Earlier this week I had the pleasure of visiting the ‘Birmingham Made Me Design EXPO’, a celebration of Birmingham’s great design heritage and of Birmingham as the home of some of this country’s great brands-Jaguar, Triumph, Land Rover, Aga, JCB and even Marmite. It’s well worth a visit. You would be amazed to learn just how much good stuff has come out of Birmingham.
In my job I spend a lot of my time trying to design and develop
brands. I don’t do the creative work on brands but instead it is my job to come
up with the underlying definition of the brand. I try to define what it is
going to stand for; the promise it is going to make and to try to keep, to its
customers; and how it should present itself to its market. Someday it is my
hope that the brands I am working on will feature in an exhibition of great
brands.
And when we are sitting around with the brand owner trying to come up
with the right sense of words to describe the brand, you can bet that no matter
the brand, company, category, product, or service, the most common list of attributes
everyone wants to be associated with goes something like this: honesty, accessibility,
innovation, invention, forward thinking, collaborative, friendly, and easy to
work with, trustworthy, leader, fun. Recognise the exercise? Now who wouldn't want to be all those things?
Anyone want to be the opposite?
But when every other brand has the same words on their list this is not
conducive to the development of a distinctive brand.
Let us look at it another way.
If I was to ask you to describe someone like Nelson Mandela I am pretty
sure I would get words like courageous, altruistic, heroic, peaceful, wise,
thoughtful, giving, caring, loving, fearless and so and so on.
Great words and accurate in their description of Nelson Mandela but the
same set of words could be accurately applied to many other people, including
me on a good day.
But if I was to ask what Mandela stood for, your answer might be
something like ‘freedom’. And that applies to very few people and most
certainly not me.
That is the difference between a true brand stance and an easy list of
attributes.
I like to think that great brands, like the ones on display in The
Mailbox, realty understand their stance in the world and their reason to exist
and pursue that mission with all their might consistently over time and across
every customer touchpoint.
These brands recognise that they are not just a collection of attributes
that could describe anyone but have a purpose, a stance, a value and pure
mission in the world. Just like Nelson Mandela.
Great brands are never remembered for their attributes but for what gets
done with these attributes. Don’t chase and measure yourself against a long
list of attributes, many of which are just the price of entry for everyone else
in your marketplace.
But instead always work hard to
stay on mission and always execute against your stance and not against
attributes. Measure the market's understanding of your reason to be — who you
are and why you do what you do.
It therefore follows that it is not so much what you make and what you
sell but why you do that matters and how you do it.
Just like all the brands on display at Birmingham’s DesignEXPO. Just
like Nelson Mandela.
