The brand system exists in every organization of size. Metaphorically, the brand system is similar to the “Butterfly Effect.” Every single organizational action influences delivered brand experiences. When we operate according to this premise, we become more purposeful about how our organizations function in service of the brand.
Brand system theory rests on the following premises:
Brand reputation is a function of value delivered and values demonstrated.
Expertise is the wellspring of organizational value and values.
Experiences are the supreme evaluative criteria of brand performance.
Operating culture determines the quality of brand experiences.
Brand reflects the quality of the organizational system and the proficiency of its operations.
Brand system theory posits that countless organizational decisions, actions, and operations ultimately accrue to a delivered brand experience. These brand experiences can be tactile, sensory, virtual or imagined. They can be fleeting or long-lasting. They can occur spontaneously, predictably or randomly.
The upstream elements comprising the brand system can be tightly managed, absently tended, or casually engaged, with consequent downstream influence on brand experiences.
Ultimately, the brand is not the province of a single designated steward or function; instead, it is the embodiment of an integrated system that every team member and all operational efforts influence to varying degrees.
The Brand System
For a short introduction to brand system theory, download the companion e-book here: http://bit.ly/3LkkYdf
Key Tenets of Brand System Theory
Value Proposition — We must know what we are good at (our expertise and capabilities) before we can develop a legitimate brand-aware strategy and supportable brand promise.
Brand Promise — Fulfilling our brand promise depends on delivering brand experiences that are consistent with our organization’s value proposition.
Operating Culture — Delivering brand-affirming experiences requires an integrated and aligned operating culture that’s predicated on defined brand outcomes.
Operating System — Our brand-oriented operating culture must be supported with high-functioning processes, systems, and procedures that reliably and predictably contribute to favorable brand experiences.
Business Strategy — Our roadmap must acknowledge brand-critical priorities and address any deficiencies in delivering strong brand experiences.
Organizational Culture — Our people culture prefigures our reputational character and necessarily must reflect the nature of our expertise, the purpose of our work, and the values we espouse.
A Reputational System
Brand reputation is the product of an organizational system, or more accurately, a brand system. The system encompasses people, culture, and operations, which are configured by strategy and resources to produce value.
Ideally, the value generated also adheres to organizational values that undergird meaningful and positive relationships with stakeholders and guide the design and delivery of brand experiences. Thus, the reputational brand is an expression of the values demonstrated and value delivered through the organization’s brand system.
The brand system’s values/value reputational formula orients to five essential factors:
Institutional expertise – The brand represents a value proposition based on unique, exceptional, or high-barrier organizational expertise.
Communal engagement– The nature of expertise is central to the development of an authentic, coalescent culture that encourages the organization’s people to be ambitious, purposeful, and peerless.
Representational relevance – The brand stands for something (i.e., values), and especially something evidently meaningful to its stakeholders.
Commercial expedience – The brand embodies a vessel of value that attracts and appeals to those who buy from, invest in, lend to, donate to, or otherwise transact with the organization.
Operational cohesion – By virtue of its correlation with value, the brand informs the priorities and performance of the organization’s operating culture.
The brand system runs in the background of every productive enterprise and, especially when untended, sometimes yield results that don’t meet expectations for the brand. However, with conscious effort and purposeful design, elements of the brand system can be brought to the foreground in shaping the organization’s culture, strategy and operations to improve brand outcomes.
Under brand system theory, the organizational entity — and the system it represents — takes center stage. We can refer to this principal subject as the “organizational brand,” “corporate brand,” “institutional brand,” “parent brand,” “master brand,” or “legal brand,” but the common denominator for all these labels is the continuous pursuit of reputational merit.
For the reputational brand, the nature of the organizational network is paramount. Indeed, the organizational network is the reputational brand system. That said, the brand system is a fluid entity; it has multiple currents, channeled by people and operating practices, that intermix across the system’s architecture.
It’s no overstatement to say that every organizational decision or action alters these currents, with corresponding downstream brand effects. The confluence of these currents influences outcomes (brand experiences) that continuously nudge, jostle, or jolt reputation along a best/worst continuum.
These pages, and specifically the “Chapters” pages and the “Excerpts” blog, address aspects of the brand system in more detail. Throughout this website, when I refer to “brand,” I am specifically referring to all the emotions, experiences, notions, impressions, sensations, discernments, and attributes associated with an organizational entity, including its people, products, and services. Collectively, these and other perceptions add up to a brand image or, as advanced here, the reputational brand.
(Note, pointedly, this discussion circumnavigates the “commercial” or “marketing” brand, which is an altogether different set of particulars and not immediately germane to organizational brand reputation.)