You redesigned your logo, changed corporate colors, overhauled your website, and clarified your messaging to better reflect your company’s unique approach, solution, and purpose. While feedback at launch was good, a year into the brand refresh it seems to make little or no difference in how you are perceived among customers and markets. You don’t see the project as a major failure, but it was a lot of money, resources and time for an effort that has no measurable positive impact. Sound familiar?
This isn’t like the famous catastrophic failures in company rebranding we’ve all read about. It is a lesser acknowledged but common phenomenon…zero-impact branding activity. Such activity happens with great frequency and can be a heavy strain on company resources with zero, and sometimes negative, impact.
In this 3-part post, I’ll address why zero-impact brand activity is so common and will provide a framework for thinking through brand initiatives to help identify action steps based on cause/effect, steer away from magical thinking, and set the right expectations.
- The Brand Illusion: Recognize and understand the allure of magical thinking.
In the 1981 military comedy Stripes there is a scene showing newly enlisted basic trainees in their barracks taking turns introducing themselves. Whether realistic or not, that’s the scene. One odd nervous guy introduces himself, speaking rapidly and stuttering a bit, as follows: “I like fast cars and fast women…Tha-that’s why the guys in my car club call me The Cruiser.” After a short silence, someone comments, “They shoulda called him The Dork.” It’s a little cruel, but the scene got big laughs in the theater because people in the audience instantly understood. The young man’s behavior and words in the few seconds it takes to deliver his introduction reveal to everyone in the room that he’s The Dork. But he thinks he’s The Cruiser. Or, more accurately, he knows deep down that he’s The Dork, but thinks if he tells everyone he’s The Cruiser, they will believe. They don’t. Further, the glaring gap between his claim and his behavior verifies to all that he is The Dork, etching his personal brand in stone.
Writers of that scene counted on an instant audience-wide understanding of the situation being portrayed. People will form strong opinions about you from your behavior and how they experience you. Things you say about yourself that don’t align with their observations and experiences won’t be believed; rather, they will likely have a negative effect on your image.
While people almost universally understand this phenomenon as it applies to personal brand, I’ve witnessed a remarkable willingness within organizations to abandon this understanding when it comes to company brands. I attribute this to something I call The Brand Illusion, a magical-thinking-based illusion that brand can be controlled via marketing efforts. It’s the idea that a perfect message, great logo, carefully-chosen colors and images will create a lasting perception of your company – or a brand. In reality, these things can support and bolster lasting perceptions of your company…but these perceptions that make up your brand are created by customer experiences and company behaviors.
The example presented above about personal brand doesn’t just translate loosely to companies. It is especially true for companies. Your brand is what your key audiences believe it is based on their experiences. If you attempt to change audience perceptions with messages that contradict their actual experiences, you’ll lose credibility and probably customers. Imagine a company brand that is taking a hit because of poor customer service. Now imagine reactions to images and ads that paint a picture of great customer service while customers continue to be frustrated by their experience. That may seem like a ridiculous example, but it happens quite often.
Recognizing The Brand Illusion and acknowledging how tempting it can be to believe is the first step in avoiding it. Step two is to ground any branding initiative and its related goals in clear, simple definitions.
- Brand Reality: Ground projects in clear definitions and propose actions with direct impact.
When you think of a company you like or a business you frequent, what do you think about? If you like Amazon, you probably think about how easily you can find almost anything you want to buy, the tremendously quick and easy checkout, and the fact that your item will probably be in your hands the very next day. You might think about a time when you forgot a special occasion but were saved because you found and bought a last-minute gift on Amazon as you walked from your office to your car. Amazon provides a service that makes people’s lives easier and very many people have pleasant feelings about the company. Essentially, that is Amazon’s brand. It might not be exactly how the company would formally define its brand, but it is a pretty good estimate of what the Amazon logo and the smile/arrow icon represent to an enormous number of humans.
Thinking of brand in this basic way will help ground any brand initiative in this fact: Your brand is exactly what your key audiences believe it is. Nothing more. Nothing less.
Ground your brand initiative with this simple definition of brand:
- Brand (noun): The perceptions of your company among key audiences based on their experiences with your company and observations of company behavior.
