You're fired

''The Apprentice'' and the art and science of building a world class brand

Lord Sugar is back.

And with him comes the usual group of self-preening, tub thumping, back stabbing, backside covering, sycophantic, ego centric Apprentice wannabees.

But while watching the first episodes of this real life soap it struck me that the principles that underlie the development of the cast list for this real life soap can also be used to help build stronger brands.

In essence a brand is a promise delivered. In other words no matter the category in which your brand is competing, the brand must deliver the promise it makes to its target customers day in, day out, and across all its touchpoints.  A tough ask in any business.

But how exactly do you define the promise of your brand and what it’s going to stand for in the first place so that it’s distinctive from the competition, relevant to your business and its ability to deliver, and which meets the emotional and rational needs of your customers?

Too often this chase to find, pin down and articulate the very essence of a brand becomes a game of Scrabble as brand specialists leaf through dictionaries and thesauruses to find word nuances to define brand benefits, values and personality. One such expert has described this process as one which produces ‘a pile of disconnected words that looks like nothing less than an explosion in a bombed thesaurus factory.’ It is no wonder that many brands end up looking and acting like crazy mixed up kids.

This is where we can learn from programmes like ‘The Apprentice’. Indeed any work of ensemble characters like ‘The Only Way is Essex’, ‘Downton Abbey’ or even X Factor abides by these principles.

Authors and scriptwriters work on the premise that there are small number of identifiable characters that appear regularly in myths, fairytales, literature and film that resonate powerfully with us across all ages and all cultures. And so we will regularly find characters like heroes and super heroes, magicians, jokers, outlaws and mavericks in our fairy tales, books and even TV soaps.

If this approach works for story tellers why can it not work for brand story tellers to help define what their brand is and what it can become? At the end of the day a brand is a story that people want to be part of, with a character with values with whom its audience wants to be associated.

Now although the experts aren’t fully agreed on whether there are 12, 16, 20 or even more of these basic character types, properly known as Archetypes, the following list of 12 seems to cover the most basic character types

	CAREGIVER	REGULAR GUY	HERO	INNOCENT
Helps people to...	Care for others	Connect with others	Triumph	Always do the right thing
	CREATOR	LOVER	OUTLAW	EXPLORER
Helps people to...	Create something new	Find and give love	Break the rules	Maintain independence
	RULER	JESTER	MAGICIAN	SAGE
Helps people to...	Become the best	Have a good time	Make dreams come true	Find the truth

It is early days and the characters not yet fully formed and they may all be trying to stake out aggressive Hero and Ruler personalities but look more closely and we see different shades of personality starting to show.Already Michael Copp, Essex’s loveable rogue, was clearly positioned as  the series Ordinary Guy; Jenna Whittingham who claims to be ‘protective of others’ is the Caregiver;  while Bilyana Apostolova, who was booted out of the programme in the first week, was a dead ringer as an Explorer. It will be interesting to see in the coming weeks how the charcters develop and the Archetypes emerge.

But let’s look at this in brand terms.  Harley Davidson is clearly an Outlaw brand, Landrover is obviously positioned as an Explorer,  Disney could only be a Magician brand and Domestos, a brand which kills all known germs dead, a Hero to mums everywhere.

By assessing as part of the brand development process who the brand is or could be, we can get a clear direction for the development of the brand personality, values, benefits and essence. It gives us a definable persona and character for the brand determining how it should look, act and feel to the consumer in a far more consistent way than using a dictionary and thesaurus might. And allows us to create stories for our brands populated with real, diverse and well drawn characters, just like the producers of ‘The Apprentice’.

Persil have over recent years used this thinking brilliantly to drive a differentiated positioning in the laundry market. Classically washing powders, and look at Ariel adverts to see this, portray themselves as Caregiver brands usually with the mum using the brand to take care of her family’s whites and colours. Persil shifted the category with its ‘dirt is good ‘campaign adopting an Explorer brand positioning and encouraging families to play in the mud. A very different approach.

Strong well –defined and firmly-grounded brands develop and deliver their promise in much the same way as the characters on ‘The Apprentice’ do. They rely less on an ability to play Scrabble well and more on a deeper understanding of characterisation. And while this approach doesn’t always guarantee a happy ending, it should lead to a cracking good story.

How well can you tell the story of your brand?