What’s wrong with the approach to brand building today?

Working in brand and marketing, we’ve heard it all over the years: The colouring-in department. Trend chasing. A wasteful, expensive distraction. And as much as we hate to admit it, it’s true – far too often, brands fall into the trap of being just a vanity exercise, a rise of quixotic brands blissfully untethered to the realities of business today. With more organisations feeling the crunch of the economic crisis in the last few years, we’ve seen a massive retrench from clients pulling back on their brand efforts.

 

But the answer isn’t to kill brand investment – it’s to make sure it works smarter for you. Your brand isn’t just the face you show the world, it’s also one of your most powerful business tools. That means it should be put to the test, day in and day out, to drive you closer to your organisations goals. For your customers. For your stakeholders. In short, it has to be a brand built to work.

 

Getting down to business

 

These brands have a job to do. They must be compelling, credible and distinctive. They have a powerful story behind them. They reflect your culture. They engage your employees and your audiences.

 

A brand that’s built to work effectively conveys who you are and what you do in the real world – on your website, in your campaigns and films, throughout your offices and facilities, on your merchandise and packaging. This is where a brand lives or dies, because it’s here where your audiences actually engage with it.

 

There’s no point of a brand sitting pretty in a swish mock-up or a hundred-page guideline no one will ever read. If your brand just looks good on paper, but misses the mark when translated into different mediums or regions—it’s two-dimensional. If your brand is fully kitted out with logos and photos, but doesn’t cut through to customers—it’s superficial. Or if your brand shows off a fancy new name or glossy campaign, but requires too much effort to decode—it’s simply distracting.

 

 

The key tenets of a brand ‘built to work’

So what makes a brand ‘built to work’? To start, it champions your aspirations.

Nothing stands out more than an inspiring vision. There’s a good reason why people get so wrapped up in it – when a business has a particularly strong one, it’s magnetic. And it doesn’t have to be about how you’re saving the world, but it should reflect an exciting level of ambition that draws people in to rally around you. Businesses that lean into their aspiration and use it to inspire their audiences end up creating buy-in much easier. Think big, think bold, think belief-building.

 

It resonates with your audiences.

Effective brands elicit a strong innate response because they nail themselves to an idea that resonates on a human level – and this has never been more important than today. Many people are feeling overworked and overwhelmed, with a hundred other things on their to-do list. Focusing on how your brand genuinely connects to their lives through your campaigns and messaging can do wonders to melt away fatigue or cynicism.

 

It defines your offer clearly.

This means knowing what you bring to the market and what your audiences can expect from you. Equally, it’s about drawing a clear line in the sand about what you’re not. Having an unequivocal view on what you bring to the table makes it exponentially easier to sharpen your perspective, dial up your impact, and focuses your attention and resources.

 

It’s designed for flex across all your needs.

Monochannel brands are dead – a modern brand now needs to thrive across a vast spectrum of channels, environments, and markets. The growing need to provide a seamless experience across physical, digital, and even multisensory realms, requires a well-considered, cohesive brand system as a foundation. This must be designed to easily accommodate adaptation, exploration and upgrades while still maintaining core consistency.

 

And finally, it shapes and reflects your culture.

Regardless of what sort of business you are, your success will be predicated on how much your employees believe in you, are prepared to go the extra mile for you, and want to champion you. Delivering experiences that support your brand and curating a culture that empowers your people to become your biggest advocates.

 

Strategic effort, enormous returns

 

When a brand ticks off all the above, it’s well and truly optimised as a powerful lever for your organisation. Great brands will help drive your strategy, reinforce your market advantage, and connect meaningfully across your audiences. It transforms itself from a tactic into a power tool, and worth its weight in gold.

 

The job is never ‘done’

 

Getting the strategic fundamentals in place is usually step one. But building the brand is only one part of the whole lifecycle. It’s not only about defining (or refining) the brand itself, but also embedding it into use, bringing it to life through experiences, and doing regular maintenance to keep it in top form. Taking a long-tail view means managing and maximising your brand’s power.

 

With that, it’s time we put the quixotic brand to rest – it’s plagued the industry for far too long. In its place, we’re celebrating a renaissance of the brand that’s built to work. So to all the beleaguered marketers out there, if you find yourself working far harder than your brand is, take a breath. It’s not you, it might just be your brand.

 

To find out more on transforming your brand into a power tool for your business, please get in touch.