Archive for June, 2010

Only a few days after my post on branding re-framed as leadership (which had a short stab at personal branding) my lodestar on this topic Doc Searls linked to a few more posts that he (and now I) found apropos.

I wanted to point people to this one in particular because (a) I love it, and (b) I agree. Big kudos to you, Maureen Johnson. (And you should have whispered it, btw.) We are not brands. We are, indeed, weird. And layered. And multitudinous.

I’m actually working through a brand platform for a client that pivots around an eclectic, multi-layered experience. I turn to New Belgium Brewery as a model for this – a great brand that captures their layered experience. It can be done.

But people aren’t experiences. We experience. People aren’t work. We work.

And people aren’t results. People aren’t products. People aren’t services. We make, and yes, brand those things.

Is branding really worth saving?

Branding (not product branding, but that enterprise-level notion of name and reputation we’re still wrestling with) is dying because we’ve run it into the ground. If you asked anyone or anything to wear as many hats, mean as many things, or be a placeholder for so many musings as contradictory (think tactics promoted as strategy), impertinent (think one-size-fits-all-contexts theories), and importance-inflated (the genocide in Rwanda is an element of a brand? Really?) as we ask of branding, it’d die too. From sheer exhaustion.

It’s not the years (to paraphrase Indiana Jones). It’s the mileage.

Branding started as a notion of something you could control. If you had the resources to overcome the complexity of making fires and casting iron, you could mark something with a fair degree of inspiration, but without much thought of listening to anyone else’s opinion on the matter. Here it is. Our brand.

Branding today is obviously different. So much so that it’s sort of turned inside of itself. It’s lost its way. What branding has become in the last five years or so is actually a re-brand of good leadership practices. Let me make that case.

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