Dropping Some Branding Knowledge | Resound Creative Blog

If you’re breaking ground with some new start-up in Austin, Texas, or in Silicon Valley, you’re in a place that eats, breathes, and sleeps disruption. If you’re a regional supplier for farming equipment, your world’s probably a bit more seasonal.

But while we give a lot of attention to the outside culture, location, and market demands that shape a business, the factors working on the inside are just as vital.

Every organization has an identity. Not something invented or made up out of thin air, but a genuine self that distinguishes it from other organizations.

While optics, impressions, and outward expression go a long way, your identity holds everything together. And it’s how others recognize you. It makes you unique… and whether or not you know it yet, it makes you remarkable.

https://youtu.be/0EsH06kCMxo

We call the first step in the process finding your frequency.

Ideally, a process like this would start with your brand identity workshop, where an experienced brand consultant could work through exercises with the leadership of an organization in order to better understand its underlying purpose and values. Because no two organizations are exactly alike, it’s impossible to create a step-by-step guide in a book that works for everyone.

Still, I’ll give an overview of the five main ‘beats’ in the process of helping organizations figure out their authentic identity and how best to express it:

Beat one: Discover your ‘Why’

Beat two: Let your ‘Why’ determine your Purpose

Beat three: Let your Purpose define your Values

Beat four: Let your Values create your Vision

Beat five: Let your Vision set your Goals

In the rest of this post, we’ll cover beats one and two—how discovering your ‘why’ helps you understand what your organization is really about.

Understanding your brand identity starts with why.

Why does it exist?

This isn’t the same as asking: ‘what are the values of your organization?’ as well as ‘what’s it’s character and personality?’

The why captures all of that. A different why creates a different organization.

Organizations are kind of like a cross between people and blenders. Wait. Hear us out.

People have a kind of purposefulness in themselves. A person’s job might involve landscaping yards, but that doesn’t mean the person exists in order to landscape yards. It’s the person who gives a purpose to the landscaping—not the other way around.

On the other hand, blenders have a very clear purpose written into their name: blending food. But blenders are made out of plastic and metal, and so they can continue to exist even when they’ve been tossed in a box and stowed in an attic.

Like people, organizations must be driven by a purpose because they’re filled with people. But like blenders, they get their purpose from what they are made for.

An organization’s purpose defines it’s identity. But unlike blenders, organizations are composed of people, not plastic, and those people act intentionally and care about the purpose of what they’re doing. The moment that sense of purpose is gone, the organization disappears.

If an amateur hockey league started holding money for people and then lending it out at interest, it would be a bank.

If a bank got out of the money business and instead its employees spent all day skating on the ice and scoring goals, it wouldn’t be a bank anymore.

What you do defines what you are.

Even if some parts of an organization feel pointless, or even as fake as one of those North Korean propaganda villages, the scarcity of resources like time and money or the hard-wiring of human psychology guarantees that there is some ultimate reason why it exists.

Large or small, every organization serves some end.

The answer to the question “why?” may be deeper than any individual in the organization consciously understands. It may not be something that anybody has ever openly named or articulated.

It is usually deeper than the service it currently provides (whether banking or recreation) and bigger than the individual motives of those who happen to be leading it. It isn’t something invented ad hoc, arbitrarily constructed or superficially pasted on—rather, it has to be discovered.

Something has brought a group of people together to cooperate with one another. Without the glue of shared meaning, they’d split up.

So, what is it that holds us together?

What is the one thing that, if it were taken away, would mean your organization no longer has a reason to exist?

Maybe your company’s why is to sell cars. Great, but why? Don’t say, “to make money”, because there are a lot of ways to make money aside from selling cars. So, why sell cars? Maybe it’s because you want people to drive cars that are faster, safer, smoother, and sleeker: cars that make driving more pleasant. You want their daily commute to be the most enjoyable part of their day.

That’s better!

But now, why do you want that?

Maybe it’s because you believe that life is short, and like Dom from Fast & Furious, you want people to live their lives a quarter-mile at a time. Or maybe you know that nothing’s as important as family, and that the hour somebody spends driving someplace often matters more than what they do when they arrive.

Or maybe you own an ice cream parlor.

Your company’s why is “to sell ice cream”, you might say. Ice cream is great, but it’s a what, not a why. Why sell ice cream? Don’t say, “well, we sort of fell into it after our smoothie business didn’t work out.”

That might be part of your individual why, but it isn’t your company’s why. What end does that ice cream parlor serve in the world? Maybe it’s that you want to give people a chance to chill out and take in their surroundings. Maybe you believe the world needs to cool down and enjoy something sweet for a few minutes out of the day.

But what if your organization isn’t as fun as a car dealership or as quaint as an ice cream shop?

What if you resell used manufacturing equipment out of a giant warehouse to industrial plants all over the country?

That doesn’t sound very cool.

Still, ask yourself: why do you do it? Why do you exist? Why manufacturing equipment?

Maybe it’s because you believe in a rebirth for American industry, or because you remember how important it was for manufacturers to be able to produce medical equipment as fast as possible during a pandemic.

Find your why, and keep asking why until you reach rock bottom. What is it that you really believe? What is it that you want to bring about in this world? Why do you exist?

Start with that.

A shared sense of purpose is what brings a group through hardship and difficulty.

Suppose that you’re a basketball team and it is the middle of January. The season is halfway over. The weather is grey, and everybody’s feeling a little sick. You’ve won some and lost some, everyone’s tired, and your best players are all injured.

What keeps your team together?

There might be individual motives, but those individual motives aren’t enough to bind the group together. What really keeps the group together is that they share a desire to win—and in a very specific sense for that time and place.

Every team has its own story and its own definition of what winning means for them.

Like sports teams, organizations and B2B’s are held together by a specific purpose.

In order to get through the difficulties of the season, they need to be looking towards an end goal. Even the most faceless corporation with the worst automated customer service line has managed to survive in the midst of hardship and difficulty.

Some shared purpose is what keeps the group together.

We’ve said that a group’s shared identity derives from their deepest why, the fundamental beliefs about reality, and desires for the world that drive them to exist in the first place.

But your purpose is the difference you are trying to achieve in the world.

It’s not just a problem that you’re trying to solve, something at the level of your products and services. Instead, your purpose is meant to be the solution to a bigger problem, something that you want to see changed about what or how the world works, the problem that first brought you to your why.

Maybe you want to sell a better toothbrush.

Before you start thinking about all the features of that new toothbrush, think about your why and your purpose. Your why might be something like helping people have closer relationships. Your purpose, then, is to make a better toothbrush so that people have better breath so that they can talk more up close to one another, for the sake of those relationships.

Keep asking: to what end?

If you say that your purpose is to make a profit, then ask, “To what end?” You go, “Oh, so that we can stay in business.” Right? To what end? “Oh, so that we can serve more people.” To what end? “Oh, because a better smile can change someone’s whole life.”

That’s it.

If I say, “To what end?” and then you say, “No. That’s it. That’s the end.” Then you know that’s your purpose.

There are three important things to keep in mind when trying to determine your purpose.

All of us have likely experienced being part of meetings, maybe weekly or monthly, where nothing meaningful is ever accomplished. The meetings themselves may be useless, and nobody can say why they happen. But the group of people has some purpose. Otherwise, they wouldn’t feel the need to meet with one another.

