In Brand Positioning Tip #3, I introduced the concept of the brand mantra. The term was originally coined by Scott Bedbury during his time at Nike, and it refers to a short 3-5 word phrase created to capture the very essence of the brand’s meaning.

Usually a brand mantra includes or hints at some of the points of difference discovered during the brand positioning exercise (learn more about points of difference here). The most famous example of a brand mantra is from Bedbury’s Nike project, where the team coined the brand mantra Authentic Athletic Performance.

The most important thing to understand about brand mantras is that they are not designed to be externally facing slogans or taglines. Case in point— unless you’ve heard the Nike brand mantra story before, you’ve probably never seen the phrase Authentic Athletic Performance associated with Nike in advertising. Usually you will see an external manifestation of it, Just Do It being the prime example.

This is where most well-meaning brand mantra projects go bad. When brainstorming possible brand mantras, it is important for your team to be very clear that they are not writing advertising copy or taglines for external use. There is no quicker path to an inauthentic brand mantra than heading too quickly toward the language of advertising or marketing.

A brand mantra should resonate internally first. The mantra you chose should reflect the core values, mission, and culture of the company while also staying true to the brand positioning (if this is difficult, you’ve got bigger problems, because it may mean your culture and your brand are out of alignment).

The most powerful brand mantras become part of the DNA of the organization, and are used to guide everyday decisions about strategy, user experience, voice, and a host of other things. The mantra becomes a touchstone that is returned to over and over again— especially when decisions start getting tough.

Once you’ve settled on your brand mantra and tested it internally to ensure it resonates, you can finally start working on taglines. Again, think of a tagline as an external manifestation of the brand mantra— written in a language that will resonate with your target customer instead of your co-workers.

[Read the rest of this post on Dark Matter Matters]

I recently finished the new book Digital Strategies for Powerful Corporate Communications, by Paul Argenti and Courtney Barnes. I must admit, I’m allergic to many Web 2.0 books. This book does have some of that social media handbook feel, but I was excited about it because co-author Paul Argenti, a professor of communications at Dartmouth, is someone whose ideas about communications have really influenced my thinking over the past few years.

Paul was one of the masterminds behind The Authentic Enterprise, a whitepaper that may be one of the most compelling looks into the future of the communications field I have ever seen. I’ve written about it previously here, here, and here.

The following paragraph highlights the point of view from which this book approaches digital communications strategy:

“The business of managing relationships– and therefore, business itself– has changed dramatically in the last decade. Stakeholder empowerment, as it’s come to be known, has shifted the corporate hierarchy of influence from the hands of elite business executives to those of their once-passive audiences, including employees, consumers, media, and investors.”

This paragraph does a nice job illustrating what we might define as the democratization of corporate communications.

—–
Democratization of Corporate Communications:
Any person communicating about any company at any time.
—–

A company’s own communications professionals can no longer expect to be the only communicators of the brand message. Employees are communicators. Customers are communicators. Even former employees and former customers can now communicate on behalf of brands. Scary stuff or exciting stuff, depending on who you are.

One of the things I really liked about this book is that it has an entire chapter highlighting a favorite subject of mine: the need for closer ties between the human resources and communications function. Why? Simple:

In a world where everyone is a communications person, everyone needs to be on brand.

[Read the rest of this post on Dark Matter Matters]

You’ve probably seen at least one of the 9 zillion articles written over the last week about Google Buzz. The feedback from the public has been, well… kinda ugly. There are plenty of articles and blogs analyzing problems with the Buzz launch around user privacy, opt in vs. opt out, and that kind of thing, so I won’t rehash those arguments.

In this post, we’ll look at the brand mistake Google made in how they launched Buzz.

This article from the San Francisco Chronicle website about a class action lawsuit filed against Google caught my eye because of the following paragraph:

Google turned Gmail “into a social networking service and that’s not what they signed up for, Google imposed that on them without getting their consent,” said Kimberly Nguyen, consumer privacy counsel with EPIC of Washington, D.C.

That sentence is a great articulation of why Buzz is a classic case of not securing brand permission, a subject I have covered here and here.

