Purists and Promoters

There are many purists in branding, the type of practitioner who agonizes over the symbolism behind a minute flourish of the logo, belabors the precise wording of the brand positioning statement, or struggles to infuse the brand with magisterial meaning as though inspiring an organizational army. I know, because I was a brand purist for most of my career.

The brand purist spends disproportionate energy and money dialing in the details of brand marks and identity systems — and the corresponding brand guidelines, nomenclature, architecture, and voice — when the more consequential expression of brand emerges organically and over time through the origins and doings of the organizational society and its operations.

We fight to protect and preserve our precious brand iconography under the belief that the organization’s logos and their use are sacrosanct — even as the marketing team and other self-anointed creatives dabbling across the organization shadow-brand below the radar.

We craft stories about exceptional moments when our brand made a difference in our communities or people’s lives, not appreciating the mundane truth that most customers simply just want our brand’s products to work as promised or for a human to answer before reaching the last Matryoshka doll of the automated call menu. (Talk about making life better!)

We engage in extreme introspection to unearth the deeper meaning of our brand even as the organization is preparing another round of layoffs, recalling defective products, facing financial challenges, or fighting damaging lawsuits (not to mention entrusting social media accounts to callow interns or wading into tinderbox social issues).

We deliberate about the nature of brand and organizational culture. We know there’s a secret sauce that integrates the organization and synthesizes as brand culture, but the ingredients are elusive.

We ponder all these aspects of brand because we know that identity, association, esteem, assurance, and relevance all matter in helping us navigate the world at large and in orienting ourselves toward people, groups, and organizations. These socially significant concerns loosely arrange around “values,” the sort by which individuals relate and respond to organizations and their brands on an emotional, if enigmatic, basis.

On the other hand, we also know that practical considerations like convenience, affordability, performance, competence, usability, and availability usually trump psychosocial abstractions in brand evaluation. These utilitarian criteria reflect “value,” i.e., verifiable, observable, and tangible outcomes that meet or exceed expectations, and which represent real or perceived worth for the organization’s customers and constituents. (Of course, perceived value isn’t always rational; why drive a Porsche if you can afford a Lambo?)

However much we purists overanalyze the subject, brand fundamentally is the shorthand through which our organizations express their values and value. We signal our values through traditional cultural cornerstones (who we are, what we do, how we do it, why we do it), and activate our value through our people and operations. These are the lodestones of brand.

Most brand purists understand commercial appeal as the end game of brand cultivation, even as they remain mindful of the values and value lodestones. However, in our current moment, the thoughtful nurturing of brand seems to have given way to expediency.

The new breed of practitioners leans fully into brand promotion, often trimming the sails of their brand vessels according to the fickle winds of transient trends. Rather than regarding their brands as stalwart representatives of institutional values and value, brand promoters interpret the organizational brand as an opportunistic instrument to pursue mind and market share.

But the thoughtful, diligent, and resolute approach of brand purists remains as important today as ever. One only needs to read the headlines to know how easily brand representatives lose their bearings, whether in the pursuit of relevancy, in virtue signaling the social cause du jour, or through off-brand messaging or tactics.

Still, brand strategies typically draw from both the purists and the promoters, so the two camps frequently intersect in day-to-day brand activities in varying degrees of productive cooperation. This commingling of affairs can make decisions and management of brand and branding convoluted, sometimes contradictory, and often confounding. A large measure of any confusion owes to the fact that brand functions in different ways across the organizational ecosystem.

Indeed, those serious about brand should be serious about exploring the nature of their organizational ecosystem and its corresponding brand-influencing systems. Even the most basic organization is a composite of expertise, exigencies, strategies, subcultures, market realities, and operational readiness, all of which reflect multiple systems that collectively drive brand differentiation, performance, and reputation.

In fact, the organizational brand is constantly influenced by institutional, relational, commercial, and transactional systems, each of which lend fluidity to the brand’s cultivated expression. Like a body of water, the brand is subject to fluctuating currents that are almost imperceptible at the surface but continuously churning by virtue of various influences across layers and reaches of the organization.

Because of the challenges inherent in these constantly swirling brand influences — good and bad — we often default to more simplistic brand-building formulas that ignore details and distinctions that matter to brand coherence. Culture, purpose, authenticity, storytelling, relevance, and the like typically comprise chapters in the basic brand playbook, but brand practitioners rarely have time or motivation to truly appreciate the subtleties, nuances, and hidden dangers of each in brand execution.

These pages probe multiple aspects of brand and branding in a way that may appeal more to brand purists than brand promoters. Nevertheless, it should at least offer a different way of thinking such that anyone engaged in an enterprise of brand can apply more insight and refinement to their endeavors. And, ultimately, the mindfulness of brand purists and machinations of brand promoters are inconsequential compared to powerful brand performance, which in fact depends on the workings of complex and often unruly organizational systems.

Yet, as unmanageable as they often are, these organizational systems can be harnessed, programmed, or channeled toward desired brand-supporting outcomes, but only if the entire organization is oriented to a brand-first ideology, where brand itself is the overriding operational premise.

And this, ultimately, is the gauntlet thrown for organizations, and especially senior leadership: to understand and act according to the reality that brand reputation is the function of a multidimensional organizational system. Within this system every member of the organization wields brand influence (even if that’s a scarier thought than one might care to ponder). Every process and procedure codes the brand’s performance. Every touchpoint interaction is a brand experience hanging in the balance.

If all this is true, it follows that brand should become the paramount orientation for the organization, directly informing its culture, strategy, and operations.