Brand DNA isn't a static thing

I found an article by Inc. magazine on rebranding a company and when it makes sense to do so that I tweeted and amplify’d. I liked the article enough to post the amplify.com note to my blog, too. If you’re a regular reader, you know I almost never “reblog” anything. Bottom line, I thought it had merit. It garnered more retweets on Twitter than anything I’ve posted in recent days, too, so it seems others saw the merit, too. And that made me wonder WHY it struck a chord with so many, right now.

Here’s what I think: It’s a new year. It’s an evolving economy seeking a new normal. As business owners, we are all striving to make the best start, seeking to leave behind the angst and difficulty of the recession and looking for authoritative answers to our questions on just how to make it happen. In some of the discussions that happened about the article (Twitter, Amplify and here) several people commented that new packaging won’t fix a bad company. Very true… so the question becomes, “How do I know if we’re a company with a branding problem, or with a deeper problem?” Before you scoff and tell me that is an easy one and list off all the things obviously unhealthy companies get wrong, let me tell you why this question is harder to answer than it seems for most businesses, and what I mean by “branding problem.”

Brand does NOT equal the logo, name, colors, style of letterhead, signage (physical expressions of a company’s visual identity). Brand DOES equal the perceived attributes, ideas, relationship, expectations and direction of a company, as expressed by external viewers. Not just customers, either. Apple’s brand is shaped by both customers’ and non-customers’ opinions and expectations. This is why people can say they “love” or “hate” a brand. They are in relationship with all the things they associate with that company. Therefore, rebranding doesn’t mean changing your logo (although that may indeed be part of the tactical steps taken). It means examining dispassionately the perceptions of your company in the marketplace. It means looking at market potential with existing perceptions in place (current brand) versus market potential with changed perceptions in place (successfully rebranding) and any number of potential new sets of perceptions or brands. It means looking at your business as an organism that must make conscious choices and that can foresee, with some degree of accuracy, the outcomes of those choices. It means doing the hard work to understand the marketplace, consumer behavior and drivers, trends, costs and long term financial impacts.

So, that’s what I mean by branding.

If you’re a small business (one or a few employees), the company’s identity is often so closely associated with your own that changing the brand can feel like a betrayal of self. Having or acquiring the market knowledge to accurately reflect and then predict your company’s trajectory based on brand A, B or C can be difficult at best. Being able to set aside the hopes and dreams you had when you launched to look carefully at the future, especially if you’re doing fine right now, is often the hardest part of all. The upside is that the vision is usually strongly shared and employees (if there are any) are committed to it and tend to start from a cohesive point. Changing a brand is impossible if the company only concentrates on external packaging, advertising, marketing, PR etc. Changing how the business operates, what it produces, how it produces or delivers, how it interacts with the marketplace… those things are often easier in a smaller company once the commitment to changing is set.

If you own or work for a larger business, the difficulty often arises from that lack of shared internal vision and perception in the first place. Many larger businesses have the resources to model their marketplace and make some educated assessments regarding what might happen if… what’s ofeten missing is the internal commitment to real change, since the starting place for the many employees is so varied. If, for instance, a large consumer goods company wants to change how they interact with the marketplace so they are perceived as more community-minded, more involved in social issues, more caring… but their employees feel neglected, unimportant, like expendable resources… I submit that the rebranding will ultimately fail. Advertising can say whatever it wants, but products and service delivered by employees who feel like the company doesn’t care are not going to deliver on the advertised promise of caring.

How do you know if your business would benefit from a rebranding effort? You don’t – without doing the hard work of figuring it out. The best thing about the process may be how it forces us to look at our businesses from a clinical perspective… examine the DNA and look for mutations that may signal a problem or may herald our next big thing.

Ok, so here we are. It’s the first Monday of 2011. Did you greet it with your “typical Monday” attitude? Maybe even a tad worse because you may be coming back to work after a few days off for the holidays? Sometimes the excitement of the New Year is hard to hold onto after the champagne headache wears off. Here are a few thoughts on this first Monday of the new year:

Monday is not the enemy. Mornings are not the enemy. Here’s why…
“Emptiness is a symptom that you are not living creatively. You either have no goal that is important enough to you, or you are not using your talents and efforts in a striving toward an important goal.” -Maxwell Maltz

Don’t make your New Year’s resolutions about the same things you know you want, in a generic sort of way, but don’t want enough to make the changes necessary to get them. You know… like, “This year I will lose 20 pounds!” Make them about living creatively. What needs to change in your life, externally and internally, so that Mondays are not about that empty, I-hate-Monday-mornings feeling? What will it take for Mondays to be the bringers of opportunity, promise, ideas and energy? It’s possible, even for those who are not “morning people,” to love Monday mornings. Well, maybe not love… but at least to greet Monday with a welcoming smile instead of a growl.