But meetings may not be the best means to their end. Either the group shares some end, or the group will come to an end.

So, remember that your job in figuring out your company’s purpose may be to articulate and make explicit something that has gone ignored or forgotten for years. Amidst all of the busyness and mayhem, nobody has ever bothered to explain it the point, and if you asked, nobody in the company could articulate what it’s all for.

That makes it all the more important to work on figuring out your purpose so that the life of your company isn’t just one big, long, overextended meeting where nothing is accomplished.

A corporation’s effect on the world might be negative or meaningless.

While we can’t advise you in this book on whether or not your organization is good or bad for the world or just a collective waste of time… we can tell you when people work together in groups, what keeps them together is that they aim at some shared purpose. Something they intend to fulfill even if they fail to, and which they rightly or wrongly believe to be a good thing.

Even if they miss the target, they’re aiming for it.

When you’re trying to determine your company’s purpose, don’t look for where the arrows have fallen in the past. Look at where the archers were aiming.

Often it’s easiest to see what’s closest to us.

Whether that’s the next quarter or the next year, goals are things like, “make our sales quota” or “grow by 20%”. Goals are good, but they aren’t far enough down the line to be your purpose.

Think further ahead. Where do you ultimately want things to go? Something beyond growth and sales is out there, which has given you the momentum to move forward with your goals every quarter and every year. Look for that thing.

Give the Resound team a shout.

Whether you know your purpose inside and out, or whether you’re thinking it’s time to pump the breaks, take a deep breath and just ask ‘why,’ we’re eager to meet you right where you are. Because no matter who you are or what you sell, your brand identity matters.

Part of our ‘why’ is our belief that the world needs organizations like yours to discover how remarkable they are, and build that purpose into a thoughtful, true, and winsome brand expression… and then connect with those who are looking for them.

We specialize in helping B2B organizations discover their authentic identity and share it with the world.

Give us a call, or check those other resources here on our site and consider subscribing to our monthly newsletter to get a breakdown of our branding wisdom delivered straight to your inbox regularly.

“Smart” people make things complicated. Effective people start with a simple plan they can understand. And then they build on it. This is especially true in marketing, where you can’t know how your audience is going to interact with your message on a particular media channel. Even experienced marketers can’t really be sure most of the time. So what’s the solution? Hire a confident marketer who knows lots of fancy words, but can’t really explain what they mean? Or do you start simply, even without research, and build from there?

https://youtu.be/BFsmVCFMNS8

The simplest way to get really, really good at anything is to gain an understanding of a simple plan and build on it. Just make a plan and make it work a little bit. Then build on what success you have.

Your working hypothesis means building a simple plan, that, if your assumptions are correct, should work. It’s not like they told you in school that you should “find out everything you can” about a topic. This is going only based on what you know right now.

No hours spent on research that takes you down rabbit holes and eventually has you watching funny youtube cat videos. Just a simple plan, based on what you know.

It’s the same reason old people tell you to read old literature, like the Stoics and the Bible. It’s simple information that, if it makes sense to you, teaches you to think for yourself. If you can grasp fundamental truths, you can use those truths almost everywhere. They give you a sense of proportion that looks like wisdom and knowledge. And they help you to test every bit of information that comes in.

But if you immerse yourself in information, you’re overwhelmed. You start accepting facts before you’re able to evaluate them. It’s like in any cult — or in college if you’re not very, very careful — they give you one point of view, fill you with information that backs it up, giving you no context or sense of proportion. And pretty soon, you find yourself lost. And even though you know something’s wrong, you don’t have the words to express exactly what.

Research isn’t bad. But be sure your brain is in critical-thinking mode before you start accepting data. This will keep you objective and allow you to see things in proportion.

It’s like in closely held political arguments; we get caught up in the emotion and the need to be right. We accept things we’d never believe if we weren’t so bought-in politically. But what if every American thought about right and wrong before they heard all of the opinions and framing? What if, when you heard that a politician did something wrong, you backed up and thought about it non-politically, like they’re someone in your everyday life who did that.

Now you’re thinking, rather than being told how to think.

So let’s say you’re making a marketing plan. Who’s the person in your life who would buy your product? If you didn’t know him, where would you advertise? Facebook, an online forum, a sponsorship? What would you say in the ad? What would make him click on the ad and go to your landing page? What would you say on the landing page to convince him to click and buy?

Now, you have a working hypothesis. Make sure you can test each part of that interaction, so you know at least the number of people reached by the ad, the number of people who clicked to visit the page, and the number of people who bought. And adjust from there.

Trying to seem smart is a trap. The most effective people don’t pretend they know what they don’t know. They keep it simple and use what they know. Be like the simple person who knows what questions to ask rather than the one who knows all of the answers. Because the one who knows how to ask the right questions is the one who doesn’t work as hard and still gets more done, can see through BS, and can make a simple, actionable plan that moves things forward.

For an example of a funnel, check out Mike’s post on content marketing.

For more on the topic of simplicity, read or listen to “Solitude in Leadership” by William Deresiewicz.

Unless you’re looking for something cheap, shoddy, and just waiting to crumble, you probably wouldn’t buy something from one. The discount brands you find at dollar stores are intentionally trying to look like copies of better-known brands—and before long, they fall apart.

When trends evolve, copycats lag behind, looking for something new and flashy to rip off. The worst ones are outright frauds, like fake universities, or airlines that suddenly go under and strand their passengers or restaurant chains that drain investors but never open.

There’s probably not a faster way to undermine your organization, discourage your team, and break trust with your customers than being a copycat.

When it comes to branding, the high road is also the best one.

Rather than going superficial, whether that’s scraping something together arbitrarily, mimicking whoever leads your industry, lying, or outright copying—doing the work of discovering your authentic identity gives you the foundation for a brand and look that will connect and resonate with those around you.

After all, you’re remarkable.

And your potential clientele needs you as you are.

https://youtu.be/gkuDNBA51MU

You’re not a criminal.

You wouldn’t steal someone’s laptop, car, purse… or even an Amazon package leaned against your neighbor’s front door (besides, there’s a good chance that one’s got a glitter bomb with a camera inside).

But when it comes to superficial branding, ripping off logos, color schemes, concepts, or whole stories—well, that’s different, right?

Not really.

Even if you don’t face charges for it (and you might).

Copying someone’s brand comes quick and easy, and probably masks an organization’s insecurity about itself, its values, or what it offers. It gives the impression of having solved something, but just like that knock-off denim from the dollar store, it fades and frays real fast.

It’s often easy to produce “copycat creative” — ways of expressing your brand that are duplicates of whatever seemed to work for somebody else. Imposter syndrome expresses itself through copying, rather than being genuinely creative.

Because you’re not comfortable with your organization’s real identity, you try to shield or deflect people from it by displaying an identity that you think they’ll like better.

“Copycat creative” might mean using a variation on a color scheme that a company you admire uses. It might mean trying to write in the same voice and tone and that your competition writes in. It might mean using a certain template you’ve seen somewhere else, or choosing images that you imagine your competition using.

It’s googling, “what brands do millennials like?” and forwarding the results to your marketing team with the message, “do that”.

