The Brand Engineer
The practice of brand management encompasses a host of inputs and variables that seemingly render perfect brand execution an “ungraspable phantom.”
On one hand, as much as brand stewards would like to tightly manage the graphic and symbolic expressions of the brand (i.e., the logo, identity system, and permissible permutations), their organization’s brand marks continuously are subject to misapplication, bastardization, and misappropriation.
At the same time, the fulfillment of the brand promise (based on actual performance, experiences, and outcomes) involves factors that are far removed from and often beyond the control of brand stewards. Truly, perfect brand execution over the long term remains elusive.
Yet, we have many examples of brands that have attained pre-eminent renown, or at least an enviable level of awareness and magnetism. While we may be familiar with the way these brands have achieved their stature (typically from culture and marketing perspectives), discussions about many of the day-to-day — if not moment-by-moment — impacts on brand experiences are mostly left on the sidelines as unremarkable et cetera of underappreciated miscellany.
Ultimately, strong brands reflect a simple, yet difficult-to-activate idea: organizational clarity around values and value, consistently expressed through authentic representations and quality experiences, which are continuously enabled by operational fluency. Brands that exhibit these traits are confident about 1) who they are, 2) the values and value they represent, 3) the experiences people expect from them, and 4) how to deliver expected experiences consistently over time.
While the brand community spends most of its efforts on generating awareness, shaping perceptions, and creating preference, the “experiences” piece often falls off the brand practitioner’s radar. Seemingly, the burgeoning prevalence of “customer experience” roles and the like attempt to acknowledge the importance of the organization’s internal and external brand interactions. However, only infrequently are brand considerations consciously applied in shaping the design of experiences (despite the fact that every interaction impacts the brand).
Putting all this together, it’s clear that brand-aware operational integration forms the foundation for consistent and repeatable brand experiences. In fact, performance criteria relating to quality, when established according to explicit brand standards, create the linkage necessary to enable intended experiences.
If that’s the case, by extension chief brand officers (CBOs) should be fully conversant with and connected to the organization’s operational ecosystem, if not already entrenched in it by his or her role. In other words, the CBO must have a deep understanding of all the mechanisms that lead to the delivery of brand experiences across all the organization’s touchpoints.
Unfortunately, brand purists tend to have limited experience in the productivity-driven sphere of operations and brand promoters typically lack such operational immersion. The system of brand needs a different type of practitioner altogether.
That quintessential practitioner would have the skill, scope, and leeway to inform and nurture the organization’s society, strategy, and operations consistent with the reputational and commercial needs of the brand. The role would require an understanding of, if not deep familiarity with, all people-related and operational considerations so that brand-experience designs would be pragmatic, feasible, and complementary to the endeavors of respective functions.
The role would also entail the more orthodox CBO job description (i.e., knowledge of brand development, branding, and marketing) as well as the ability to shape organizational culture, influence performance standards, inspire leadership buy-in, apply relevant data analytics, and work across levels, functions, and roles with equal effectiveness. This practitioner would essentially be as boundaryless in the role as a CEO, but with a dedicated commission to foster brand values and create brand value through the orchestration of organizational systems.
Collectively, these organizational systems de facto comprise a brand system, the administration of which requires a holistic, enterprise perspective to engineer various brand-influencing mechanisms to produce intended outputs in the form of brand experiences. By extension, the brand system requires something on the order of a chief brand engineer.
Whether the practice of brand management evolves to the notion of brand engineering, in which brand is understood as the product of organizational systems rather than the rote execution of tactics and other image-burnishing stagecraft, depends on a visionary commitment to brand as the organizing principle of the enterprise. In other words, brand would be recognized as the strategic centerpiece of all organizational endeavors.
To behave otherwise is to deny the obvious about the nature of brand reputation and its influence on organizational success (operational, commercial, financial, and otherwise). If every employee impacts brand, and every organizational process is governed by an employee, the brand is the product of an organizational omniverse of people and processes. The implications of that syllogism suggest that working toward brand-oriented organizational systems would be advantageous to reputational stature.
Certainly, this comes with serious challenges. A key difficulty would be finding qualified brand engineers and empowering them beyond the traditional brand management remit. These would be brand practitioners who also are facile with process improvement disciplines, leading by influence, and operating the levers of culture. Equally important, these individuals would need to be capable of negotiating their way into the intimate corners of their colleagues’ operational and administrative domains (as someone who has endured and waged his share of turf battles, this requires equal parts armor and diplomacy).
An additional challenge is the sheer enormity of the organizational omniverse. Taking the brand system to its extremes, every action and interaction puts reputation in play. Considering how many actions and interactions occur over the course of a workday that can affect the brand, this suggests a need for an omniscience unattainable by humans and problematic through technology.
Given the infeasibility of universal control of brand-influencing variables, it seems easier to just open the branding playbook, freshen a logo, tell a few heartwarming stories, or announce a new feel-good philanthropic partnership. In truth, our reputational world exists somewhere between the panoply of organizational actions and interactions and the tried-and-true mechanics of brand cultivation. The brand engineer just might know how and when to turn all the right gears.