In this essay from Seducing Strangers, I wrote "A brand is just another word for a reputation that can be ruined by more than one person." Thought I would post the essay after reading in Bloomberg what one manager did last week in a Philadelphia Starbucks and how the company is responding.
From Seducing Strangers, How to get People to Buy What You're Selling
I was working in the San Francisco office of a large worldwide agency when one day each of the 150 offices around the globe simultaneously assembled their respective creative, account, and media people. The agency’s main office, in New York, had completed a three-year initiative defining the company’s position on branding. The document was being distributed to the agency’s employees and its clients around the world. They gathered us all in the office’s main entrance for the big unveiling.
I was in the back listening as the president of our office, the man tasked with making the presentation, held up an eight-hundred-page document. It was as thick as a phone book. Nobody was ever going to read it. Worse, by making it so dense, the agency was effectively admitting that it never intended anyone to read it. After all, these people knew to the letter exactly how much ad copy a reader of Fortune or the Wall Street Journal would read about high-tech products and software before losing interest and turning the page.
The agency president made it easier for us by telling us that the document explained the company’s thinking about the relationship between the brand and the client’s business. He held the document above his head and proclaimed it the agency’s “Brand Bible,” which made sense to me because a lot of what it said sounded very religious. The section on why a brand needed more than one defining attribute read, “A brand needs three defining attributes because four are too many and two are not enough.” Oddly enough, that’s the same reason you need to throw three wild pigs into a volcano to satisfy Pele, the Hawaiian goddess of fire and destruction.
It seemed to me that the idea of using advertising to build the brand, as opposed to using the brand to build the business, was leading me, the agency I worked for, and the whole advertising industry down a giant rabbit hole.
Companies are not brands. Logos are not brands. Products and services are not brands. Paris Hilton is not a brand.
A brand is just another word for a reputation that can be ruined by more than one person.
Back in the day, real live people stood behind their products. The names of Henry Ford, John D. Rockefeller, and Anita Roddick were synonymous with Ford Motor Company, Standard Oil, and the Body Shop. Over time, however, businesses grew from enterprises run by sole proprietors to much larger endeavors. As a result, they needed something other than one person to stand for all of the people who worked collectively to create their products. That’s the role of a brand.
Today brands, not individuals, represent the reputations of businesses. A brand is the collective reputation made by a group of people united by a single, strategic purpose: to make customers happy. the reputation of the entire company is affected if anyone of the group screws up.
Paris Hilton is not a brand because Paris Hilton’s reputation can be ruined only by Paris Hilton. Only Paris Hilton makes the promise of what people can expect from her. Only she delivers on that promise. Therefore, Paris Hilton is the only one who gets a reputation that only she can tarnish.
By contrast, for over fifty years, thousands of men and woman working at McCann-Erickson advertising agency offices around the globe told millions of people in different countries and in different languages what to expect from a Coca-Cola. And thousands of Coca-Cola workers, bottlers, truck drivers, and retail sales people made good on those promises with millions of cans and bottles of Coke. Any one of those people could have screwed something up and ruined or at least soiled the reputation of the Coca-Cola Company.
Building a real brand is the long, slow, back-and-forth process of using advertising to set the market’s expectations, then delivering products that meet or exceed them. It’s not a solo act. Brands are built together by ad agencies or other companies who make promises and by companies that make or provide products and services. Neither the promise-making company or the product- or service-providing company is solely responsible for the brand. It’s a two-way street.
The company offering the product or service is the one that foots the bill. It manages the brand--it pays advertising agencies, media companies, branding firms, and others to set expectations in the market for its products and services. But nobody actually possesses the brand. Like a reputation, a brand can be built, managed, enhanced, guarded, and ruined. And also like a reputation, a brand is a perception that exists only in the minds and memories of those who have both expectations of the brand’s promise and experience as to how the brand delivers on its promise. In other words, the thing brand-building companies buy and pay for exists only in people’s heads.
I’ve heard that the Coca-Cola Company keeps the recipe for Coke in a vault below its Atlanta headquarters. The brand the company has spent a gazillion dollars building, however, is kept in the minds of its customers. The Coke logo is all over Atlanta. Yet the Coke <I>brand<I> is invisible, ephemeral. It’s by far the most valuable thing the company has built, but it’s nowhere to be found in the building.
Reputations are built one successfully fulfilled promise at a time.
Traditional brand building is the process of taking a new product or service that nobody knows or cares about and--using words, pictures, music, and stories--creating a promise so compelling to a group of people that, when those products and services make good on that promise, a reputation is rooted so strongly in those consumers’ minds that they cannot imagine their life without that product.
Apple promises to eliminate complexity and ugliness from people’s lives. Facebook promises to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected. Michelin promises safe travels. Products and services are the way a company delivers on its promise; the brand is the reputation the company earns for how well it delivers.
When people talk about a brand as if it’s an advertising agency’s responsibility or invention, I don’t know what to do. When I think of a brand as a reputation-building process, however, I know exactly what to do, because I understand the equation: Promise + successful delivery = good reputation.
I would add that it can take thousands of people to establish and maintain a worldwide reputation but only one or a few to ruin it. If you think about that, you’ll do things differently too. A company can have thousands of well-trained, helpful employees, but if one YouTube video of a surly sixteen-year-old employee goes viral, the reputation of the business takes a real hit.
Recently I saw that an employee at a national upscale, indie-and-earthy woman’s retail clothing chain asked a customer who was breast-feeding her baby in the store to do so in the store’s bathroom. Inside of twenty-four hours, the insulted customer invited her other breast-feeding friends to join her in a protest at the store. Before long, the store was issuing apologies on national TV. The actions of one employee had become a full-blown branding disaster and branding disaster.
A brand’s usefulness as a concept is in direct proportion to the number of people working on the business who can ruin it. Seven hundred thousand people work for Coca-Cola, so it’s probably smart for company leaders to think about protecting--as well as growing--the brand. An excellent way to do this is by keeping employees happy and informed.
For small companies, startups, or individuals, however, it’s much better to concentrate on building a reputation.
As long as you can fit everyone responsible for the success or failure of your business into one room, there’s no need to use the word brand. It’s too abstract and tends to sound like a stand-alone entity that can be built or addressed in and of itself. Try using the word reputation instead. It’s much more compelling and causes people to care a little more.