If a certain brand expression is working for your competitor, it isn’t as though they have a magical logo or website layout. What’s working for them is that their brand matches the reality their employees and customers experience, and so it produces trust.

You’re different from your competitor. Maybe it worked for them, but it probably won’t work for you.

Let other brands tell their story. It will get exhausting trying to keep up appearances and live out a story that doesn’t fit you. Your identity has a grain to it, like a piece of wood, and it will wear you out to constantly try to cut against the grain. Tell your own story.

Other companies are just as capable as you are of copying and pasting whatever the industry leader is doing. Copycat branding is as easy for your competitors as it is for you.

All things are as valuable as they are rare, and so people only pay a premium for preeminent products. If you look and feel basically like all of the other competitors you have, then the only way you have left to compete is on price. You think: “Since every brand is fake anyway, ‘who I am doesn’t matter; customers only care about their pocketbooks.” And the industry descends into a long war of attrition: which business can survive the longest while charging the least?

The surest way to lead isn’t to follow the leader.

Rather, it is to head somewhere with clear intention and purpose in mind and to communicate the value and importance of what you are doing.

Would you want to work for a company that’s perpetually lying?

Probably not.

Nobody wants to work for a company that’s deceiving its customers, telling a false brand story and actively faking it.

Maybe the lie isn’t intentional. Maybe the company intends well, but it has a bad case of imposter syndrome and so it’s trying hard to be something it isn’t.

But how do you approach a conversation about that?

It’s awkward. Nobody wants to say anything.

So instead, your employees may begin looking for a new place to work. One with a story they can believe.

When an organization’s employees often wish they could explain that the brand just doesn’t fit, that the choices don’t feel right, that the look and feel of the company don’t match, it’s an awkward thing to talk about. They don’t like it, and maybe find it a little embarrassing when friends or family look up where they work, and a little annoying when customers always approach them with strange misconceptions.

It’s hard to bring up. Sometimes it’s easier to look for something new.

Externally, when talking to customers, employees may try their best to express your brand in a way that is positive, even if it’s hard to do so naturally with a straight face. But internally, no one buys it. It doesn’t resonate within the team, because it isn’t real. The constant switching back and forth starts to get confusing, like a manager acting like a CEO one minute and then like your best friend the next. Business in the front and party in the back isn’t a good look, and eventually, even he’s going to mix them up.

Superficial branding undermines your team. It forces them to put on a show for your customers.

That means they can’t relate to customers in a fully honest and sincere way, and can’t build authentic relationships with them. So, by undermining your team, superficial branding undermines your relationships.

You can pour as much money as you want into marketing, but if the way your brand expresses itself is all for show, you’re undermining the future of your own business.

On the other hand, if you empower your team with your authentic brand that resonates with them, then they can help that brand resonate with your customers. That builds loyalty and strong relationships, which create trust, allowing you to work less while profiting more.

Authentic branding takes work, but it means not fighting yourself, not undermining your team, and bringing the best version of your authentic self to those around you.

Along with non-branding and arbitrary branding, superficial branding contradicts the core values of honesty, transparency, and trust, both within an organization and among those who interact with it.

If you want to grow your business while serving customers, clients, and even team members the best you can, don’t copy. Learn from them, but don’t mimic those you admire.

And don’t use your brand expression, look, or website to make promises you can’t keep.

And if you like the idea of being honest and confident, and the goal of building sincere relationships based on trust, then give the Resound team a call.

We’re excited to help B2B organizations discover their authentic brand identity and express it thoughtfully in their look, visual presence, and all of their interactions. We know it takes work, and that’s why we’ve developed a ton of online resources for those looking to develop their authentic brand.

Give us a call, or check those resources out at resoundcreative.com.

We know you’re remarkable. The world needs remarkable brands like yours. And they need you just as you are.

“The world needs you as you are.”

Sure, you’ve heard it before. You’ve probably rolled your eyes.

It’s hard not to hate that message when everyone from YouTube personalities to TikTok influencers collect millions of likes, shares, and subscribes by standing in front of their cell phones and doing a Fortnite dance as a way of being unique and expressing themselves… and for some strange reason, it seems to work.

If everyone gets a trophy for just existing, then what’s so special about the trophy?

But regardless of what everyone else is doing or saying, the truth is still there.

Your entire company is stocked with skills, talents, ideas, personalities, and core motivations that equip you to serve others in a unique way. From the services you offer, to how you interact with clients, cohorts, and other entities, you can’t be replicated.

In other words, you’re remarkable. And it’s a loss when your branding, marketing, and whole organization chases after trends or copies someone else. Especially when you do this instead of telling the truth about who you are and what you offer. It’s a surrender of your own creative agency. Regardless of the trends, people respond to truth, consistency, and authentic communication.

In this article, we’ll examine the dangers of superficial branding, and the indispensable alternative of authentic, truthful branding.

https://youtu.be/y0Uy62sFSmg

Superficial branding defines a company based not on anything inwardly true about itself, but on an impression it wants to create outwardly.

Superficial branding is “fake it ‘til you make it” branding. It defines a company by its perception of what people expect it to be.

Most often superficial branding shows up as copycat branding. Mimicry of others who have been successful in the same industry. A company brands itself much like a high school student, copying and pasting an encyclopedia article into their term paper.

Imitation may be the most sincere form of flattery, but it’s also the easiest way to be accused of plagiarism.

Superficial branding doesn’t fool anybody and it isn’t hard to detect. It stands out like bad acting in a documentary.

Superficial branding is dishonest. While it aims to attract people, it ends up scaring them away. One of the most attractive traits a person or an organization can have in a virtual world of carefully crafted appearances is honest depth.

Many people approach branding as nothing more than a recipe for marketing based on what sort of customer they want to reel in.

They think: “In order to attract that kind of customer I’m going to have to talk like this and look like that.” My audience wants something like that, because that’s what all my competitors are doing, so that’s what I need to make myself into.

But the truth is that this rests on a shallow perception of how people actually make decisions. It comes from the behaviorism of the early 20th century, where customers are Pavlov’s dog—ring the right bell and they’ll salivate.

This approach doesn’t give customers enough credit for being able to recognize and understand something new. It wrongly assumes they won’t be able to detect something fake when they see it. Unlike dogs, customers won’t keep on trusting you after you trick them.

The deeper problem beneath shallow branding is what we might call Organizational Imposter Syndrome.

For individuals, “Imposter Syndrome” is an eerie feeling of inadequacy around one’s equally successful peers. Those who suffer from Imposter Syndrom often believe their success must rest on some mistake, a stroke of luck, or fraud. In practical terms, it means constantly doubting oneself and hiding differences in order to avoid being revealed as a fake.

They aren’t comfortable in their own shoes, and they doubt themselves. On some level, they believe that having reached the point they’ve reached in business is a kind of cosmic mistake. A matter of a few lucky breaks.

Perhaps it is a start-up that genuinely hasn’t accomplished anything, and so it thinks it needs to pretend to be something it isn’t in order to be taken seriously.

Or maybe it is a business that has genuinely grown to a new scale through hard work, but now feels daunted when surrounded by competitors that it previously looked up to. Whatever brought the organization to its current place, it feels like its true identity needs to be hidden to fit in with its competitors.

Organizational Imposter Syndrome means outsourcing your company’s vision and goals to whichever company is leading your industry.