To be of any value, a brand must create meaning in people’s minds. People associate certain terms or ideas with that brand. If you want to see a awesome experiment in brand meaning, check out the Brand Tags site.

[Read the rest of this post on Dark Matter Matters]

We are excited to announce that Chris Grams has joined New Kind as President and Partner. Chris has over 15 years of experience in the communications field, including 10 years at Red Hat, the world’s leading open source software company. The open source way—including themes like openness, collaboration, transparency, community, and meritocracy—are key influences in his work, a perfect fit with New Kind.

At Red Hat, Chris played a key role in building the brand and culture, most recently in the role of Senior Director, Brand Communications + Design. During his time there, the company grew from about 150 employees in one office in North Carolina to an S&P 500 business with almost 4,000 employees and over 55 offices around the world.

Look for Chris to blog on brand, community, and culture, here at New Kind and on Dark Matter Matters.

When I first entered the corporate world five years ago after nearly twenty years of running my own business, I was definitely a fish out of water. As a direct report to the CEO, I participated in many of the most important conversations taking place in the company. Being a designer, I often had points of view rather different from the other executives sitting around the table. Sometimes, after offering such a point, I would find them looking at me like I was insane.

The last two days I’ve posted blogs based on articles in recent editions of MITSloan Management Review and the Harvard Business Review. I thought I would share a sample of the best quotes from these magazines— today I’ll focus on HBR (JULY/AUG 2009); tomorrow I’ll look at the MITSloan. While these thoughts and research-based ideas may be new to the business world, they are not to the design world.

The Big Shift— Measuring the Forces of Change

“One of the easiest but most powerful ways firms can achieve the performance improvements promised by technology is to jettison management’s distinction between “creative talent” and the rest of the organization. All workers can continually improve the performance by engaging in creative problems solving, often by connecting with peers inside and outside the firm.”

from HBR; July/Aug 2009; “Leadership in the New World”

“An executive team on its own can’t find the best solutions. But leadership can generate more leadership deep in the organization.”

“Embrace disequilibrium— keeping people in a state that creates enough discomfort to induce change, but not so much that they fight, flee, or freeze.”

from HBR; July/Aug 2009; “Strategy in the New World: The 10 Trends You Have to Watch”

“Corporate leaders need to demonstrate to civil society that they understand popular and political concerns related to executive compensation, risk management, board oversight, and the treatment of employees facing layoffs.”

Management models “need to incorporate more-realistic version of human behavior— most likely by drawing on behavior economics, becoming more dynamic, and integrating real-world feedback— and… business leaders need to get better at using them.”

Regulation in the New World: Government in Your Business

“The changes afoot have been on the horizon for some time, thanks to long-term trends such as deepening public distrust of business.”

Shareholders First? Not So Fast…

“Why should past labor (capital) receive so much preference over current labor (employees)?”

“Consider that there are literally scores of recent studies showing the gains in profitability and productivity that companies have made— not by putting investors’ interests first but by implementing high-commitment work practices. These include investing in training, decentralizing decision making, and having pay contingent on organizational, not just individual, performance. Other sources show the benefits companies reap from customer loyalty and high levels of customer satisfaction.”

[DB NOTE: I was struck by the use of "high-commitment" rather that "accountability" in the paragraph above. Machine parts need to be "accountable" but innovative organizations thrive via deep personal commitment. Fodder for a future blog]

Restoring America’s Competitiveness

“Corporate management must overhaul its practices and governance structures so the no longer exaggerate the payoffs and discount the dangers of outsourcing production and cutting investments in R&D.”

“Stop blaming Wall Street for short-term behavior… When companies promise to increase returns quarter after quarter, that’s what Wall Street expects. But when they articulate a credible long-term strategy and demonstrate a capacity to execute that strategy, the capital markets have given them the necessary room to achieve it.”

“Managers would serve their companies more wisely by recognizing that informed judgment is a better guide to making such decisions than an analytical model loaded with arbitrary assumptions. There is no way to take the guesswork out of the process.

“Only be rejuvenating its innovative capabilities can America return to a path of sustainable growth.”

