![]() No matter how well your employees adhere to your new brand style guide, if they couldn’t care less about the job they’re doing, that’s your brand.īrand is your facilities. Having a good team starts with good hiring and continues with strong and consistent training and development. Brand is your people and the way they represent you. Do you rethink traditional business tools or default to convention? The choice you make says a lot about how innovative your brand is.īrand is your people. Brand extends even to your office forms, the contracts you send out, your HR manuals. If your website’s functionality frustrates people, it says that you don’t care about them. In the digital age, user interface is your brand. It says that the motherboard in the Mac isn’t hanging by a thread either. Can you imagine seeing a crooked banner with duct tape in an Apple store? Never. It says you don’t pay attention to the details. You might have a pretty sale banner that adheres to all the right visual standards, but if it’s sagging and hung up with duct tape, that’s your brand. The former says you are just like everyone else and you’re fine with that the latter says you are original. Brand is the quality of the sign on the door that says, “Back in 10 minutes.” It’s whether you use a generic voicemail system with canned muzak-on-hold, or whether you create your own custom program. How many times have you encountered a product or service that didn’t live up to what the copy writers told you about it? That disconnect is your brand.īrand is the whole array of your communication tools. Message is a central part of your brand, but message alone cannot make a great brand. If it’s trying to be all things to all people, that’s your brand. If your annual report puts people to sleep, that’s your brand. If you let social service jargon, acronyms, and convoluted abstractions contaminate everything you say, that’s your brand. If the copy is impenetrable - a disease of epidemic proportion in the humanitarian sector - that’s your brand. ![]() If you build a new website and fill it with outdated copy, you don’t have a new brand. If the clerk at your checkout counter is admiring her nails and talking on her cell phone, she’s your brand, whether she’s wearing one of the nice new logo caps you bought or not.īrand is the way you speak. It says that you don’t think it’s really important whether they hear what you have to say or not. If they come to your annual dinner and can’t hear the speaker because of a lousy sound system, that’s your brand. It says you don’t really care all that much about your donors. If donors call your organization all excited and get caught up in a voicemail tree, can’t figure out who they should talk to, and leave a message for someone unsure if it’s the right person, that’s your brand. If you’re a humanitarian organization, the things you ask your constituents to do are your brand.īrand is your customer service. Are your calls to action brave and inspiring or tacky? Are they consistent with some strategy that makes sense? Getting more Facebook “likes” isn’t a strategy, in and of itself. If Martin Luther King had offered people free toasters if they marched on Washington, that would have been his brand. If you don’t know where you’re going or how you’re going to get there, that’s your brand, no matter what fancy new name you come up with.īrand is your calls to action. It has a nicer logo now - but the brand no longer stands for anything. Back in 1969 NASA didn’t have the best logo. The work the organization is doing to get governor after governor on board is its brand. Share Our Strength’s audacious goal to end child hunger in America in five years is its brand. If you’re a humanitarian organization, brand is your aspirations and the progress you are making toward them. Ikea’s kitchen chairs’ tendency to fall apart after two years is part of the company’s brand. If you’re a consumer brand, brand is your products and the story that those products tell together. Brand is everything, and everything is brand.īrand is your strategy. ![]() Much of our work consists of disabusing people of this notion.īrand is much more than a name or a logo. Lots of people think that brand begins and ends there - that once we shine up the name they can stick it below their email signature, pop it on their website, and, voila, they have a new brand. Lots of organizations come to our company, Advertising for Humanity, asking for “a new brand.” They typically mean a new name, or icon, or a new look and feel for their existing name. ![]()
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