It means plagiarizing their brand story, and hoping your customers won’t catch you.

Look at any industry, and you’ll notice that the leaders are almost always the authentic ones, at least on some level. They’re leading because they are trusted, and they’re trusted because they are authentic. Most of the “followers” in the industry, on the other hand, have brands that feel artificial. Often they are simply copying whatever the “successful” leaders in the industry do. They’re hoping that they can hitch a ride on the train or skim off some of their competitor’s customers. They can’t be authentic, because they’re just playing Follow the Leader.

There’s a real maturity in recognizing that you’ll never fully be able to say you’ve “made it” or feel like you’ve fully “arrived.”

But feeling like you’ve arrived isn’t the point—the point is to continue serving your customers well.

When a company reaches its end, it’s dead. Because of that, there is no need to try to pretend that you’ve accomplished more than you have. Don’t pretend that you’re just like whoever you look up to in your industry.

You should learn from competitors, but you don’t need to be them.

Accidental branding, non-branding, arbitrary branding, and superficial branding are ultimately battles against a company’s actual core.

These approaches to branding start out easy, but gradually drain resources as the marketing team struggles to maintain the lie. Whether they’re driven by business metrics, wishful thinking, or shortsightedness, they lead you down the path of making promises that you can’t keep. And making a promise that you can’t keep doesn’t help anybody.

Ultimately, the reason an organization exists is to serve people. Having worked with dozens of brands for over 10 years in Arizona and beyond, we know that’s what makes you remarkable.

The better way is to know your authentic identity and communicate it honestly—even if that means stepping back and investing the time and energy to discover it, understand it, and integrate it into everything you say and do.

If you need some help discovering and presenting how remarkable you are, contact us, subscribe to our monthly newsletter, or check out our other free branding resources.

The world needs you, and it excites us to see people, organizations, and B2B companies like yours step up and meet that need.

We’ve been talking about why a real brand can’t be invented out of thin air or tailored specifically to meet a certain market demand. Remarkable brands are built from the inside out. If you find this article helpful be sure to catch our first article here and our second here. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HJ4tXHUqxmI

Taking shortcuts and sidestepping integrity can only take you so far.

Whether it’s creating an online presence for your B2B, fine-tuning a management philosophy, or even sticking to a diet and workout routine, going against reality is not a good long term strategy for success.

In the TV miniseries ‘Chernobyl,’ a lone scientist named Valery Legasov fights to understand why and how an RBMK nuclear reactor, a design deemed indestructible by the Soviet Union, exploded like an atomic bomb.

Finding himself testifying before a grand central committee and all his colleagues, Legasov does the unthinkable—he tells the truth of how the Soviet State hid a known design flaw in the reactor.

Knowing he’s a dead man, Legasov goes further. He calls out the whole social and political culture of his country, a system built mostly on lies, shortcuts, bribery, and nepotism.

Before he’s taken away, he takes a parting shot:

“What is the cost of lies? It’s not that we’ll mistake them for the truth. The real danger is that if we hear enough lies, then we no longer recognize the truth at all.”

It’s a sound warning—and one that B2B services should take to heart.

While short-circuiting your brand identity probably won’t (in most cases), cause a nuclear meltdown, there are real, long-term consequences to plowing ahead without knowing what you’re really about.

In previous articles, we’ve covered the signs, science, and pitfalls of arbitrary branding.

Arbitrary branding—a brand identity, presence, and expression that’s outdated, neglected, picked at random, invented ad hoc, or outright copied—means selling yourself and your clients short. Ultimately, it’s making promises you won’t be able to keep; it’s presenting an image that doesn’t reflect your core identity, and it’s offering what you’re not able to deliver.

In the end (and even in the short term) arbitrary branding makes impressions that no B2B wants to make.

It runs the risk of making others think you are being:

-Pretentious

-Random

-Deceptive

-False

Of course, many companies that fall into artificial branding don’t fall into these categories on purpose.

Time shortages, competition, and other conflicts can force companies to put something together at the drop of a hat, or to stick with something simply because some forgotten individual made the decision eons ago. We grant that poor, rushed branding decisions can be driven by doubt, skepticism, or frustration with the creative process.

But whatever the reason, artificial branding means doing yourself a huge disservice. The hard, messy work of discovery and of telling the truth is what wins out—and pays off—in the end.

“It is always simple to fall; there are an infinity of angles at which one falls, only one at which one stands.” 

– G.K. Chesterton

As G.K. Chesterton points out, there’s only one way of doing things right.

Truthfulness is at the heart of authentic, effective, and winsome branding. While getting there can be tough, going with truth from the very start means you’ll be able to communicate it downstream, in all the avenues where your organization presents itself.

As we’ve discussed, an organization can’t spontaneously invent its core purpose as a company, make random choices about how it expresses itself as a brand, or create relationships with its customers out of nothing.

While improvisation can be a great tool for discovering a brand’s story, improvisation is not a good navigator for trying to reach the destination of genuine branding. A real brand’s story can never simply be dreamt up. It has to be truthful, not a fantasy. We wish these points were so painfully obvious that there was no reason to write an article about them.

In spite of this, why do so many brands still do fake things or try to pass themselves off as something they aren’t? Why are we even having this conversation?

One understandable reason companies neglect truthfulness is the up-front cost.

Sometimes it is a little more expensive to do things right. Of course, while stock photos are cheaper than paying a photographer in the short term, in the long run it is going to cost you. In the short term, it may seem more cost effective to commission your cousin’s girlfriend Kim, who took one graphic design class, to create your logo in exchange for pizza. Or it may be faster to copy the content from your competitor’s website, change a few words, and launch. In the short run, it is cheaper to go with the easiest idea that comes to mind.

But in the long run it’ll cost you. You’ll constantly be fighting against the untruth you created. It will create friction with your actual identity. Finances can’t be the main motive for creating a genuine and real brand identity.

But we think there is a deeper reason that many brands try to pretend to be something that they aren’t.

They look at what everybody else around them is doing and wonder why they’re not doing it. They notice that Lobster font is trendy right now, so they use Lobster font. And they notice that everybody else is doing a certain type of photography, or imagery, or pages on their website, and they want the same thing.

Maybe it makes them feel legitimate, like a young brand that’s trying to feel grown up. Or maybe it makes them feel like they’re cool again. Other brands are trying to fake it ‘til they make it because they aren’t comfortable with who they really are.

Arbitrary branding is the gateway into superficial branding, our fourth big branding mistake. When you don’t believe it really matters what you choose, you begin to copy what you see around you.

That’s another pitfall—and the subject for another article.

We hope that this rogue’s gallery of branding mistakes has set one thing straight—authentic branding reflects the truth itself.

If you’re interested in understanding the truth of what makes you remarkable more clearly, then asking for help isn’t a bad place to start.

The Resound Team specializes in helping B2B’s discover, integrate, and fine-tune authentic brand identities that reflect who they really are, what they really do, and what they really offer.

Whatever stage you’re at, we’re glad to help. You can sign up for our newsletter for regular access to our branding content, peruse some of our branding videos, or drop us a line to get the conversation about your brand going.

And that’s the truth, the whole truth…and nothing but!

A reputation for lying is the only thing worse than a reputation for bending the truth.

