Brand has a whiny bitch problem

The branding industry has undermined its own credibility and value. We’ve done this to ourselves.

Branding is one of those disciplines that has always seemed to be more important to the people who practice it rather than to the people who buy it. And so you get articles like this, explaining how brand consultancy has a brand problem. To be clear, I agree with everything that is being said here. The problem is that I’ve read this type of stuff for years.

The perception of brand doesn’t seem to change. It’s seen as the bits of the business at the edge of the core, the look and the feel. Rather than being seen as transformative, it’s seen as an expense. And, as practitioners, we’ve only got ourselves to blame.

Our challenge is that brand doesn’t feel like a valid business lever you can pull. We’re competing with trends like digital transformation and the AI efficiency tsunami in which we’re being swept up. As such, you’re more likely to see a data or IT expert be represented on the board, with branding losing influence at the highest level.

As an industry, we tend to do the same job, using, by and large, the same process. But in trying to differentiate from each other, we’ve overcomplicated it. Are you a digital brand consultant, a creative brand consultancy, or a creative brand consultancy? Every consultancy comes in with its own proprietary process, which is pretty much the same as everyone else’s process but with a ™ dotted about somewhere to provide credibility. We’re too busy trying to differentiate between our similar offerings rather than trying to bring additional value to the client.

That’s why you get the bamboozling array of brand approaches: brand love, “Why, What, Who?” brand onions, brand keys, brand pyramids, brand purpose, the list goes on and on. All of them do the same basic job but are too often dressed up and as the next great breakthrough in brand. Clients who are always thirsty to find a new way to solve the same old problem tend to use this approach. But when it climbs into the C-suite, it looks like the emperor has no clothes.

We look like Logan Roy’s children. As an industry, we just don’t look like serious people.

This lack of seriousness has an impact. Maintaining a brand is pushed to the periphery of the business. I don’t know if, as an industry, we’re too afraid to understand our impact on business, if it’s too hard for us and for clients to get the figures that help build a case for brand work, but without it, it just seems that we’re playing at it.

How do we expect clients to understand the transformational potential of a brand if we can’t explain it and, more importantly, demonstrate it? We need to be sharing fewer brand guidelines and more bottom-line guidance. Even the smallest of businesses can benefit from the work on their brand. Brand consultancy, instead of advertising or marketing, needs to really lead with why it can make you money and save you money. The endpoint of the work isn’t the creative output, as important as that is to the process. The endpoint is the business goal. Either that’s increasing market share, maximising the potential sale value of your business or increasing margins. Pushing the end game seems to me to be a better use of time rather than whining about why we’re not taken seriously.

I’d love to see fewer articles bemoaning why businesses don’t take brand seriously and more demonstrations of how brands can transform a business.