Branding is Just Like Life: Only don’t make it up as you go along
There are a lot of obnoxious stories out there about personal branding. This is not intended to be one of them. My own belief is that life is commercial enough without dragging branding into your personal life. But, allow me to borrow that idea for a moment to make a really useful distinction.
Your personal brand is already baked. If you think of your public personality as your brand, it’s easy to see that the fundamentals of your personal brand were baked in a long time ago. The way you carry yourself, the way you talk, your laugh, your point of view about the world, all of these are a done deal. Most of it was there before you even had the ability to think about it. We’re pretty much talking Popeye’s “I am who I am.”
Corporate branding is a completely different story–it is invented. When you are creating a corporate brand, in the beginning there really is nothing. You have a blank slate. But it even goes deeper than that because if you’re starting something new, you don’t have any corporate DNA. In the corporate realm, there are no relatives to blame for your bad gums or to praise for your high IQ. When you create a company brand or a product brand, you are probably starting from scratch. Which can be exciting or terrifying, depending on your ability to deal with the unknown. Before you create your brand, there is only the void. Or as designers like to say, white space.
Where do you start building a corporate brand? If our premise is that you already know everything you need to know about branding, where do you begin? Well you need some meaning and you need some structure, unless you want to go random or just copy something that’s already out there. Don’t laugh because that is what most companies do. It’s really hard to be original when it’s more important for you fit in. What most companies do is create a brand that makes them one of the trees in the forest. Then they spend the rest of their marketing budget trying to stand out.
The philosophy gives birth to the brand. If you subscribe to the theory that life is a search for meaning, then you need to apply this theory to the brand you are creating. This kind of inquiry is generally known as philosophy. It’s the one place we get to ask the really big questions like, Who are we? Why are we here? How are we different? These questions are deceptively simple. Most people who are building companies or products are in too much of a hurry to ask these questions. But there is a price to pay. Why would you want to build a house without a strong foundation?
You just have to ask the right questions. When you wrestle with these questions at the beginning, and you come up with thoughtful, concise answers, it will lead to clear thinking about your brand. You will have created the well that you will return to again and again when you encounter new situations or you find yourself in unfamiliar territory. The foundation is the part of the building that doesn’t change—in the same way as philosophy deals with things that are always true. If you want to build a strong brand, it’s a good idea to begin by asking the right questions.
Branding is Just Like Life is a series by A Hundred Monkeys CEO Danny Altman. Keep your eye out for weekly installments. In the meanwhile, see what Haitian bus drivers can teach us about branding.
