What Is a Brand And Why Should I Care? Building equity in your organization.

Branding got a huge black eye during and after the dot-com era. Most people (marketing people included) confused branding with name awareness campaigns. I’ve actually heard a VP of Marketing say, “We don’t need branding. We don’t need our company to be a household word. We need to generate sales.” Garnering attention for your company and/or product is important but it’s hardly branding. When done correctly, branding will drive your sales effort, articulate the entire organization’s goals and create an equity center as valuable as any other part of the company.

Simply put, branding is the process of instilling the core business strategy into every communication touch-point, (i.e. Coke=Refreshment, Volvo=Safety, RadioShack=Answers). In these examples, every communication (internal and external) supports their core business strategy, from their tagline (RadioShack—You’ve got Questions. We’ve got answers.) to their internal newsletters. Branding is the device that facilitates the communications process.

If branding is a process, then the brand elements are the fundamental cornerstone deliverables of the process, culminating with the logo. Brand elements (logo, identity system, tagline, etc.) are the personification of a company or product. For example, your moral fiber is your brand. It is the essence of who you are deep inside. Your outward appearance represents your brand elements. If you’re an egocentric and immoral person, it doesn’t matter what clothes you wear or what socio-economic status you achieve; your true personality (or brand) will show through. You will only be able to fool some of your audience for a finite amount of time.

The same is true for corporate brands. If the company fails to start the branding process with its core business strategy, it will fail at branding. The end product may be beautiful and effective marketing materials that may achieve a department’s (or someone’s) goals. However, those materials will fail to communicate the top-down business strategy and therefore fail to articulate the entire organization’s goals. View branding as the oil that lubricates the machine. You can run at full speed without it, but you're probably going to have problems down the road.

All strong brands start at the top of an organization. Most senior executives know the core business strategy and have formal ways to communicate that strategy. Ask people at all levels of your organization: What do we do? What do we stand for? What is our philosophy? They should be able to answer all the above questions with ease. If you get contradictory answers or worse yet blank stares, you have a fundamental branding problem.

A sound brand provides a conduit to communicate the business strategy to everyone in the organization (even entry-level personnel). It also gives them formal ways to communicate the business’s strategy and ensures that all team members are on the same page when speaking about the company, especially when outside the organization.

Strong companies change over time—they grow, adjust to market pressures, introduce new products, etc. Therefore, strong brands need to grow over time. Once a brand is established, it must be protected and nurtured. However, a strong brand needs to evolve in personality, style and personification with the company. That’s not to say they need to change radically. Brands need to grow to stay congruent with an evolving core business strategy. Almost all the top 50 worldwide brands have gone through at least one brand refresh during their existence. Some have gone through several.

A strong brand articulates the entire organization’s goals, drives the sales process and creates an equity center as valuable as any other part of the company. Existing brands don’t need to be scrapped. They need to evolve. Start the process with a brand audit. Look at every communications touch-point: Does it support and personify your core business strategy? Does everyone in the organization know the core business strategy? If not, you have some work to do. Building a strong brand is an on-going process. View the process as an investment in your organization and you will realize an excellent return on that investment.