To Brand or not to, Brad.

Everyone should have a story like this. It seems as if somewhere, a page from my life was made into 47 different after school specials and 115 movies produced between 1983 and 1987. Does art imitate life or is life merely following the script handed to it by art? How many licks until you get to the center of a tootsie pop?

Brad was so much like the villain in all those mid-eighties teen romp films that I still wince at the idea that we were ever friends. Brad was much like a shrinky dinked Iceman from Top Gun. He had Iceman’s flattop and Hitler youth looks. Brad never really played sports but that didn’t matter. Huge doses of steroids (seriously) work wonders on the 13-year-old body and Brad looked like one of those freakishly built, pre-pubescent Russian gymnastic stars with the unnatural bulging muscles.

I guess I was friend of Brad because everyone else liked him or at least feared him. His synthesized testosterone temper earned him a reputation that other eighth graders avoided like a wedgie. Brad was not cool but no one dared say it. Becoming friends with Brad was like joining the army through transcription and even though I never really like him, over time he became tolerable.

Brad’s parents moved a lot. So when his parents moved a few towns away, Brad would come to my house to connect with the old crew. It was on such a day that Brad came over, and together with Amber (who will be explained in a second), we did what kids of our age did. We walked around the neighborhood.

Amber was what is defined at that age as my girlfriend. We were not old enough to go on dates or anything of the ilk. At that age, being girlfriend and boyfriend simply means when a slow song comes on (usually super rawk group Cinderella’s “Don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone”) one should migrate over to slow dance with whoever your girlfriend was that week. Only, with Amber, the week had turned into two years. It started as kind of an accident. When we all first started junior high we played the all too typical game of musical dance partners where everyone pairs up with the person they will send cute little notes and custom mix tapes of love songs to. I guess I wasn’t paying attention with the music turned off and everyone grabbed a cheerleader and I got stuck with Amber. I tried to end it but she cried and I hate it when girls cry.

So here was Brad, Amber and I. I had a football game to go play, which left Brad and Amber to discuss things that 14-year-olds discuss. We beat Norcross for the county championship and I sacked the QB who would later play QB at University of Georgia (Go me!). But the elation of the win was not enough to quell the hurt that I felt when the final buzzer rang. Brad and Amber were now boyfriend and girlfriend, just waiting for a slow song.

Ironically, this happened to me again but with a slight twist. Our little town of Athens is celebrated for its artistry yet its prowess in marketing to the outside world is dismal. Every year our town’s various tourism and economic development entities run ads full of bullet points, clichéd pictures and some campy headline like “Have it all in Athens!”

My team and I decided we could help. We convened a group of the city’s tourism and economic development stakeholders. The Chamber of Commerce, Convention and Visitors Bureau (CVB), the Economic Development Foundation, the mayor’s office, the convention center and several area businesses were all invited to a presentation.
We were really on our game in this presentation. The concept we presented was called “Only in Athens.”

The concept and drive behind Only in Athens was to develop a brand that could be used to attract both visitors and relocatees of an individual and organizational nature. We marketed the idea that our seemingly paradoxical existences indicate our unique spirit that is desirable to businesses and individuals alike. For example, in an ad we showed two restaurants on our main drag in downtown. To the first restaurant pointed an arrow which said “Chateau D’ Pomerol, $198 a bottle” to the second restaurant pointed an arrow which said “Chateau D’ Milwaukee, $3.50 a pitcher. The ad then went on to explain that Athens’ biggest selling point is great diversity peacefully existing in one area. Diversity of geography, business, entertainment and lifestyle make Athens what it is. This approach is in opposition to the too often bullet point laden junk that so typifies destination marketing. We told the relocating businesses that our unique offerings were something that they needed and that they could only find in Athens. Similarly, we told the prospective visitors that unique cultural and enriching experiences also exist to make Athens a fine destination.

Walking out of the meeting, I knew we nailed it. You could see the glimmer in the attendee’s eyes as they imagined all the other seemingly paradoxical relationships that exist in Athens. We had struck a cord and were awaiting a flood of new and even better ideas to emerge from within the strategy. It took only days to get the e-mail.
And we were crestfallen. The head of the Conventions and Visitors Bureau dispatched an e-mail to the mayor calling for the group that had convened to reconvene for a more expansive study of which he would happily be in charge of. He powder puffed our efforts and vacuumed all the momentum we had created in pursuit of his ambitions.
Welcome back Brad.

In the three years it took the CVB to craft a brand for the city there was enough tomfoolery to upstage the Benny Hill show. The first firm considered promised to do a full review of operational effectiveness of the CVB and other brand entities. That firm was promptly dismissed because this effort was about the CVB trying to make itself relevant, not to let everyone see how the sausage is made.
The second firm was ousted for giving several communities the same brand. All of the smoke and mirrors that the CVB director had used to persuade the stakeholders towards and out-of-town firm ended up being just smoke and mirrors. The dismissal of the second firm was kept quite as to not wake those asleep at the wheel. The third and final effort used a professor from a college a state away, the bountiful resource of about ten thousand dollars and came up with something profound. Athens: Life Unleashed!