For me, Monday mornings are best when I take thirty minutes sometime Sunday evening and get ready for Monday. I make some notes, one of my ubiquitous lists, and go through emails, calendar appointments, etc. so I can start off Monday on pace, on schedule, prepared. It’s sometimes the only time the whole week I feel ready, prepared, in control of my day. I happen to love Monday mornings…. true story, that.

Another way to think of “living creatively” is to just live an examined life. Stop rolling through your days one after another without introspection and that crucial inner dialogue that keeps us true to our beliefs, our values, our very selves.

• Take some time to tune into the thoughts and needs of others, whether they’re family or strangers.
• Connect to your larger world.
• Connect to your inner world.
• Think about why you care about what you care about.

The busyness and business of our daily lives (I have 4 kids, remember? Busyness is something I understand!) makes real introspection something that rarely happens without allowing it some time and space. So provide some… a few minutes a week devoted to just checking in with your inner self. I almost always drive with the radio off when I’m alone in the car… I use the time for thinking. Not daydreaming, but giving that inner voice an opportunity to speak. Find your moments. Now, if I could only find the necessary moments for physical exercise… that would be my “I hate Mondays!” equivalent.

This year, let’s resolve to welcome Mondays for the opportunities they are, and to stop blaming a day or a time for our dissatisfaction with who we are or what we’re doing. And I’ll see about that whole exercise thing.

And, uh, Happy New Year!

Because together is better.

I miss my blog (and blog readers!). I miss writing. And that is my resolution for 2011…. to write more. More often. More places. Covering more topics. In more styles. Just to write… MORE. And, further, I hereby promise that many of the yet-to-be-written sentences will be longer than three words and will contain punctuation other than ellipsis.

This past year has been one of the roughest I’ve ever been through. Losing my Dad to an awful fishing/boating accident 16 years ago tops the list, but 2010 comes in next on the list of years I could have done without. Part of the reason I’ve written less was because, as previously mentioned, I tend to be a private person and hesitated to overshare my personal struggles on this “professional” blog and website. I will spare you all the gory details (or I will protect myself by choosing not to share, however you want to look at it… ) and give you the short and dirty run down, below (note… if you’re just here for the marketing lesson in all this somewhere, you can skip this one. No hard feelings.):

In late 2008, pregnant with our fourth child, we bought a bigger (older, but bigger) home. We closed on Halloween… and the next month the housing market tanked. We hadn’t sold our previous home, either. ’08 was a banner year for my business, and the bank determined we could support both payments (!!) until we sold our first home. Since we only moved about 7 blocks and I was pregnant, we didn’t really “move” as much as we “transported” bits and pieces every day or so. It took awhile for the old house to be ready to sell… and by then we couldn’t sell it for even close to what we owed.

Fast forward to the last quarter of 2009. That year sucked as far as business went, and we’d been making 2 house payments for nearly a year. And then… we just couldn’t. There was no way to borrow, or take more from credit cards, or anything else, to take care of the bills for our now-family-of-six. It was either not pay the mortgage on the home we lived in or not pay the mortgage on the home we DIDN’T live in. Guess which one won?

So… 2010 brought a personal bankruptcy, a foreclosure on the old house, a repossession of a car (they don’t give you any grace period AT ALL after you go through a bankruptcy, just FYI, and getting it back is difficult and expensive), tax and IRS issues, and continued depressed business billings. Depressed, and depressing.

The bankruptcy, while a crushing blow to the pride and a burden of paperwork like you’ve never seen, was a good decision. It gave us a platform from which to plan, budget and begin to rebuild. I’m grateful that option exists for people who have done all they can, and then just can’t any longer. My car, which we recovered, is now paid off and altogether mine, and that’s comforting. The IRS thing is going to be a thing for a while, but we’ll get through it.

And the biggest thing that 2010 taught me? That the WE is important. The “WE” of our family, of my husband and I, of my extended family, and of my friends and colleagues who supported us emotionally through all the struggles. And the WE of you and me… everyone I’ve connected to digitally one way or another. Everyone who took the time to stop by, to read, to comment, to share, to tweet a reply… who kept me focused on moving forward, growing my clients’ businesses and thereby growing my own. Because while most of 2010 was dark and difficult, the last few months have taken a decided turn for the better. It’s time to move from the worry and stress of going broke to the excitement of going for broke. I intend to carry that outlook into 2011 as I shove 2010 forcefully out the back door of my life. Buh-Bye.

While this blog will remain mainly marketing and PR focused, there might be a few bits and pieces of me that creep in here, too. Because we’re a family, right? See you all next year… it’s time to rock some upward momentum.

Photo Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/seeveeaar/4910032429/

Thanks for checking out the new site. I have work to do still on the Portfolio and Partners pages, but I’m really excited about the new look and feel, and the ability to interact with everyone. Please take a look around… if you have any thoughts you want to share, please leave me a comment