Your Brand as Your Business System

The view of what your brand encompasses continues to narrow. With most brand managers lasting only a couple of years in the role, the focus has increasingly become quarterly results, not long term profits.

This is an extremely sad state of affairs, and is bound to do your brand more harm than good.

The reality is that the narrowing of your brand has been driven internally. Brands analyze themselves in great detail, and they should. But consumers rarely put as much conscious thought into it. For the average person, brands are a fluid, everyday aspect of life. I challenge you to find someone who buys your product because of your latest quarterly results.

People purchase your brand because it fits a need (functional, emotional, or both) within the context of their life, and the context of their life is much longer than the 18-24 month tenure of the brand manager.

Expand Your Horizon

To overcome this, you have to start viewing your brand as your entire business system. Allow me to use a simple example to illustrate what this means. If I buy a cell phone from a local carrier, my view of their brand is made up of all the different interactions I have with that company. This still includes the commercials I see on TV, but also factors in the customer service I get on their 1-800 number, the accuracy of my monthly bill and if the phone I want was in stock at their store. The cumulative experiences with all these parts of your business system make up the consumer’s opinion of your brand.

To deliver on all of these different touch points, and in turn build a strong brand, your entire company, or business system, has to be aligned.

Change Your Decision Making Lens

If everyone your company can line-up behind your brand, and recognize that every part of the business system is a part of the brand, you can experience some amazing results. Suddenly, everyone in the organization has a clear lens with which to evaluate any decision. Does buying this new machine help deliver our brand? Does re-organizing this team help deliver our brand? What about the message in this commercial? Or the turnaround time for deliveries?

Who Should Own the Brand?

Many companies have a role whose responsibility is essentially to act as the owner of the brand. Some companies go so far as to make this a role in their executive team. But even that is a step too short.

Overall responsibility for the brand must rest with the only person that can oversee the entire business system – the CEO. No other person in the organization has the cross-enterprise point-of-view required to understand the brand or the power to bring about the changes needed to deliver on your brand.

Adopting the philosophy of your brand as your business system also means that every person in your organization has some level of responsibility for your brand as well. And this can be a powerful motivator employees at all levels of your organization.

What should your brand do next?

No one expects that you stop running regular promotions. Ongoing objectives are important and shouldn’t be washed out by a higher order need of your brand. But at the same time, you need to start thinking, at a very high level, about what your brand should stand for.  Different companies will call it different things – your brand vision, brand promise, brand essence. But what you call it doesn’t matter.

What matters is that you have a clear sense of what your brand stands for and wants to deliver to consumers. Then you need to ensure that all the different parts of your business system – the people, technology, processes, etc – are aligned to that vision.

After that, you’ll be amazed how easily your weekly promotions come.

Ben Wise blogs at Ben Wise on Branding and works regularly with leading brands at LEVEL5 Strategic Brand Advisors.