Prisoner 46664

I do brands.

In my job I spend a lot of my time trying to design and develop brands. I don’t do the creative work but try to help businesses develop the underlying definition of their 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. 

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.

Great brands really get their role 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.

And don’t chase and measure themselves against a long list of attributes, many of which are just the price of entry for everyone else in their marketplace.

But instead always work hard to stay on mission and always execute against their stance and not against their attributes. 

And measure they the market's understanding of their reason to be — who they are and why they do what they 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.

So in one word what do you want your brand stand for?