Either way, getting caught doing it obliterates everything—trust, careers, and not the least of all, relationships. From the still-smoldering fallout of the Ashley Madison email hack to notorious, tabloid-worthy cover-ups, lying creates a situation no person, business, or company ever wants to be in.

And as we’ll see in this blog, the same principle applies to branding.

Last month, we looked at why brands can’t be arbitrarily invented. From the carelessness to  pretentiousness, we touched on the importance of building a meaningful brand identity.

Aside from working gradually, and thoroughly, to understand every aspect of what your organization does, there’s no way to capture and present a brand identity that tells the full truth. As we’ll discuss in this blog, being fictitious, or outright deceitful, is the fastest way to destroy a brand or company that people can trust.

https://youtu.be/Gn3_G4rKEds

Imagine for a moment that you’ve been trying for a long time to find that special person, so you decide to download a dating app. You’ve heard some success stories, so you’re giving up on the real world and heading online.

So you open up the app and search some profiles, swipe left a few times, and find some others interesting. Then you find one profile and you say, “Oh wow! That person is really cute. I like that photo.” You read the bio, and you think: “Yeah, definitely, it seems like I’ll click with them. What they’re saying resonates with me. I like The Lord of the Rings too?! I’m excited to get to know them.” You send them a message, and they send one back. Before you know it you’re on your way to your first date.

And on that first date, you discover that . . . they look nothing like their profile photo. You’ve been catfished!

The bio you read? Most of it was fake. Some of it was exaggerated and some was made up to sound good.

That sense of connection? The feeling you could relate with them? A complete illusion. You just happened to be in the “target demographic” this person was hunting for a date with.

You find yourself wishing you could swipe in real life.

Even if they turned out to be pretty cool in their own right and had an interesting life story, or even if they had a lot in common with you, it wouldn’t matter to you anymore because they lied to you. Any potential they had for being trustworthy would be gone.

The whole charade is just plain creepy.

That is how your customers feel when you try to form a fake relationship with them.

You can’t just arbitrarily decide you want to connect with a certain demographic and then change your branding to try to fit what you think they want. It might get them in the door, but they’ll leave quicker than they came in. You can’t present your business as something it isn’t.

Real people are naturally adept at spotting fake people. We can recognize the stock photos on a website and artificial smiles from employees who hate their jobs. We feel cheated when the fun-loving tone of your Twitter feed doesn’t match the robotic operator we get when we call expecting to talk with a live person.

The way you express your brand publicly, whether through a website, a newsletter or social media, is an invitation to extend a relationship. But a business can’t simply invent the people who are part of its team or the kind of relationships it wants with the customers it serves. It has to carefully and painstakingly hire and train that team to align with its values, and it has to grow relationships with its customers through authentic and honest communication.

“Dating” your customers in the real world takes a lot more work than creating a profile page with some beautiful photos and inspiring text, but those genuine relationships will pay off in loyalty and commitment.

Good fictions must ring true.

The events in the story did not literally happen—that’s why it is fiction. But the underlying story must be something that really happens, all of the time, to many people. The events in the story might be a fantasy but the story itself, to be any good, has to tell us about reality.

There is a difference between being fictional and being fictitious. A fictional story is one that everyone knows to be false, and yet tries, through the use of analogy and other literary devices, to present us with the truth in a new way. A fictitious story, on the other hand, is one that purports to be true, but which in reality is entirely fabricated.

Every brand tells a story because every brand is a story. A brand’s essence—its purpose, values, relationships and identity—are best articulated through a narrative rather than a list of bullet points. That narrative is almost never a literal timeline of the company, but rather through storytelling, like the plot of a good book or movie.

That story is expressed through everything else—its choice of photography, the tone of its content, the way it interacts on social media, the signage and even the furniture inside its physical location. People who observe these outward expressions are subconsciously reconstructing the brand’s story in their mind, and using that to figure out how they want to relate to the brand.

A brand’s story about itself has to ring true with reality.

If a customer goes into a restaurant, the story they put together from reading reviews and looking at photos of the restaurant needs to match up with the story they experience when they walk inside. If the reviews are faked, or bribed, and the photos give the impression of a very different atmosphere than they encounter, then the story doesn’t ring true.

It’s fictitious. A hoax.

The cumulative effect of arbitrarily inventing your purpose, brand expression, and relationships is a fictitious story. A lie. The easiest way to prove a story is fictitious is to show that it is inconsistent, like the liar who must inevitably contradict themselves. Once people start asking questions and poking holes in your fake brand, it will fall apart.

The benefit of telling a truthful brand story is that it takes a lot less effort to maintain over time. While keeping your behavior aligned with your values takes effort, there’s no extra work involved in being consistent. In the long run, telling the truth is easier than maintaining a lie.

Even con men know that lies don’t hold up for long under scrutiny.

In the words of playwright David Mamet’s cutthroat salesmen: “Always tell the truth.. It’s the easiest thing to remember.”

Whether you’re in the B2B sector, manufacturing, or an industry that requires an extensive online and social media presence, nothing will beat the honest work of communication, building relationships, and moving toward a comprehensive understanding of what’s remarkable about you.

Are you tired of trying to ‘date’ customers with a fictitious brand?

Are you struggling to get a handle on what you have to offer and how you should present yourself to everyone else?

With videos, self-assessments, and even one-on-one workshops, we’ve got resources aimed at helping B2B companies build authentic… and truthful... brand identities.

Whether it’s helping revamp your social and website, or starting from scratch to help with brand identity and brand strategy, the Resound team is here to help.

We know that you’re remarkable.

How often have you done something because everyone expects you to?

Probably once a day—if not more. While doing what’s expected is part of life, it’s another trap for B2B companies when it comes to solid, authentic brand development.

In our last article, we wrapped up the mistake of ‘accidental branding’ based on temporary aspects of a company. We also discussed how false beliefs lead to non-branding. A third approach we often see is “arbitrary branding,” which is motivated by the same doubts and skepticism as non-branding.

Situations come up that force companies to paste together a brand strategy of some kind—perhaps your marketing team insists on it. They recognize that  “having a brand” and “brand consistency” are important, but they don’t want to invest any thought, time, or money into figuring out what the brand actually is. Arbitrary Branding is when a brand defines itself because of expectation, making a random decision, and then sticking with it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TIMxbPPWJR8

What makes a decision “random” is that there is no ultimate explanation or story behind it, it simply reflects a pure act of will by the leadership, the marketing team, or the intern tasked with designing a logo. If you ask, “why?” there is no real answer. Core elements that compose a brand can’t be “invented”, “made up”, or “improvised” on the spot.

They are discovered, not invented. Companies are mistaken when they think that:

These four building blocks of a brand aren’t arbitrary. While the decisions of leaders and others are all part of a brand’s story, they do not “make up” a story or narrative. A brand’s story is non-fiction.

In this article, we’re going to tackle the first two pitfalls of Arbitrary Branding—pretentiousness and randomness.

Your purpose is something objective and enduring, a real part of what makes your company continue to exist. Your company’s underlying, unifying purpose has real weight and substance. It explains how you choose to operate in the present and where you want to head in the future.

