Unlock Brand Achievements
If you follow brand-oriented communities on LinkedIn, you’ll find much energy devoted to storytelling as a means of securing relevance, meaning, and emotional connections for the brand.
Certainly, storytelling has long connected the folklores and sagas of cultures and peoples across generations, so it’s natural to incline toward talismanic narratives when positioning the brand. Ultimately, though important in the brand toolbox, storytelling and other tactics are equivalent to video-game assignments within given levels of play. Perform the tactics well and your brand will be rewarded — and potentially elevated to a higher reputational platform.
Just as increasing mastery of a game (i.e., successfully completing assignments) is reflected by achievement rewards, so too will strong brand execution result in achievement rewards for the brand. Unwrapping that analogy, while we may simultaneously operate at many levels of brand execution, we should still have an understanding of what reputational brand mastery at any level would look like. Here’s how that might look:
Level One Achievements
Authentic — The brand reflects who you are, what you do, and how you do it.
Purposeful — The brand is planned and developed according to a coherent rationale and process.
Meaningful — The brand conveys the “I get it” that makes it relevant to employees and customers.
Actionable — The brand is able to be internalized and operationalized.
Level Two Achievements
Ownable — The brand is clearly differentiated and uniquely proprietary in character.
Valuable — The brand achieves preference, drives revenues and market share, and earns loyalty.
Magnetic — The brand attracts people, investments, partnerships, and support.
Expandable — The brand has power to cross into new markets, sectors, and product/service categories.
Level Three Achievements
Sustainable — The brand is antifragile regardless of social/political/economic events or self-inflicted crises.
Adaptable — The brand can accommodate evolution of the business or organization.
Strategic — The brand is a fundamental determinant of organizational and operational priorities.
Experiential — The brand orients people and processes to consistently deliver at- or above-standard experiences.
Levels one and two respectively (mostly) reflect the “values” and “value” prerequisites for the reputational brand. Level three addresses matters of brand durability. And, yes, I do regard achievements relating to value as more challenging (a level up, anyway) than those relating to values.
I wonder how practitioners might assess their own brands against this or some other achievement-level framework. I also wonder what other levels and achievements could be added to the framework.