The effort landed with such a resounding thud that even some of the stakeholders would not sign their name to it. The newspaper called foul and conducted an online poll where two thirds of the respondents said they hated the concept. The CVB staff ran around like a battalion of keystone cops trying to cover their actions. When I attended their board meeting soon after the supposed launch they cowered from the subject and barely mentioned their three years in the making masterpiece.

I was asked my opinion because we had been summarily dismissed from the CVB because they could not gain political power from our continued efforts; the Economic Development Foundation loved our materials. So did the ADDY judges. The material was named “Best in Show” by the local ADDYs. A major market research company who studied the branding efforts of the State of Georgia said the work was “The best municipal marketing materials I have ever seen.” So what was my opinion?

My critique is simple. That’s not a brand.

It’s a campy slogan. It’s a poorly designed logo. It’s a group of ads that continue to perpetuate the undesirable concept that Athens is a place of excesses. Honestly, when was the last time anyone typified anything positive as being “unleashed?”

I blame the CVB for putting their own attainment of power and influence above the needs of the town but I don’t fully blame them for the brand screw up. It is a common problem to equate the idea of a brand with so much that it is not.

Businesses often make this mistake. They design a logo and call it and new brand position. They mock up a few yuckfest ads and say they have a new brand strategy and that strategy is “fun!” Branding has become the new buzz concept for companies but it is so widely misunderstood and widely misused that the unimpressive result of such misuse has made the approach suspect. It reminds me somewhat of the Adkins diet. People who know and faithfully implement the diet lose weight. People who do it halfway or simple don’t know what they are doing gain weight and blame it on the diet. Rarely does one hear someone say, “I tried the Adkins diet but my inability to following directions or commit myself to any long-term discipline has delivered lackluster results”.

I cannot and will not attempt to explain every nook and cranny of creating brand in this chapter. Instead, I’ll throw out some broad and oft violated rules that will help you test the integrity of what you are calling a brand.

A brand is a system of meaning.

A brand gives consumers predictability and assurance. A brand is all the attitudes and perspective concerning a product or service. It encapsulates the essence and inspirational nature of a brand. It is the awareness of the earth exuded by Patagonia and the love of driving extolled by BMW. A brand is a personality for a product or service. And like a person, if the brand is not interesting, engaging and fully developed from a personality standpoint, good luck making friends. And even if such a brand can make friends, they’ll all be like Brad.

A brand is not a logo.

A logo may identify a brand. A logo may even incorporate the spirit or essence of the brand (Like Nike’s swoosh) but the logo itself is not the brand. A swoosh without all the imagery and emotion of Nike is an icon that could just as well be promoting a fertility clinic.

A brand is not just for mass communication.

A brand also functions as an internal ethos. Companies with solid and rooted brand concepts have an uncanny ability to incorporate the meaning system within their organization. Sometimes it is the internal culture which gives rise to the brand. Brands such as Ben and Jerry’s and Saturn used the communication of internal culture to inform the masses what they stand for and believe in.

A brand is active. A brand is nothing without a brand strategy.

I have observed far too many companies conduct a distillation of their brand only to say, “Okay folks this is our brand: we believe in innovation.” “Now, back to work.”
A brand strategy that is not implemented is worthless. Brand strategies are not just the persona but how that persona is cultivated, communicated and nurtured. The brand strategy determines what types of media the communication will flow through and what the next product or distribution channel might be.

A brand is everyone’s business.

The iPod was not an invention of the marketing department yet it taps so deeply into the Apple brand. The brand is essentially what is being sold and it is everyone’s responsibility to live the brand. New products should be on-brand. Sales should be selling on-brand. The design of the corporate headquarters should be on-brand. A brand is what a company and its products are. It is based in who you are in the life of the prospective consumer. If it is something you try to fake, you will fail.

Brad vs. the CVB.

The violation that too many companies make, ultimately leading to their poor branding efforts, is betrayal. A brand is not created in as much as it is discovered. A brand already exists for most companies and the careful uncovering of exactly what motivates a consumer to take action and love a brand might as well be pure gold. The failed efforts of branding have given the practice a tarnished reputation when truthfully it was ineptitude and incompetence to blame.

Be it Brad, the CVB or your marketing department, loyalty can make the difference in whether or not those you want to like you will actually like you. When an entity shows loyalty to its prospect and earnestly listens to that which is already beckons the brand’s devotees, magic happens. In the all too common situation where personal agendas, politics and a little back stabbing are leading the way of your branding effort, I have but one recommendation: Put them back on the leash.