Branding is just like life: Give more than you get

There are certain rules in life that make the difference between living like you’re in Lord of the Flies or in the suburbs of Minneapolis. One of these rules is give more than you get — think of it as your meta brand promise. The concept is that if you’re only willing to go halfway in a relationship, sometimes you’re going to fall short. If you are comfortable going more than halfway, it’s a sign that you do not apply balance sheet principles to areas of life where people come before numbers.

Why does your brand need to go more than halfway? Because of the behavior of some of the brands that have preceded you, brands are considered guilty until proven innocent. If you want to have more respect than a pool hall hustler, then you need to send clear signals that you have a lot of respect for the people you want to have in your camp. So you may want to think about the kind of messages you are sending. Do you care about the people you are trying to reach? Are you here to help them? Can you put yourself in their shoes?

Think about what you do, not what you say. These are the same questions you would ask yourself if you were trying to make a new friend. But as we all know, it’s not really about the words. It’s about the body language. Because the people in your “target audience” are looking at the whole deal. They’re thinking less about what you say and more about what you do. They want to know if they should ignore you, come a little closer, or run the other way. If you want them to come closer, you need to give some thought to how you are going to encourage that.

There are a lot of ways to signal that you are friendly. Southwest does a great job giving their people permission to be themselves. When a Southwest flight attendant makes a funny boarding announcement, it is never scripted. This is a gift to their customers, a way to make good on their brand promise, because they could very easily have a rule that would discourage this kind of behavior. If your logo is a heart with wings, you are making a pretty big promise to your customers. Do they always live up to it? Well, they’re pretty damn consistent.

Going more than halfway is not just for when you’re feeling generous. When you fly on Southwest, it’s easy to find the right flight, it’s easy to see what it costs, and they don’t try to screw you when you change your plans. It doesn’t mean they are a bargain and it doesn’t mean they don’t charge you stupid fees (they just raised the Earlybird fee from $10 to $12.50) but they make a big point of never charging you for checked luggage, which is a pretty big differentiator in the airline business. Is it hard to be a customer-friendly business? Not if you’re good at putting yourself in your customers’ shoes.

Branding Is Just Like Life is a series for people who want to build brands that are human.

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