Yet we’ve seen so many companies who try to make up their purpose out of thin air. They don’t have a lot of time to put thought into it—they’re too busy selling. Inventing a “purpose” is just a step to giving a pitch or getting some investment. A lot of startups do this: they think they understand branding. They’ve read some branding books, made something up in an afternoon, and it sounded clever. They checked the “mission and vision” box. Maybe it got them to a name and a logo, and that’s good enough. “Whew! Glad we got that out of the way. Time to move on to something that actually matters.”

Brands with arbitrary purposes are everywhere. It’s the vague statement that doesn’t quite mean anything or the repetition of trendy buzzwords. The noble idea that nobody follows through on, the lofty vision irrelevant to the everyday. The company which says it exists to “Be the greatest at what we do.” There are “mission statement” generators online that sound about as authentic. An arbitrary purpose is a “pretend” purpose. No one believes in it, and no one follows it, because no one really cares.

It has to be discovered. You have to search the world around you and figure out why it needs you, distinctly. Why does responding to your customers’ needs motivate you? Why does it motivate your team? Your leadership? You have to observe not only your current passions but also your enduring cares throughout your history.

Coming to a shared understanding of your organization’s purpose takes time. It takes reflection and introspection, and even some awkward and uncomfortable conversations. It might even cause “drama” or a few fights. That might sound intimidating, but it’s healthy and important. Until you define your aims, you are going to be aimless. This isn’t something you can carelessly delegate.

All of us as individuals have things we’re capable of doing. We’re good at them, but they don’t excite us. We don’t get any satisfaction out of doing them. Then, there are other activities which we’re not only good at, but which we find immensely gratifying and fulfilling, that seem to just naturally “fit” us. Other people may not understand why we like it, and might even think it’s kind of boring or uninspiring, but we love it. They’re gifts. While life inevitably requires us to do a bit of both of those things, we’re happiest when our work is aligned with our gifts.

The same is no less true of groups. Your company can do some things well, and some things not so well. Of those it does well, there are some things it just has to do as part of operating, and some things it exists to do.

Why is your team driven to serve your customers? Why do your customers need you? Looking for your purpose in your gifts is the place to discover it.

Just like you can’t invent your purpose, you can’t randomly make up the way your brand expresses itself.

Or rather, you can, but it’s going to impact your business in ways you never imagined.

Imagine that you arbitrarily choose that your colors are red, or blue, or yellow-green, or whatever, because that’s a color you like, or your mom likes, or it’s a color that looks “different” from the competition. No one will stop you from picking a color that way.

Colors are extremely memorable though, and every culture has long-standing associations with each color. The associations are at least partly cultural: “red” and “blue” in American political culture are reversed in the U. K., and the white of an English wedding is the color for mourning in a Chinese funeral. The associations may also be partly biological, like the calming effect of a light blue sky and green grass, or all the associations we have with the darkness of the night sky.

So, when you spin the color wheel and land on orange as your company color, you’ve determined a large part of how people are going to remember and think about you, for the remainder of your company’s lifespan. And once you’ve set your color scheme, changing it isn’t easy (imagine if Coca- Cola tried to pivot to purple).

And that’s just a color!

All of the other aspects of your brand’s expression are going to impact how people inside and outside your company think of its identity. What is your name and what typeface is it in? What is your logo? Which style do you write in, and when? Which images do you use, and when? Who is the voice of your company in videos and advertisements?

If it doesn’t match your core identity, it will either produce a kind of dissonance that is a constant drain and drag on your company, or it will slowly shift the culture and values of your company to match those arbitrary choices you made. Rolling the dice now, or picking something your sister’s boyfriend suggested has a definite thrill to it, but if your identity doesn’t guide your choices, these choices will guide your identity.

Many people misidentify their brand identity with their brand expression. They think that their brand is just their brand expression—and since they can make an arbitrary choice to settle their brand expression, they can make an arbitrary choice that defines their brand.

That’s a mistake. Your brand isn’t invented, it is born.

People don’t invent themselves, and brands are born out of relationships between people and the purpose which organizes them together. Your brand already exists before you start to choose how you want to represent it. Your brand expression is an attempt to communicate that brand identity outwardly, and it is how other people learn to recognize your brand identity. It should be carefully and creatively crafted to fit the reality of who you are.

Back when companies were listed alphabetically in the phone book, one tactic some companies used was naming themselves “AAA”, like “AAA Painting” or “AAA Plumbing”. That tactic, of course, died off with the internet, because the “AAA” was an arbitrary and meaningless choice.

Arbitrary choices can be arbitrarily changed just as easily as they were first established. Meaningful choices endure. You can’t build an enduring, remarkable brand arbitrarily. It takes intentionality.

——

If you’re part of a company, businesses, or team that could use guidance toward a more intentional, thorough brand strategy, give us a shout! If you’d like to know if your company subconsciously uses arbitrary branding (or just want to know more about arbitrary branding), we’d love to chat. With videos, free tools, and our brand maturity assessment, we’ve got tons of resources for those working already in the thick of the branding process. And if you’re looking for one-on-one help, ask us about our professional branding services to help B2B companies move past arbitrary branding into a coherent, meaningful brand identity.

In our previous article in this series, we looked at the problem of ‘non-branding’ for B2B companies. We looked at the various reasons why so many companies (and the people that make up the company) are skeptical of branding, think that it’s just not that important, and therefore end up not really branding which results in what we at Resound call a ‘non-brand’.

In our decade-plus of working with B2B companies to build authentic, lasting remarkable brands, we’ve learned a few things about why companies fall into this ‘non-branding’ trap. There are really four main causes for non-branding:

None of these beliefs line up with reality. They’re false and untrue. But they can be deeply held and hard to change our perspectives on. Last time we unpacked the first two of these causes. You can check those out in Part 1 of this series. But now we’re going to tackle the other two causes of non-branding.

Because a unique collection of people make up your B2B company, your company actually is unique. The particular services or products you provide might not be unique, or the markets you sell to might not be unique. But because people are unique and act in unique ways, the way your business does what it does will inevitably be different from the way another business would do it.

We’ve talked to prospective clients before who have said to us, flat out, “There is really nothing interesting about us. We’re just like everybody else.”

What a lie! Our clients may believe that lie, but it is still a lie. No two people are the same: even the two most average, normal, typical, conventional people you can imagine are not duplicates of one another. Two twins who share the same genes are still very different people. So, no two companies of people are the same.

A company might feel the same as everybody else, of course. It might not look or sound unique. If the organization hasn’t put much thought or energy into branding, it may not be articulating or presenting its unique identity in a unique way. Look around and you’ll see plenty of bland and boring brands.

Sometimes bland branding (call it, ‘blanding’) results from neglect or a holdover from the past. Maybe the organization started with a brand expression that was quick and easy at one point in time, like naming themselves after the nearest street, river, mountain, or landscape, and that was good enough because there were more pressing problems to deal with.

Other brands are bland by choice: they’re self-conscious about seeming unique in any way. They’ve chosen the most unobtrusive, “just like the other guy” look-and-feel possible, maybe because they actually feel a little inferior to the “other guy”.

Other brands just don’t think they need it. They’re satisfied with the personal referral business they’ve built and the portfolio of recurring revenue they have and see no need to change things.

Still, hiding under that bland and boring brand is always going to be different people, with a different way of handling things than the company down the street.

