Emerging practices in branding – a strategy for strategy

When asked to give a presentation with the title ‘the future of branding’ audiences usually expect to get examples from brands that innovate and point to the future. This time, we took a different approach. Instead of talking about branding as a noun, we decided to speak about it as a verb, about how branding is carried out. This is a look at emerging trends in branding as a practice. These are changes led by the people who lead branding programmes – usually branding agencies together with the clients who hire and work with them.

Our presentation looks at five aspects: methodology, relationship, culture, identity and engagement.

1. Methodology or why the next big thing isn’t

For a long time, the industry has tended to jump from one marketing fad to the other. There is a whole side-industry to the marketing discipline which repurposes kernels of academic discoveries or just plain common sense insights, rebrands them as buzz-words and turns them into ‘marketing fundamentalism’.

The typical structure is ‘It’s all about X’, with X being the flavour of the month: values, experience, ‘love marks’, one word equity, buzz, relationship, customer equity, customer centricity…

Many of those ideas are important, some are empty, but the point is that it’s one thing when a single idea is used to create a focus for a book, and another when it becomes a dogma that takes over an agency or an organisation – that’s dangerous.

It’s ok for your agency to have a methodology; even more so, it should have methodologies, but beware an agency with The Methodology™. In a world where almost no axioms are left, and where best practices should be reused carefully due to the increased complexity of business, communication and audience dynamics, dogmatic approaches lead to failure.

Our reality is messy, complex, sophisticated and unique. Trying to squeeze reality into a template or a black-box is pointless.

We appreciate the fact that in the most familiar project or situation, there will always be something new.

When we approach strategic problems we try to approach them with certain looseness. We let the situation direct any tools or models used. We have a robust collection of methodologies that we can utilise and adjust to fit a unique problem. This ‘emerging theory’ approach is better equipped to deal with the paradoxical nature of marketing situations, and with real life – in all its messy, strange, mysterious glory.

In this approach, you figure out the tools, even shape them, as you delve into the problem, embracing its messiness. Then, gradually, you see meaning emerging and possible solutions take shape.

The Cracker project is a case in point: This could easily be approached as ‘yet another packaging project’. But it wasn’t.

It was full of contradictions and quirks: there was no clear free slot for it in the market, no audience or retailer was clearly waiting for it and the USP seemed to go against the fundamental nature of the category.

By getting back to basics and mapping the different stories juices tell, we were able to create a unique concept and get the product picked up by major retail players. (read more about this project)

2. Relationships or Branding that plays together, stays together

Maybe because branding is positioned as a premium professional service, it tends to collect unnecessary etiquette protocols. The marketing manager leads the programme and won’t let others near it. In traditional agencies he is in contact with a relationship manager who connects him to a consultant who cannot speak to the client directly unless he is unveiled in a presentation. The consultant cannot speak to designers, because he is ‘a suit’, so he speaks to a creative director who’s versed in the way of the suit and can translate it to the gentle geniuses of the creative practices.

This absurd tradition creates a broken telephone effect and needless frustration. Those multiple translations and limitations on communication and perspective are a sure way for meaning to distort or just get lost, as well as a lot of needless political pain.

Instead, we like to see what happens when everybody interacts, knowledge shared openly and conflicting agendas used to spark creative solutions.

The Pasta Pagani product catalogue is a case in point. It was born thanks to close interaction between consultants, designers and a variety of roles on the client’s side. This catalogue is a deliverable born out of marrying an aesthetic design led approach with practical business sensibility. The result doesn’t just look good and is different from anything else in its category, it also bridges the work of sales people with the work of the people working in the factory’s food lab. (Read more about this project).

3. Culture or There’s no insight like local insight

As an international agency, there are two traditional dogmas we try to keep away from. The first is that of the ‘benevolent imperialist’, with consultants marching into a new culture like masters of the universe whose international-marketing-guru knowledge cannot fail – all-knowing conquistadors. At the other extreme, you have over-PC-anthropologists trying to go native and ending up looking like an enthusiastic dad in a school disco.

There is a delicate ecology created when local and global cultures interact. That’s why we try to combine our international experience with local insight.

