I’ve always had a cyn­i­cal view of com­pa­nies that offer “brand­ing” and “strat­egy.” Both are valid, nec­es­sary, impor­tant activ­i­ties which every busi­ness owner must con­sider, but I’ve seen too many cre­ative houses that get into these lines as a way to sell cre­ative ser­vices — and lit­tle more. To them, it’s just cre­ative ser­vices, rebranded. The thing that gets me most is how often some of these types of shops tend to rebrand them­selves, and what that means to them… the joke I never said to one of their faces when meet­ing them on the street was, “Hey, I saw your new brand — very nice! Been slow around the shop lately?” I don’t know where they found the time to rebrand them­selves every six months and still look after clients. The sad thing is that you just know the sales rep’s are out there telling prospects that they’ve just rebranded and they’re all-new, all-energetic, all-knowing, all-powerful… well, maybe not those last two. I hope. And once they get some­one on the hook for a bit of cre­ative, they’re going to stretch it into a rebrand­ing exer­cise for the new client, as though every new client doesn’t already have a brand to be con­sid­ered, no mat­ter how long they’ve been in exis­tence. All I want to know is why? Do they believe this stuff, or are they just fol­low­ing the herd?

The sub­ject came up again for me because I saw John Moore’s post at Brand Autopsy on Lucas Conley’s book, OBD: Obses­sive Brand­ing Dis­or­der: The Illu­sion of Busi­ness and the Busi­ness of Illu­sion (Ama­zon USA), a more exten­sive devel­op­ment of his Fast Com­pany arti­cle from Octo­ber 2005. I haven’t read the book, but the afore­linked will give a rea­son­able overview — along with, of course, the OBD web­site. In the arti­cle, which com­pares brand­ing mania with the self-help indus­try, Con­ley writes,

You’d have to be crazy–excuse me, hav­ing a behav­ioral health issue–not to real­ize that brand­ing has got­ten out of con­trol. Part of the prob­lem is that everyone’s doing it. Bill Sch­ley, author of Why Johnny Can’t Brand (Port­fo­lio, Novem­ber 2005), says brand­ing “is not what you say but what you do.” But what a com­pany does is already, well, what it does! To brand, in a cor­po­rate sense, is no more a verb than “to gor­geous.” A brand is a result, not a tac­tic. One can­not go about brand­ing an orga­ni­za­tion or a prod­uct or a ser­vice; the orga­ni­za­tion, prod­uct, or ser­vice is what cre­ates the brand. In a bril­liant twist, the experts have bot­tled an end and sold it as a means.

“Remove the hype, and brand­ing is just com­mon­sense strat­egy, rebranded.” I like what Con­ley is get­ting at here: the notion that because every­thing you do is part and par­cel to the cre­ation of your brand, then it’s a bit disin­gen­u­ous to sit around in a board­room and decide what your brand should look like so that you can then tell peo­ple that this is what it does look like, when in fact, it doesn’t. This is called Lying to Your Cus­tomers. Per­haps you’re lying to your­self as well.

And this is what brings me back to my old cyn­i­cal joke. Brand­ing is the prod­uct that gets sold by cre­ative houses because it has the most bill­able cre­ative work, along with some add-on neb­u­lous bill­ables. And the first thing they’re going to do is tell you to aban­don your old brand and adopt a new one.  Excuse me?

• Anec­dote número uno: a few years back, I had a sales guy sit in my board­room and describe the rebrand­ing that his com­pany, [insert mean­ing­less TLA here], had just gone through after hir­ing [insert name of com­pany that had recently changed its name from “_____ Soft­ware” to “_____ Strat­egy.”] The upshot of said strate­gic con­sul­tancy and rebrand­ing was that the com­pany should change its name to [insert dif­fer­ent TLA here]. Let me say for the record, I couldn’t tell the dif­fer­ence, and the value of the not-mentioned “strat­egy” com­pany dropped like a stone in my estimation.
• Anec­dote deux: in the early months fol­low­ing a cor­po­rate merger, I was being pressed to com­plete a rebrand­ing exer­cise despite my esti­ma­tion that it would take a year to develop the new (merged) cor­po­rate iden­tity ade­quately enough to brand prop­erly. We com­pressed it down to six months and devel­oped the begin­nings of a great brand strat­egy, which was ulti­mately never fol­lowed through because the ini­tial deliv­er­ables were mis­taken for the whole pack­age, and those who took it on after­ward sim­ply didn’t “get it” no mat­ter what I said. At least I won the dis­cus­sion about whether or not to change the com­pany name… I said “don’t do it,” since you’ll lose all the brand equity that’s been built up so far, and it’s more sig­nif­i­cant than you real­ize. And all of this was with a com­pany that should have known better.

These are cer­tain symp­toms of some kind of brand­ing dis­or­der, I would say. When did brand­ing become syn­ony­mous with adver­tis­ing? “Alright, the campaign’s over, time for a new brand.” A brand is some­what akin to cor­po­rate char­ac­ter and per­son­al­ity, but somebody’s been spread­ing the idea that schiz­o­phre­nia is a good mar­ket­ing strat­egy. Some­times, I swear, peo­ple will buy any­thing. In this microwave soci­ety of quarter-to-quarter busi­ness think­ing, it’s cer­tainly appeal­ing to take a lengthy process and turn it into an instant pack­age. Call it what you will, it just ain’t nec­es­sar­ily so. In this sense, Con­ley is cor­rect,¹ and the under­ly­ing assump­tion is false: exist­ing com­pa­nies aren’t always in need of a new brand, and if they think a fresh logo and a splash of paint is going to solve some other under­ly­ing dis­or­der, they are sadly mistaken.

I don’t know… maybe I’m wrong, all just a mis­in­formed off­shoot of the ranch­ers in the fam­ily who told me that “brand­ing” means some­thing else entirely. Per­haps I should intro­duce some of the ranch­ers to the rebrand­ing addicts and see what hap­pens next in the herd. Mmmmooooooooo!

Foot­notes:

1. There’s another sense in which he’s incor­rect: you can (re)brand your­self, just as indi­vid­u­als might undergo some form of behav­iour mod­i­fi­ca­tion ther­apy. The mechan­ics of a proper (re)branding process will have to be a sep­a­rate and future post. [back]