Brand Integration

Brand practitioners are not programmed to think of brand in terms of a large, complex, organizational system. Instead, brand activities tend to fall into the playbook chapters of Identity, Image, and Influence, each of which often operate under the authority or oversight of various roles and functions whose activities and objectives don’t always mesh. This doesn’t much operate as a system let alone a well-integrated organizational process.

While smaller organizations may enjoy tighter connectivity among brand practice areas, resource challenges (staff, time, budgets) militate against system-oriented brand management.

In any case, the notion of brand management as methodical, orderly, and efficient typically yields to the realities of organizational dynamics and priorities, not to mention ever-changing circumstances.

With that in mind, it’s time for the brand community to rethink the practice of the craft. Notably, brand practitioners should be reorienting their playbook-driven, role-based methodologies toward driving a more integrated brand consciousness throughout the framework and fabric of the organization.

If we acknowledge the existence of the brand system, we must also acknowledge that gaining and preserving reputational equity requires a high degree of brand-attentive integration across the organization and beyond the customary remit of brand practitioners.

In this regard, traditional brand strategies and tactics are less consequential than organization-wide proficiency — and specifically the competence of people and effectiveness of processes. More to the point, brand-led organizations understand that reputation is less the result of brilliant brand campaigns, tactics, or gimmicks; instead, reputation is driven by consistent performance across the organizational domain, especially in regard to stated or implied brand expectations.

Indeed, elevating brand as a paramount operational consideration is the central tenet of the consciously devised brand system. However, it’s useful to think more expansively and consider brand as the organizing principle for the organization itself (this is what brand purists mean when they invoke the nebulous phrase “brand truth”).

Organizing around the brand means hiring and retaining a nucleus of talent to support the continued expansion of brand-differentiating organizational expertise. In turn, the nature of organization’s expertise informs the organization’s culture. In other words, the brand’s foundational DNA of expertise molds culture, rather than vice versa.

Similarly, with brand considerations at the forefront, organizational strategy becomes a proxy for brand objectives (i.e., to advance the organization’s values and value), which come to fruition as brand experiences through operational fluency.

Brand practitioners can lead their organizations toward the higher-level brand consciousness inherent in the brand system. But there is a ticking clock that they need to heed. The lofty strategic, tactical, and creative realms of brand development, brand management, brand marketing, and branding in general are already rapidly deorbiting as AI prompt engineering hurtles upward. Indeed, the future of traditional brand work figures to be a soulless enterprise, much as it will be driven by AI models.

The good news is that brand reputation depends more on things meaningful, multifaceted, and, in many ways, mysterious. To operate in the space of the brand system is akin to embracing the enigmatic nature of the Tao (there is a “way,” but also something beyond the way).

Still, it’s likely, the brand-first ideology as advocated here will exist as a theoretical ideal even as some practical application of its underlying concepts may gain traction. As much as I dislike the idea of AI hegemony, I suspect that AI will be a useful (if not unavoidable) tool to integrate brand sensibilities into organizational planning and operational execution.

Until that day, brand practitioners will toil within their respective realms with great imagination, creativity, and brilliance, which hopefully continue to synergize masterfully to advance their organizations’ reputational standing.