While creating the retail design for MCS/Say in Romania, we started the project by walking around different stores with the client. Our entire team visited their sites, competitors’ stores and popular Romanian retail players in other categories. We discovered that most telecom players were just imposing on the market a bad recreation of some western retail trends. We studied what makes the Romanian audience tick and then adapted our best practices to work in harmony with this local sensibility. (Read more about this project)

4. Identity or Beauty at work

Let’s admit it: Branding has become the ‘prima donna’ of marketing.

Naturally, companies and their brands tend to adopt bigger aspirations as time goes by, and branding, developed in the later stages of marketing’s evolution and becoming more dominant as a company evolves, has a tendency to deal with ‘higher needs’.

‘The dirty work’ is left for sales, or advertising. With many organisations going as far as assigning separate managers to MarComs and advertising, out of an ambition to recognise the importance of those ‘higher brand needs’ and separate them from ‘commercial’ advertising.

As a result, many organisations find that the huge investment in branding and marketing communications is ‘not working hard enough’. Living with the results of a branding programme becomes a little like moving-in with someone very attractive just to discover they are lousy kissers, have bad hygiene and don’t help with the rent.

Instead, we like to create brand identities that work as a system and are not afraid of getting their hands dirty. Our work on No1 and Sohar are good examples. While the identity has an aesthetic sensibility that communicates a differentiated message emerging from the strategy, it doesn’t stop there. The identity system is created with the sales applications and everyday promotion in mind. That way the identity doesn’t just communicate the high aspirations, it connects those aspirations with everyday business.

5. Engagement or organic branding

Too often, a robust branding programme spends most of its life inside the marketing department. Then, ‘when it’s ready’, it is launched with fanfare on the unsuspecting, or worse, the highly suspicious, organisation. From our experience, most branding failures happen on implementation because the organisation won’t get behind a programme people don’t believe in.

Instead, we recommend engaging the entire organisation from day one of the programme and increasing this engagement after launch.

With Budapest Bank, strategy emerged from a series of workshop with a mixture of middle and senior management and key employees. Then, once it got accepted, and while identity was being developed, the organisation was engaged from the top – with workshops bringing senior managements on board; and from the bottom – with workshops creating brand champions.

Brand strategy was launched without fanfare, as a practical tool, bringing together existing programmes and different levels of the organisation, months before the identity was launched. When the actual identity was launched the entire organisation was already busy with both management and grassroots initiatives that bring the strategy to life, and the new ideas have been trickling in those internal activities as well as external marcoms, so changing the identity felt like a reasonable step forward, rather than a skin-deep marketing activity. (Read more about this project)

In summary – it’s all connected

We believe you should embrace the messiness to find meaning, instead of trying to fight it. Life is messy. Marketing is getting messier and messier.

We see disappearing barriers between organisation disciplines and agency disciplines; between brand and audience; between media channels; between product and brand.

We see more and more strategic challenges which are multidimensional and paradoxical. We see old marketing practices that stop working, sometimes unexpectedly, almost inexplicably.
Too many marketing people out there are shutting their eyes, trying to pretend nothing has changed.

We believe by recognising the messiness, you don’t give up meaning, but actually improve your chances of finding unique, authentic solutions.

We prefer to be systemic, not systematic – to be strategic about strategy. So instead of a purely analytical, modernist, approach that claims to paint a full, rational, map of your situation and then attacks a single aspect, we try to see the whole hidden in the parts, and create a state of flow that is in harmony with the basic interconnectedness of all things.

We believe that when you appreciate it’s all connected, you can create sustainable brands.

Sustainable brands, like any sustainable concept, give more than they take – to you and to your audiences.

Because sustainable brands promote sustainable relationships, and we all know that sustainable relationships create sustainable business.

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Aaron Shields and Sam Holmes will facilitating and exhibiting at Engage ‘08: the largest annual employee engagement event in the UK. We will be exhibiting in our big black inflatable igloo, so come by and grab a biscuit.

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The Riyadh Chamber of Commerce is hosting an intimate seminar on the future of brand development in the kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Ian Dunlop, consultant at Brandinstinct explored five trends in brand development observed around the globe.

The seminar was sponsored by Enshaa Holdings

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