Branding Without “Branding”

Posted by: Chris Lester, Principal Mar 09, 2011 0 Comments

Successfully orchestrating and navigating a branding engagement is something most organizations, no matter how large or small, find themselves up against at some point. Organizations that don’t have official branding programs often find the process challenging because of misconceptions that lead to unrealistic expectations. A couple common misconceptions are:

Project Completion

The misconception that the project will be completed and neatly wrapped up will likely lead to disappointment. Branding requires an ongoing commitment—the work begins when the project ends.

Expectations

Too often, there is a misconception about what branding will accomplish. The perception that it will create sudden magical change is unrealistic. The process requires patience and an understanding for how it can create incremental and cumulative change. Over time, those results can be staggering.

Many organizations hoping to brand themselves are very inconsistent when it comes to their existing marketing and communications (hence the need to consider their brand). They often develop marketing and communications in silos without centralized guidance or oversight, which only further dilutes the brand. If this scenario is familiar, then there’s little risk in testing a new approach to branding.

Even with the best intentions, getting every stakeholder to invest energy in understanding the approach and objectives so that misconceptions don’t derail the process can be difficult. For those who find themselves passing on the opportunity to rebrand because of the challenges they face, there may be an alternative, which will require rethinking some of the rules.

Step 1 – Don’t Call It Branding

When a project is considered “Branding,” it can take on a life of its own. If it’s branding, it will likely require the attention and approval of a large group of stakeholders (often a committee and board) and may run the risk of falling victim to over-analysis, subjectivity, and political agendas. Very few projects can survive that pressure.

So what do you do? First, try keeping the group limited. Involve only a handful of people who can invest themselves in clearly understanding the objective and process for leveraging the most compelling aspects of your organization. Having an understanding for how those qualities can be turned into concepts that drive communications will be critical. From there, focus on opportunities to execute a handful of communications that will serve as brand models. Chances are, you will get positive feedback from key stakeholders who are able to see the progress being made. It will be easier to get buy-in as you gradually gain momentum.

Step 2 – Choose Your Battles

All communications are not created equal. You will want to identify the highest visibility communications to tackle first. Don’t bite off more than you can chew. Focus your efforts on a few pieces that you can knock out of the park and use them to illustrate the effectiveness of the new brand approach and how it relates to compliance and scalability. Once these efforts gain visibility, it will be much easier to start applying them to other communications.

Your website will certainly be one of your most visible marketing tools, if not the most visible, but you may want to get traction and build consistency with other communications first. During the period of time that you’re focused on bringing brand consistency to other projects, you could invest energy in developing conceptual look/feel samples of your homepage to demonstrate how it could be made consistent with the developing brand. This will go a long way to making a case for addressing the site and will demonstrate how it can better support the organizations efforts.

Step 3 – Don’t be Afraid to Phase It In

An official “launch” is a convention rarely challenged. It’s true that if you plan to radically reshape a brand, it’s preferable to make a clean break. Out with the old, in with the new.

The problem is that an official launch requires significant resources and organizational buy-in, luxuries you will likely not have. By focusing efforts on a small number of visible communications and a phased strategy for scaling it forward, you will likely spread your branding efforts across the whole organization more quickly than if you had attempted going the traditional route.

There are many paths to successful branding, each requiring different levels of commitment and approval processes. It’s certainly worth giving one of them a shot, but if you find that the barriers to success are too high, it might be time to explore an alternative and start a gradual rebranding without too much fanfare. You might be surprised at the results.

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Chris Lester

Principal

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