Sane or insane? You decide. More tomorrow…

For too long, advertising firms and marketing groups have misbranded branding. In an effort to make it sound mysterious, they’ve added “TM” symbols and acted like they had some incredible process that the rest of the world missed. Too often, they overcharged and under delivered, and even more often, a lot of smart business leaders fell for it.

At face value, branding promises control and cash, both of which are openly worshipped by said business leaders, many of whom continue to pay top dollar for access to this “mysterious” formula for measuring a company’s worth.

The simple truth is that branding an organization isn’t really much different from building a reputation for an individual. You build a great brand by doing the right things, authentically, over and over again. It takes time. There are no short cuts, no secret ingredients. And there never were.

In the July/August issue of the Harvard Business Review, there’s an interesting article identifying “The 10 Trends You Have To Watch.” Honestly, I love the HBR, but these “trends” do make me smile a bit.

Like the final words of the intro:

“We also see signs of new forces emerging… The overall picture is of an altered business landscape. It does seem there will be no going back to the pre-crisis world.”

You don’t say.

Honestly, I’ll be quoting that line often. Seems a lot of smart, successful business leaders think they can continue to compete like they have for the past 20 years. It shouldn’t shock anyone that our world is changing by the minute, but I’m continually surprised by how many people think the old way will continue to serve their needs.

Maybe they’ll listen to the HBR. Maybe not. But, if they want to compete and innovation is fundamental to their ability to do so, well, they have a lot of changing ahead of them.

And with change on the menu, HBR provides evidence of another trend you might have heard about: Trust in business is running out. And here I found these revolutionary words:

“Regaining trust also means dispensing with the view that the only objective of management is to increase shareholder value.”

They note that 62 percent of adults in 20 countries trusted corporations less in December 2008 than they had the year before. This should concern strategists because “a low-trust environment makes everything about doing business more difficult… Loss of trust leads to higher transaction cost, lower brand value, and greater difficulty attracting, retaining and managing talent.”

News flash: this is not a trend.

This is how it has always been. Marketing gurus and their business cohorts may have confused matters over the past several decades. While their pockets are full, they’ve played a huge part in today’s business crisis environment.

Once and for all, branding is NOT marketing. Marketing is a brand tactic. It’s past time for all of us to get back to the fundamentals of branding. Authenticity. Value. Reputation. Credibility. Trust.

Famed social ecologist and the “father of modern management,” Peter Drucker once advised that the only purpose of a business is to create customers. That type of thinking lead companies to conduct marketing research, determine who their customers are and what their customer want to hear. They created positioning platforms, messaging, advertising— the whole nine yards— in an effort to create customers. For the second half of the 20th century, that model kicked ass. At least for the advertising and marketing firms who did it well. Or could convince their clients they did it well.

Today’s world is different. Duh. Customers are in control. They don’t believe authoritative voices. They don’t trust their messages. They no longer trust the media such companies employ. They don’t have to; they now connect to more authentic voices that they trust via the internet and other social media. It’s second nature.

The broad and rapidly growing consumer preference for networked media means that traditional advertising is now suspect.  The media of advertising comes with an underlying meaning— an agreed upon contract that the advertiser may bullshit you if that helps them make a sale.  That’s the meaning. We all know it. The medium is the message.

So what’s a company to do? Branding is about building credibility. About establishing and scaling your reputation. So, why use social or networked media— such trendy media— to build brand?

Networked media isn’t important because it’s trendy. It’s important because it creates customer-driven innovation. It creates brand evangelists. It can help build a collaborative internal culture and engaged work force. It demands authenticity— especially in the form of customer experience.

So can Twitter really save brands that don’t provide good experiences? That’s the question asked by Fast Company blogger Rupa Chaturvedi, who cautions companies against relying on social media to influence customer behavior when the brand doesn’t live up to the hype they’re trying to create.

These networks can be a highly effective way to build your brand externally. But there’s a catch. It only works when the messages are true. You know they’re true when they’re open. And transparent. And valuable. You know they’re successful when the network grows organically.

But Twitter, Facebook, etc. are the media. They are not the strategy. The strategy is community building. Community building is the ‘new’ marketing.