Ten Truths About Successful Brands

Have you ever wondered why some brands take off like a rocket, while others sort of trundle clumsily along in a perpetual fog of mediocrity? Sometimes an idea will just take off in spite of itself, because the time is right, the price is right, and the stars align just so. But more often than not, brands get traction because their owners know these ten truths, and they design their strategies accordingly.

1. A brand is a promise.

A brand, in its simplest form, is the promise you make to the people who matter. And like every promise, a brand has three parts: Behavior, expression and experience. Brand behavior is what you actually do to create value. Brand experience is how people receive what you offer them. And brand expression is how you connect the two ends so your customer experiences your value in the way you intend. When you understand that your brand promise lives in everything you do or say, and that the public will receive your promise as true or false, just as they will any other promise, you begin to build a framework for a sustainable value-based relationship with your stakeholders.

2. Brand drives organizational performance.

If a brand is a promise, doesn’t it follow that shaping your internal processes around that promise will impact how you perform? From the outside, your brand is what I believe you can deliver to me. Meaning from the inside, every step you take moves you either towards your goal of satisfying my need, or away from it. If the promises you make don’t drive your progress, you’re either lying to your customers or you're sailing without a rudder.

3. A brand is either Inactive, Reactive or Proactive.

Inactive brands don’t say much. They tend to just lie there, inadvertently allowing the perceptions of the market or the claims of their competitors to define who they are. Inactive brands are usually owned by folks who view marketing communication and advertising skeptically, or fail to see the value of investing in their story. They’re often the folks who believe if you build a better mousetrap, the world will beat a path to your door.

Reactive brands, on the other hand, are touchy fellows who focus exclusively on what the competition is doing, and make every message a referential comparison. Every time they open their marketing mouths, they scream about how much better they are than the other mousetraps. Their prospects often respond by thinking, “Oh, there are other mousetraps? I better go check them out!”

Proactive brands have the courage and intuition to dig into the value equation and learn exactly what a mousetrap means to someone who has mice, and leverage that intel to essentially redefine their category.

4. If you don’t position yourself, the market will.

The whole idea behind brand strategy is to seize the market position you want to occupy. But many companies focus exclusively on sales goals — or even NO goals — without thought to how they want to show up in the minds of their market. When they do that, their market position is handed them by their competition, or by misperceptions of their customers. They become “the tire store that charges too much,” “the printing company everyone calls just because they need three bids,” or “the pet shop that probably gets their animals from puppy mills.” The positions the market assigns are the ones no one wants. A clear brand promise becomes a market position, if it’s the basis of your strategy.

5. Differentiation is more than just standing out.

Think about it: Every noisy pitchman stands out – often like a sore thumb, but that doesn’t mean they’re offering anything unique. That’s why you flip the channel so fast. True differentiation relates to the value you offer, not how loud you can scream. In fact, it’s the key to effective brand positioning. People consider your brand because of its similarity to the rest of the competitive set, but they choose you based on their understanding of how your offer is different. Differentiate your offer by providing a clearly relatable value, and you’ll wind up in the market position you aspire to.

6. Design is fundamental to effective branding.

Design is not decoration, and it doesn’t come out of a computer. Design is the strategic discipline of aligning visual messaging, narrative and experience so that your value promise is received as you intend. As Thomas Watson, Jr., former Chairman of IBM said, “Good design is good business.” Without a brand design program, your prospect experiences only a part of the multi-dimensional promise you spent so much energy and money to bring to life.

7. Brands require asset management systems to protect their value.

Suppose you pay someone to create a positioning statement, consult on your brand promise and design a set of graphic standards, but you don’t put in place a system to ensure their adoption and use throughout your organization. It’s pretty easy to see that your work and expense will have virtually no impact on your business. The ideas you worked so hard to define and express, will only live in your imagination. The promises that define you have to be made clear to the people whose job it is to help you live up to them. A sound system of managing brand assets is critical to aligning behavior with expression.

In addition, a brand asset management program makes it easier to defend your intellectual property. You may find yourself in court someday, fighting a trademark infringement. If your brand expression is inconsistent, if your logo files are not tightly managed, if your look and feel or your taglines vary from application to application, it may be hard to convince a judge your brand identity is really yours, or really worth defending. A proper management program ensures the intellectual property that expresses your brand promise can be defended, and that the stakeholders who hear your story from an employee will understand it when they hear it again from a radio ad or read it in your brochure.

8. Your brand affects business valuation.

Compare two Houston-based furniture retailers: Star Furniture and Gallery Furniture. (If you don’t live around here, sorry. You’ve missed some of the most irritating commercials to ever be aired. Anywhere. Ever. Seriously.) Gallery, until recently, stayed aloft purely on the frequency and reach (and voice volume) of its ad campaigns, featuring proprietor Mattress Mack, promising to “...save you money!” They’ve done well, becoming (I believe) the highest volume single-location furniture store in America (someone correct me if I’m wrong on this).

A proponent of sustainable strategy might ask what would become of Gallery Furniture if Mattress Mack cut his aggressive ad budget without changing his message. The obvious and undeniable answer is that sales would immediately plummet. More ominously, what would happen to Gallery Furniture’s valuation if, Heaven forbid, Mac passed away and his heirs needed to sell the company? More than likely, the business would fetch a price based largely on the value of its inventory and real estate, rather than on the value of the brand into the future. (Interestingly, Gallery Furniture seems to have seen the light and changed its strategy, as its ads are now aimed at positioning rather than pure selling. Yay, Mack.)

Star Furniture, on the other hand, has built a leading retail brand not by commoditizing its core value, but by differentiating it clearly. Star’s slogan is “Different by design.” While that might not be the most thrilling or original slogan ever coined, it makes a specific promise to satisfy discriminating tastes. Star does do periodic discounting, but the core brand value is not mere price. Furthermore, its strategy requires a substantially lower outlay for advertising, and its margins are supported by a strong “brand premium.” As for valuation, look only to who owns it: Warren Buffett, arguably the world’s foremost authority on the importance of business valuation.

9. Responsibility for the brand resides at the top.

One of the most common and devastating mistakes a chief executive can make is to delegate responsibility for brand to line managers. An organization is built on the vision of its leaders, and leaders emerge (ostensibly) as a result of their ability to articulate a vision and infuse it into the culture of the tribes they lead. A brand is a direct extension of the intention of the keeper of the vision; responsibility cannot be passed down to people who lack the absolute authority to bring it to fruition. Yet, because brand involves some complexity, it is often seen as a “discipline” that requires expertise and an intense allocation of mindspace. In truth, the brand itself must be inherently simple. Many brands are complex in their execution, and to bring them to life often involves the expertise of a team of specialists. But the vision itself has to live in the heart of the top executive for it remain viable.

10. It’s the one advantage no one can copy.

Your competitors can copy your ads, your business model, your recipes, techniques and ideas. They can undercut your prices or claim they’re “Number One.” The one thing they can’t copy or co-opt is the unique value promise that makes you who you are as a company. You can build a comfy little coffee shop on every (otherwise unoccupied) corner, and serve $4 coffee for $3.50, in white cups with little green mermaids on them, but the best you’ll ever be is “just like Starbuck’s, but cheaper.” If you take that approach, you miss out on establishing your own distinct persona, your own position in the minds of the people who matter.

Your brand is yours and yours alone, and if you give energy to building it on solid principles of differentiation and emotional connection, it will provide a sustainable competitive advantage that can withstand competitive pressure, economic turmoil and cultural evolution.