use? Were there ways they expressed their values that indicated that you had values in common? Did they laugh at the same jokes? Did they tell jokes that made you laugh? What did you admire about them? Did being together make you feel good about yourself? These are all important elements of early relationship building. In the case of a new friendship, the players in the equation are you and the new friend…and perhaps the other people in the room with whom you did not feel a quick affinity.

Just imagine that in that friendship scenario, you are not just you the individual, but you, the organization. Now it’s your job to proactively develop relationships. Your survival as an organization cannot passively assume new friends will just walk in and introduce themselves; you have to get out there first. So, organizational brand development begins with thinking about things like how your history, values, beliefs and goals influence the way you like to interact with people. How do all of those things come together in a way that is naturally attractive to other people (i.e. customers) who share those values or perspectives? How do you project and present yourself so those like-minded people will find you and want to get to know you? Once you meet, how will you deepen your friendship, get to know and “be there” for your new friend? How will you know what they want from your relationship with them (hint: ask). And, how do you develop the relationship so that when they meet other people, they are less inclined to dump you as a friend and start another relationship with someone else?

Brand development is fundamentally relationship development long before it is a function of creative design or interesting ad campaigns. The creative piece is important, but, like my silver hoop earrings, the creative needs to be pretty AND purposeful. It needs to serve as an attractive, compelling, and symbolic expression of who you are and how you want to relate to people. Without a good understanding of the relationship dynamics, creative elements are just window dressing—silver hoops on a blank-eyed, mute mannequin with all the personality of a damp tissue.

Good brand research will identify the many complicated dynamics that make you and your customer friends tick and will steer creative design so that the subsequent creative expression is an apt metaphor for those values. Or in other words, good brand development brings that blank-eyed mannequin to life and frees its wacky passion so it can run around yelling: “It lives, it Liiii-VES!”…and then it helps it find other whack-jobs who find that kind of thing funny.

Kyndra Wilson, KW Brand Translation

Filed Under: Brand Communication, Customer research, Personal Brand Tagged With: , ,

3D Branding

October 12, 2007 By Leave a Comment

Fall is upon us and with it, the eventual arrival of the holiday family-fests. I can anticipate the good food, the ad hoc drinking games, and this question: What exactly do you do?

As a brand marketing consultant, this is a question I have been asked by nearly everyone I’ve met…including my parents. It’s ironic that one of the sole purposes of marketing is to make clear the features and benefits of any given company and yet brand marketing remains among the amorphous aspects of the process.

So, just so that I have something clear to tell my family the next time we get together for a holiday function, I’ll try to make it clear. But first, a bit on brands.

Brands have several jobs.

1. Differentiate: In (generally) crowded markets, brands help to clearly differentiate the product and its company to be worth more—more attention, more respect, more money and more loyalty.

2. Deliver: In (generally) crowded mindsets, well-developed brands make promises they can keep. When I think “high-end coffee beverage,” Starbucks pops into my head because the company and its culture work so hard to deliver a high-end coffee experience. 7-11—the chain of convenience stores, also brew and sell coffee but it doesn’t promise to be high-end; it promises to be fast and cheap and it—like Starbucks—delivers on its promise. Brands make promises about what you, the customer, will get out of the interaction. The product, packaging, people and pricing etc, should all work together to deliver upon that promise.

3. Deepen (you knew there’d be another “d”): Brands are meant to be relational and like any relationship, they’re meant to grow and deepen. When I meet someone for the first time, I have to make a real effort to remember their name. Over time—if we become friends—I will not only know their name, it will carry with it the associations of our many interactions. And, like any relationship, the association will begin to take on a life of its own. I will become loyal to it. I will promote it to other people I like. I will defend it. I will go out of my way to spend more time together. Herein is the meaning of “brand equity.” Brand equity—like carefully managed friendships—grown and deepen in complexity and value.

So what do I do? As a brand translator (a term I made up), I make it my job to research and understand the 3D’s of branding (I made up the three D’s too). 

  • I research a client’s competitors and how they present themselves to their markets so I know how the client can differentiate itself from others who claim to do the same thing.
  • I research the client company itself. I delve into its goals, its history, its values and its culture in order to get a sense of what it can and cannot realistically deliver.
  • I research the client’s customers to get a sense of what comes to mind when they hear the company name, what drew them to the relationship, what they love about it, what makes them stay and what would make them leave. I use all of this information to help the client know how to connect with their customers and to build and deepen that relationship over time.
  • Then—and this is where it gets interesting—I help the clients get a clear and focused sense of how the 3D’s pull together into a unified brand concept that they can strategically use to keep themselves on the straight and narrow path (e.g. to make sure that the Starbucks of the world don’t accidentally start delivering 7-11 quality and values).

There you have it, dear family. That’s what I do.

Kyndra Wilson, KW Brand Translation

Filed Under: Brand Development Tagged With: , ,