Usually I try to use this space to provide solutions to branding problems, or perhaps to expose a new marketing idea or thought to the bright light of day. This week, however, I am going to raise a bit of an alarm regarding an issue I don’t have a good answer for. Maybe someone reading this will chime in and help us all out.
The issue is the preservation of brand memory.
How do you make sure the hard and soft aspects of your brand personality are passed down within your company from one generation of employees and managers to the next? How do you stay on your charted course when a key individual who was responsible for any number of little unspoken daily course corrections is no longer part of the team?
One obvious answer is to identify those pivotal individuals within the company and make sure they have an understudy. Don’t be so exposed that your branding and marketing machine will grind to a halt if one individual leaves the control panel.
Of course your brand vision, brand values and brand personality are all written down and shared amongst all your staff. Right?
And of course your brand is so central to everything you do that there is an institutional continuity that rises above any one individual within the organization. So that’s something.
Still, as brands are involved with more and more daily communication and interaction with prospects and consumers, there are small nuances that defy our most noble attempts to codify and quantify. In many respects, today, the public face of the brand and the personality of the individuals responsible for the public face of the brand are hard to separate.
I’m not sure what to do about this. Maybe the control that I am yearning for is merely a remnant of my pre-recession lizard brain; a pre-historic urge for order still not fully extinguished by the new realities of the no-control marketplace?
I do know one thing: we need to think about this. As more and more of our brand personality is being determined by a thousand tweets and blogs and calls and comments, it’s going to get harder and harder to remain consistent. And consistency has always been central to the discipline of brand-building.