We’re not saying it is necessarily wrong to have a bland and boring brand if the company has clear reasons for doing that. Sometimes, when it is an intentional choice, it can be the most authentic and best-fitting representation of the company. Most of the time, though, blanding is a tragic waste. There is so much more to the company than they are giving themselves credit for! Companies that endure over time, which build referral networks and loyal customers, do so precisely because they are different and people recognize it. So, why hide it?

You have a purpose because there is some reason you are in business. Your business cares about people because that’s what makes you a company and keeps you going. Your business is unique, because, even if nothing else, the people and relationships in it are unique. So, if you have all of those ingredients, you have a brand story…and dare I say it – a remarkable story.

Your remarkable brand’s story is what connects everything. It is the context of every relationship and the narrative behind every conversation or experience or interaction that happens in the course of your business.

As an individual, when someone is getting to know you, they want to know your story: where are you from? What do you do? Who is in your family? Why are you here? Those are questions we as humans want answered, so we can try to imagine the story of the person we are talking to. Knowing someone’s story better makes it easier to trust them.

The same is true of a company’s story. Where is it from? How did it begin, and why? Who are the people on the team? Whom do they serve, and what problems do they solve? What do they do together and why? Why is the business even here at all?

Just like it is hard to build a relationship with an individual who will only tell you the bare minimum of their story, it is hard to build a relationship of trust with a company that doesn’t communicate anything about itself but a name, address, a few statistics, and some sales points.

Imagine you’ve just met somebody at an event, and this is the conversation you have:

Bob: Hi, I’m Bob.

You: Hi Bob, nice to meet you. What do you do?

Bob: Sales.

You: Oh, nice. Where at?

Bob: An office.

You: Oh, sure. Do you have any . . . uh . . . hobbies?

Bob: Sales.

You: Oh. So, where are you from?

Bob: An office.

You: Yeah . . . can you tell me anything about yourself?

Bob: Yes, I’m Bob.

You: …

Just like nobody wants to start a relationship with Bob (let alone put much trust in Bob), nobody wants to start a relationship with a company that has nothing to say for itself. As humans, if we are going to trust the company to take care of us then we are going to need to know its story.

The good news is that every organization has that story. It isn’t a made-up story, or a clever tale spun to impress a certain “demographic group.” It is an honest and authentic story about the people and purpose that make you do what you do every day.

What motivates you at a deeper level to take care of these people and customers? Why do you stay in the business? Why have you done that for 10, 20, even 50 years? There’s a story behind that. Come on. Let’s go tell that brand story!

Opposition to “branding” often results when someone has seen too many examples of what we will call Accidental, Superficial, or Arbitrary branding. Those companies which consciously avoid talk of “branding” are often the ones most committed to authenticity: they fear “branding” would amount to wearing a false face or a ridiculous costume or would force them to change their identity to fit a mold.

That non-brander’s desire for authenticity is admirable, and companies that share with us that desire are in many ways closer to what we consider true branding than those which have “branded” by substituting something surface-level or temporary in place of investigating their essential identity. The skepticism that there really is an essential “core” to every company, a “true” identity, results from seeing a lot of falsehood.

True branding has to do with knowing the truth. When you can do that, you can uncover a unique story about your company’s people, driven by its purpose, to create lasting customer relationships.

If this is you and you want help, we have a plethora of resources for you in your branding journey. From articles to free tools, videos, and even a self-assessment for your remarkable brand – we’ve got you covered. And if you’re looking for help in a more direct way, we offer professional branding services to help B2B companies like yours unlock your authentic, remarkable brand and tell your story to the world.

At Resound, we believe branding is all about uncovering your authentic identity. But many people (especially in a highly technical B2B company like manufacturing, technology, or engineering) don’t believe in “branding”, or don’t believe it is capable of reflecting anything like an “authentic” identity. They think of branding as a B2B company’s way of “putting lipstick on a pig”, and want nothing to do with it.

We call this “non-branding.”

https://youtu.be/TeJJ0PTeNO8

Non-branding is when a “brand” consists of nothing beyond an arbitrary name and logo (though the logo may just be the name in a stylized typeface). The B2B company has no interest in knowing or communicating what it is outwardly, usually because of skepticism that there is anything authentic about its identity which could ever be known or communicated. The brand is an empty shell and doesn’t really think of itself as anything more than an empty shell.

First, some people in B2B are skeptical about branding because they’re skeptical about their own B2B company. They don’t actually believe in themselves. They’re discouraged by the lack of purpose and vision. They doubt that there is anything beneath the surface to be discovered about its identity. They just can’t buy into the idea that there could be anything authentic, genuine, or intrinsically remarkable about the identity of the company itself. The company really is just a piece of paper filed with a government entity and maybe a couple of bank accounts.

Second, some B2B industry folks are skeptical about branding because they’re skeptical about everybody else’s companies. They’ve seen “branding” before, and it’s all a massive hoax to them. Branding to them is empty, deceptive, and profoundly inauthentic. “Branding” is just a bit of hocus pocus a marketing team makes up with no substance to it. Maybe they’re afraid that “branding” wouldn’t really fit them. When you see a lot of superficial branding pasted on that doesn’t match anything underneath, the most honest approach might look like not branding at all.

Obviously, we’re biased. As a B2B branding agency, we don’t at all share these doubts. We truly believe there is something remarkable about every B2B company which continues to survive in a hostile world where, as W. B. Yeats wrote, “things fall apart”.

There are four primary beliefs causing non-branding:

All four of these beliefs are false. We argue that companies can and should take themselves seriously, and find their authentic identity.

You have a purpose. If your B2B company has survived more than a few years then it inevitably serves a purpose in the larger marketplace or community. Some people must find you valuable, and you must hold true to some sort of values.

The faster you spin a ball on a string in a circle, the stronger the string must be to keep the ball from flying away. The centrifugal forces pulling people away from one another in a modern world spinning at an ever-faster pace are so powerful that it takes a very strong bond to exert the opposing centripetal force needed to keep them together for any length of time. Whatever faults a business may have, it has at least succeeded in keeping people together. That bond that keeps the business from flying off into pieces is some sort of purpose it serves.

Not every business exists to, say, cure cancer or solve the AIDS epidemic, or end homelessness. The purpose your company serves may be fairly modest: it might exist to serve its customers by giving them a better way to organize their projects online, or access to some of the brightest software engineers in the world, or a machine to package their new brand of breakfast cereals, or whatever business your company is in. Nonetheless, assuming a free market and the free flow of information, companies that don’t serve their customers don’t survive long.

Companies that do not communicate their purpose communicate that they do not have values. No one wants a relationship with a company that has no values. A company that avoids branding, that avoids reflecting on its purpose, only attracts customers who have no other choice. It is very limiting. Your “word of mouth” network wouldn’t extend very far if your customers didn’t share your values.

If your B2B company has survived so far, then you probably do serve some sort of purpose, and you do have some underlying set of values. Take the time to reflect on that. Identify it clearly, and you have the starting point for communicating your brand.

Every company (or organization, if you prefer) is made up of people. The word “company” derives from the root word for “companion”, compaignon, literally, someone who shares bread (pain) with (com) another. Companies are composed out of companions who accompany one another in some shared common work.

