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Build a Better Brand

LESSON 3 – THE ME, ME, ME PIG (Internal Support)

It’s a damning but wholly unsurprising aspect of human nature that we like talking about ourselves. Probably too much, but almost certainly as often as possible. “How was school today munchkin?”, “What did you do at the office dear?”, “How’s your day been?”, “How are you?” In ancient Greek mythology, pretty-boy Narcissus famously spent his time gazing at his own reflection, then died. I shortened that tale a bit there because the Greeks did go on and on, but you take the point I’m sure – looking at or after number one is no new thing.

And so it is with brands. We like our brands to reflect our personalities. I regularly sit in meetings with prospective clients who are looking to build or rebuild their brand(s). And they really do see them as ‘their’ brands – it’s all very personal. “I want the new brand to be vibrant, I want it to be cool, I want it to have energy, I want it to be more contemporary…”

I want, I want, I want… if my mother could hear some of the marketing people I engage with, she’d without question do a lot of finger wagging and there’s a very real possibility she’d give them a good, sharp, slap upside their heads. Being intellectually superior to most, I have come up with my own term for this somewhat narcissistic behaviour. I like to call it the, ‘Me, Me, Me Pig.’ High-brow I know, but hopefully you’ll keep up.

That a brand reflects the values, beliefs, attitudes and behaviours of its keepers is certainly not unexpected. In fact, it’s desirable – a brand should indeed reflect the needs, desires and wants of its guardians. It’s the human aspects of the brand that actually give it the ‘personality’ that will allow it to differentiate in a competitive marketplace. Just as we all have our own human personalities to differentiate ourselves from each other, so a brand should have emotive triggers that make it stand out and attract other people to want to be associated with it.

But the brand personality cannot or certainly should not be developed in isolation – at the instruction of an individual. Brand strategy and development needs to be an inclusive process in order to be successful in the long term – not exclusive. It’s a bad idea to place the responsibility for brand development on one pair of shoulders because it’ll come as no real surprise to find that the brand as a consequence reflects the personality only of the individual. Even worse would be to abdicate responsibility to an outside expert, consultancy or agency – the brand would then reflect the wholly subjective personality of a third party that is probably least well placed to convey the ‘truth’.

The brand, lest we forget, is a corporate entity. So while personality and emotive triggers are an essential part of its creative articulation, we are ultimately trying to ‘sell’ the corporate whole – not individuals. We’re not looking for the brand to become your best friend, or a quick shag, or a soul brother – we’re offering commercial transactions between buyers and sellers of products and services. There’s only one way to do that and it requires stepping away from the Me, Me, Me Pig and ensuring that if the whole company is expected to deliver against the brand promise, then the whole company has been involved with the development of the brand promise in the first place.

This isn’t as tough to achieve as it may first sound and the positive outcomes play directly to the aspects of human nature we previously looked at. Everyone likes to talk about themselves. So let them talk. Gathering opinion about the brand from the very ambassadors who will represent it is essential. This makes the difference between a tangible brand culture within an organisation and, well, just another waste of time project from the tree-huggers in the marketing department.

No one likes to be told what to do – not by their parents, their schoolteacher, the police, the government… So don’t ‘tell’ them the new corporate brand strategy. You may as well be telling them to eat their greens. But they simply love to be asked their opinion. It could be their opinion on global warming and renewable energy sources. It could be their opinion on the outrageous price of free-range turkey this year. In this case it’s their opinion on their corporate brand that we’re interested in. Ask them and they’ll have an opinion.

The difference with your corporate brand, however, is that when you ask for their opinion, which you will undoubtedly receive, and you subsequently deliver the brand strategy back to the organisation, how can the recipients possibly not engage with it? They have contributed, they will see the tangible representation of that contribution, and so they become, by default, active participants in the brand development process rather than apathetic bystanders or worse still, the voice of dissent. So if you really want to look after number one – look after all the others first. Oink, oink.

Scot McKee
Managing Director
Birddog Ltd.
www.birddog.co.uk