A few months back I was leading a brand workshop for one of our clients as part of a corporate rebranding program. This particular workshop involved associates directly at the front of the client relationship: folks who either directly faced the client or provided work product for those who did. After moving through about half of our planned exercises, one of the participants remarked, “Management can do whatever they want, this won’t change my job.”

After removing my jaw from the floor, I realized how much work we had to do in building a compelling brand experience for this particular client. And, yet it reminded me that one of the larger misconceptions of branding is that it starts and stops with the marketing department. At Mlicki, we can’t think of any bigger misunderstanding than that.

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We hear this all the time, “I just want to make sure everything looks the same.” Sounds like a pretty good idea. But, offering consistently poor communications isn’t any better than delivering a steady stream of inconsistent ones. Ultimately, a lot of branding efforts and rebranding programs fail for precisely this reason — organizations spend all their time focusing on whether the corporate identity is being used properly rather than ensuring that their brands are providing a consistent experience to the customer. That’s not to say that brand consistency isn’t important. Rather the contrary. Ultimately, the world’s leading brands are focused on delivering a consistent feeling to the customer through their brand communications and brand experience. A good example is Urban Outfitters. Read more

Over our 30+ years of brand building we’ve talked and worked with a lot of B2B brands. As expert builders of service-based brands we’re always shocked when an executive tells us that “branding doesn’t matter” in the B2B space. In our experience, brand building is actually more important in the B2B world. And, it’s inherently more complex.

Generally, we’ve found that the perceived lack of importance in B2B branding stems from a common misperception of what brands are and what they do. When a B2B executive tells us that branding isn’t important, generally they’re referring to brand identity. Translation, they’re thinking of the brand and its identifying logo as one in the same.

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Last week, we had the privilege of attending a speaking engagement featuring Don Schmincke. As founder of the Saga Leadership Institute, Don has authored a number of books on leadership and has spent over two decades analyzing high performing teams. His morning session shared a variety of insights on the world’s highest performing organizations. Ultimately, through 30 years of research and observation, his team has found that the best organizations outperform by activating passion within their people. That passion is packaged through a clear, compelling internal belief system, which drives employee behavior and culminates in desired results. In his words, the most successful organizations create a “compelling saga.” The compelling saga inspires people to believe, encourages self sacrifice for the greater good of the organization, and fosters passion within the workforce. That passion drives the company to outmaneuver and demoralize its competitors.

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Since the Tiger Woods scandal broke last Fall, we’ve been regularly asked our opinion on the effects both to his personal brand and to those of the brands who’ve endorsed him. I’ve fielded the question in brand workshops, speaking engagements and client meetings. In the five months since the story unfolded, we’ve generally seen it as one of the larger destructions of brand equity in recent memory. In fact, Associate Professors Dr. Victor Stango and Dr. Christopher Knittel at the University of California Davis estimated that from the time of his accident to the announcement of his “indefinite leave” from golf that his endorsing brands lost $5-12 billion of shareholder value.

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