Precision and momentum – the benefits of better brand building

Robert Jones, Professor of Brand Leadership at UEA, and author of such books as ‘The Big Idea’ and ‘Branding: a Very Short Introduction’, gives his insights on the fundamentals and rewards of building a better brand.

A strong brand is incredibly valuable. How can companies make sure they get theirs just right?

Well, the first thing I’d say is that a brand is not really yours! It’s actually what you stand for in the hearts and minds of people external to your organisation. Although this means your brand is not directly controllable, there’s much you can do to nurture it. For me, defining, designing and delivering – the three Ds – are the building blocks or steps to nurturing what your brand is. The defining bit is by far the most fundamental and most difficult. Organisations are always in flux, so a definition artificially pins down something that’s constantly changing. Conventionally, I would say that defining is being clear about purpose (why you exist), proposition (what customers and other stakeholders get from you) and personality (what you are like). But, interestingly, all three of these things are contested at the moment.

Why? Could you explain?

It’s partly because we’ve had a kind of purpose overload. Some businesses define their purpose as something that is more precise than is actually feasible in the real world and so it becomes an artificial corporate construct, little more than a one dimensional slogan. For me, ‘spirit’ is a more nuanced concept. Great organisations have a really strong spirit, instantly recognisable but not easily definable. Spirit allows for ambiguity and contradiction, the things that make us interesting as human beings and engage our interest in organisations. Moving on, I think the proposition bit is changing because neuroscience tells us that what matters to customers and consumers is not so much needs as goals. So, it’s not ‘What will I get from a company?’, it’s ‘What will I do through that company?’. And personality as a concept comes from the age where brands were built through advertising and adverts need personality. Today, brands are built through customer experience, so what’s important now is to define some experience principles that are broader and deeper.

What are the influences of the building blocks on each other? What are the benefits of having them in place?

If you don’t have them, how do you know what to design? Assuming every organisation had good designers, they would all end up the same. You need your definition to establish what is different, special or interesting about your organisation. The definition also drives the delivery both externally (products and communication) and internally (culture and capability). The benefits of having them all in place are that your people know what to do. They will all pull in the same direction and you can start to build a brand out in the world more effectively. I saw something really interesting on Twitter the other day talking about precision and momentum. In a way, its definition gives an organisation precision so that the momentum, the huge boulder, is rolling in the right direction. This Twitter piece said that most big organisations have massive momentum, yet very little precision. So, I think what you’re trying to do with definition is bring precision to the organisation.

It sounds challenging. Supposing you don’t worry about all of the above and just get on with running your business?

You can do that but, over time, you mean less and less to the world and you become more and more irrelevant. Look at what has happened to department stories in recent years and then look at Primark – they have just opened a new department store in Manchester. So how is it that Primark can make department stores work when nobody else can? I think it’s because they have real precision about what they do. Whether they have a well-defined brand purpose statement, I don’t know, but they sure have precision. And Ryanair, which some would paint as a terrible brand, actually has lots of precision about it.

Accepting that you need brand building blocks, should they be the same for internal and external audiences?

I would not separate those audiences too much and would try and embrace both groups. You need a customer proposition and an employee proposition, but they both follow from the same purpose or spirit. For some organisations, their brand is built out of their employee value proposition, to borrow the jargon, but that is the result of their culture. If you talk to people at Google, they don’t talk much about brand, actually, but they do talk a lot about culture.

How about B2B and B2C businesses? How do their brand building blocks differ?

I’m not sure they really differ, but there is a difference in the way the two sectors are able to nurture them. There’s obviously a huge spectrum of different organisations. From extreme B2C – where everything is about the fluff, the sizzle, the emotion and the brand – to businesses where decisions are made for purely rational reasons. The power of brand is that it’s to do with emotion as well as rationality. To be honest, brand teams are not generally that powerful even in B2C organisations, and in B2B they have very little power. They might just do the website and corporate events and not very much else. They have very little control over the product and the service that actually builds the brand. So that’s why the difference is in degrees of power that the brand team have over the organisation. And it’s much harder in B2B to do those 3Ds – the define, design and deliver things – properly.

That’s all good food for thought. To conclude, can you give us your five top tips for corporate brand success?

I think number one is to think of brand as a really important asset to long-term investment. Tim Ambler of the London Business School defined brand as ‘an upstream reservoir of future cashflow’, so you’ve got to keep topping up the reservoir, even at the cost of short-term revenue sometimes, or it will dry up. Number two is to remember and to be really respectful of the fact that the brand is not what you think it is, it’s what people out there think it is. Design is my third tip. Although your logo isn’t the most important thing in itself, design in a broader sense is. It’s about designing the whole experience as the best way of nurturing the brand. Number four is to think about brand as a way of creating change in the world: changing how people think, feel and act. Think hard about the change you want to effect. And my last tip is that building a brand nearly always demands constant change inside the organisation. To achieve that, you need to overcome people’s ‘loss aversion’, the fear of losing what they already have. And the best way to do that is to give them opportunities to learn; what’s going on in the world around them, what’s the latest going on in this organisation and how they might do something a little bit differently day-to-day. Get those five right and you are well on your way.

The Luminous view

We spend a lot of time at Luminous advising companies on brand matters and Robert points out something really interesting: that if you take things too literally, you can be in danger of fencing yourself in, with a rigid purpose statement that does not chime with your customers’ view of what your brand is all about. Understanding that external view is critical – without it, your brand building blocks simply won’t stack up.