What is being “organized” in the term “organization”? It’s not papers in a filing cabinet, expenses on a spreadsheet, or digital assets in the cloud. Once again, it’s people who organize themselves into an organization. An organization is people. Your organization is people.

One reason companies tend to neglect branding is that they forget that they are made out of people: living, breathing human beings. The corporate name takes on a life of its own so that the individuals whose paychecks bear that name forget that they are part of the very thing for which they are working. Customers view the business as a kind of temperamental super-human demigod, and they feel lucky if they can get what they want from it without sacrificing too much. The “corporation” feels abstract and distant to the very people who physically embody it. It’s completely crazy and completely normal.

Ultimately, caring about your own brand is a matter of caring about people. Your brand is how employees in the office identify themselves to the outside world. “Where do you work?”, is a question they have to answer all the time. It is the lens through which employees relate to one another, whether in an office or over long-distance video calls. Your brand is the intermediary through which your customers (whether they are individual people, or companies made up of people) relate to your business and your employees. If you care about relationships between people, you care about your brand.

What if a business simply doesn’t care about relationships between people? What if its employees really are completely expendable? And what if how well it serves its customers is irrelevant? Well, then it doesn’t really sound like much of a “company” or an “organization” at all, and one has to wonder how it survives! When an “organization” manages to survive without seeking to produce value in the world . . . like a personality cult, a criminal gang, a state-sponsored monopoly, or a pyramid scheme. . . well, then, frankly, that sort of “organization” is simply too far gone for any of our advice on branding to apply.

We take it for granted that most businesses seek to produce value and are concerned about customer relationships: as Ray Kroc, the founder of McDonald’s, put it, “Look after the customers and the business will take care of itself.” So, we take it for granted that relationships matter for all value-producing businesses.

There are still two more causes of non-branding that we need to unpack. We’ll do that in the next article so be sure to get on our email list so you don’t miss it.

But until then, I want to leave you with this thought: non-branding is a real thing.

With our branding agency, Resound, I’ve seen it first hand with clients and others. There are companies in every industry (and especially B2B) that don’t believe that branding is important. They don’t believe that they have what it takes to be remarkable. And they don’t believe that it’s all worth the time and effort.

That’s so unfortunate, not because it’s just good business sense to build a remarkable brand, but because those companies really are remarkable. They simply need to be reminded that they are and why they are.

So don’t forget: you are remarkable.

Check out our branding services on our website if you want to find out more about how Resound helps build remarkable B2B brands. And if you want to improve your own brand, we have a treasure trove of free branding resources that will help you out.

The world needs your brand. Your brand is unique, dare I say, remarkable. So your brand needs to resonate strongly with its authentic identity. But we all know a lot of brands (especially B2B brands) that don’t feel remarkable. They don’t seem very unique. And that’s what I want to dig into today —  the dangers of doing branding wrong, especially accidental branding.

Last time we looked at the first two ways that companies can fall into accidental branding. Those two ways were:

Now I want to look at the second set of ways companies can fall into accidental branding. This risks a lot of confusion with their customers, staff, partners and ultimately creates a short-lived B2B brand.

https://youtu.be/Tzsn0do7OD4

A company’s leadership is the most prominent communicator of the heart of a company: its values, its mission, its purpose. The way leadership presents its values and purpose reverberates throughout the company at every level and resounds through its employees. Attempting to work out a company’s brand without the support of its leadership is almost always fails. Ultimately the leaders of a company are in the best position to recognize what does and does not fit with their company’s driving mission.

Having said that, an organization’s leaders themselves are not its brand. Unless we’re talking about the founder of the company, anybody else in leadership, no matter how amazing or influential or publicly prominent, is merely accidental. The present CEO is not the company’s identity, and the CEO’s personal tastes should not drive brand decisions. “The boss likes this color” or “The boss loves this typeface” are not brand-based reasons to make any decisions. The same is true of any other outspoken or prominent person in a business who may want to influence the brand around pet projects. The brand is not about them.

The leadership of an organization often drives its brand towards the leader’s fantasies rather than the organization’s real abilities! The leader badly wants something, and the organization must transform its identity to serve as a tool for the leader to get it. When rebranding accompanies a change of leadership, often it is a sign that the former “brand” looked too much like the personal seal of the former leader. Unfortunately, the “new” brand often seems uncannily shaped to fit the predispositions of the new leader. Customers and employees feel the dissonance as the brand shifts and look for excuses to leave the brand until a new leader re-invents the business yet again.

Leadership structures, like departments, sub-businesses, regional offices, or teams of people, are equally bad drivers of the brand identity of a business. Your customers usually don’t care much about internal politics, and your org chart tells them nothing about who you are and what you’re here for. Authentic branding will instead help them have consistent and seamless experiences across different divisions, offices, or teams.

The founder of a company is the one possible exception to this rule. The founder of a company is essential to the company: without the founder, it simply wouldn’t have existed. There is no Ford Motor Company without Henry Ford and no Apple without Steve Jobs. The values and vision of a founder are often identified with the values and vision of the company. Still, even the founder of a company is never the whole of its identity. The company aims to outlive its founder, just as Ford and Apple persist to this very day. A founder’s job is to create something larger than themselves. The brand will ultimately take on a life of its own. So, even a founder is not infallible when it comes to recognizing when choices fit or don’t fit with an organization’s identity.

One natural place to look for a brand’s identity is its history. A brand’s history is the story of what the organization has done over time. And what an organization does inevitably reflects who it really is and what it cares about. History gives us a lot of information about a brand. Longevity in a company often indicates customer loyalty, and that loyalty often hangs on a common thread of brand identity which has remained over time. It would be malpractice to try to brand a company without knowing anything about its history.

But no brand is only its history. Even a historical monument, like the Antietam Battlefield, is not just its history. How it is experienced and interpreted will change over time, along with the environment. How much more true for a company that has to constantly grow and adapt!

A company that defines itself by events in its past risks stagnating into irrelevance. Maybe your company did something amazing twenty years ago, but is that how you want to be remembered today? Don’t be like “Uncle Rico”, the 50-year old man forever living in high school varsity football memories!

Maybe your brand is best expressed by retelling the story of your founding in a basement two-hundred years ago because that story best reflects the values and personality traits that continue to animate your brand today. But the mere fact that you have a long and interesting history to share doesn’t automatically make it the best window into your soul.

Perhaps your company hasn’t been around very long; all the more reason to be careful in how you allow the story of your founding to be told and how you connect it with your identity. Stories about what you have done or the reasons the business was started tell us a lot about your brand’s underlying values and purpose. On the other hand, stories about things that simply happened to your business along the way are just coincidences. They’re void of meaning to the rest of the world. It’s like a story that’s all plot and no character development.

Ultimately, the foundational mistake in accidental branding comes from confusing what is important with what is essential. Your goals, competition, leadership, and history are all vitally important components to understand when building a B2B brand. However, Being important doesn’t make them the essence of the business.

The essence of a brand is its unchanging core. Your brand wouldn’t be the same without it. You can – and should – find that essence for your brand. If you succeed, you’ll be well on your way to a Remarkable Brand.

____

Sign up for our newsletter if you’re looking for more brand strategy thinking just like this. You might also enjoy our podcast. And feel free to download any of our free branding tools.