Then you can begin to think about the active form of the word and the actions you can take to affect desired changes:
- Branding (verb): Everything your company does to influence the perceptions that are your brand, including creating desirable customer experiences, encouraging certain company behaviors, consistent use of an easily identifiable logo and visuals, and appropriate messaging.
Next, think about all the actions that can be taken that fall into the realm of branding as defined above. Consider the impact changes or adjustments to a logo might have vs. changes to customer experiences. I like to think of anything that can be adjusted as a “brand lever”. These can be easily categorized into types: brand drivers, brand identifiers, and brand tactics, shown below:
Brand Levers
Brand Drivers: Brand drivers are the things that truly define your brand, or the perceptions of your company among key audiences. It’s useful to think of these things in two broad categories:
- How key audiences experience your company: products offered, interactions with customer service, purchasing process, ease of use, refund experiences, product quality and price, delivery time, unique value experienced, etc.
- Company behavior audiences observe: corporate goodwill, how the company treats employees, whether executives take political stances, charitable contributions, community relations, etc.)
Brand Identifiers: Logos, images, slogan, musical theme and visual identity – the symbols presented consistently and repeatedly to promote instant recognition of your unique brand.
Brand Tactics: Messages, ads, videos, events, campaigns, posts, and channels used to actively encourage positive brand perceptions.
Of course, some levers are harder to pull than others. In many cases, the harder the pull, the more impact it tends to have. Investing in new systems and changing policies to improve your purchase experience might be a big lift, but if that’s a key place customers struggle, the impact on your brand will likely be significant and lasting.
It’s worth mentioning another manifestation of The Brand Illusion here. Overhauling the company logo, colors, imagery, web site and collateral is the type of project that can have benefits, but the primary benefit is NOT that it will change your image or how people feel about your company. Such changes may create a more professional look, for example, and may influence initial impressions. If the new look is consistent with a very professional experience customers have with your company, the new look will help to reinforce a deeper impression.
If your logo is indecipherable or if your very friendly company has an unfriendly harsh visual look…go for it…change your logo or visuals but be clear about your reasons and expectations.
- Logo/visual changes can help align the impression you make (professional, friendly, etc) with your actual company brand. Significant changes sometimes come with short term loss of recognition.
- Visuals are vital as brand identifiers and they can be powerful supporters of actual brand perceptions. Don’t expect to change your image or brand by focusing solely on visuals.
Consider Amazon again. The smile/arrow logo works well because it supports and represents the positive experience-based perceptions people have. The smile – satisfied/happy feelings, the arrow – delivery/getting the things you need from a warehouse directly to you. The logo did not create those perceptions; similarly, a new logo wouldn’t change them. If Amazon changed its colors and logo tomorrow, it wouldn’t change the brand. It wouldn’t change the perceptions about the company, though it may take an adjustment period before people instantly associated their perceptions with the new logo and colors.
As you head into your brand initiative with clear goals and expectations based on the realistic impacts of various actions, it’s worth thinking through possible scenarios and how your organization may react amid the reality of day-to-day business.
- Company Realities: Prepare for situations that can derail effective brand initiatives.
Rebranding and similar brand initiatives generally go through a process of defining a desired brand, presenting evidence of the current brand as perceived among key audiences, and proposing a plan to close the gap between the two. It goes a little like this:
An internal team or a consulting firm takes you through exercises designed to help you get to the core what your company does, the problems it solves for customers, the company values, purpose, culture, and mission – this is defining your desired brand. Then they walk through research about brand awareness, customer and market perceptions of your company, net promoter score, employee impressions of culture, and similar measures of brand and brand value – this is your current (or actual or perceived) brand. The plan for rebrand is built around closing the gap between the company’s desired brand and the actual, or perceived, brand.
Company Realities
Reiterating some of the key ideas so far, The Brand Illusion mindset often looks to logo changes, new colors, new messages, and campaigns as perception changers. The allure of such magical thinking is powerful, but brand is truly driven by how audiences experience your company, so an effective rebrand starts by addressing experiences that drive undesirable brand perceptions. Then messaging can reinforce the new state of experience and visual identifiers help audiences instantly associate such experience uniquely with your company.
This may seem intuitive, but in practice rebranding initiatives often deteriorate into message-only efforts. This happens for a couple of primary reasons:
- Disbelief: Sometimes the gap between market perception and internal belief in a company brand is so large that it surprises company executives/stakeholders, leading to challenges like: “We are clearly [desired positive brand attribute]. Maybe we’re not perfect but how can people possibly think we are [perceived negative brand attribute]?” To which the common response is: “I think it’s a messaging problem. We need to send some clarifying emails and get more case studies published…stat!”
- The true solution is daunting. The reasons behind poor brand perceptions can be challenging to overcome. When customer service issues, product issues, or company policies are identified as drivers of undesirable perceptions, the work required to fix the problem becomes all too clear and the commitment to the brand initiative may falter. This can quickly lead to conclusions like: “Right now, we can focus our message, develop more professional images, and gather more testimonials. Let’s set a meeting to talk about addressing the product issues [actual fixes].“
It’s easy to see how these common scenarios can turn branding initiatives into resource wasters, while the actual problems—the real-life customer experiences that truly define a brand—are tabled for future consideration, often going unresolved. The following is a real-life example of a well-intentioned branding initiative that derailed for reasons outlined in the second bullet above – the real solution was daunting.
From Brand Initiative to Marketing Campaign:
I was involved in a rebranding effort at a point in my career when I was in mid-level management, so I participated but did not make final decisions about actions taken. It was with a company where employees embraced the mission and derived job satisfaction from knowing their work helped people – we were all “drinking the Kool-Aid,” as they say. Beyond our personal feelings, research actually showed the benefits our products provided. This wasn’t in dispute among those who read the research. Internally, our brand felt good. The desire for a rebrand came from a significant disconnect between this internal state-of-mind and the actual perception of the company among key markets.
As we dug into other components of our perceived/actual brand, plenty more came out – much of which we knew but didn’t realize had such an impact on our brand. Our internal tech wasn’t great at the time, which made it hard to do business with us. It wasn’t easy to purchase, pay for, or get help with our products. While we assumed our brand was measured by the ultimate outcomes of our work that helped people, the way customers experienced our company was driving a perceived/actual brand in a direction far from where we wanted it to be. It was a formidable challenge. Changing the market perception by addressing the customer experience would be an enormous undertaking, so the action plan eventually defaulted to marketing – a new slogan, message, ads, videos, tradeshow booths, and more. It wasn’t a deliberate derailment, but messaging was the one thing we could address immediately…the rest would have to wait. And it did.
Ultimately, the campaign was off target. It was destined to miss the mark because we had done nothing to address our customers’ experiences, nor did we have a plan to do so. Despite our best efforts to understand the issues, a personal belief in the company’s mission, and a desire to make a difference…we defaulted to an expensive, zero-impact brand initiative. While I have no data to show a negative impact on the company brand, I can confidently say that it did not have a positive impact on market perceptions and it was costly. It used internal resources to the point of nearly halting all other marketing activity and, at the time, was one of the most expensive marketing campaigns the company had ever undertaken.
IT’S NOT ALL DOOM and GLOOM: For the desired impact, align expectations with actions you are willing to take
This post isn’t meant to discourage anyone about rebranding or other brand initiatives – they don’t always reveal enormous functional problems that are driving negative perceptions. I used some extreme, but not uncommon, examples to make a point that brand is more complex than many people believe. It’s not highly complex – it just can’t be controlled by simply tweaking messaging or using marketing to spin unfavorable experiences.
I cannot overstate the importance of making sure stakeholders are clear about the kind of actions that might be proposed and the impact of various brand levers at the outset of any brand project. The allure of magical-thinking will be ever present, so continue to remind participants that messaging alone won’t change your brand for the better, but it can potentially damage it. For a positive impact, address the things that drive undesirable brand perceptions, then support those changes with other tools like imagery and messaging. It’s worth discussing, up front, what you’ll do if you discover negative perceptions caused by issues that may require massive resources to resolve. This will help you avoid the temptation to change perceptions with messaging alone.
I suggest going into such projects with an open mind and a willingness to examine anything that may be driving brand perceptions that are not what you want. You’ll likely discover some reasonable undertakings that will improve the way customers or other audiences experience your company – focus on these. If you find trouble areas that are cost-prohibitive to address in the near future, at least you’ll have them documented and will understand their effect on customers and market perception.