Mindset in many ways determines the degree of innovation in business and the extent to which unique and fresh solutions to problems are conceptualised and implemented. Also, no planning tool, however innovative and revolutionary, can add much value to business if the mindset with which it is introduced and applied, fails to welcome innovative thinking. A mindset that is conducive to innovative thinking is particularly needed in the environments on which we depend for fresh thinking. The advertising or communications agency is such an environment. Clients employ communications partners to engage creative thinking, to ensure that innovative solutions to communication problems are conceived. The Brand Communications Challenge

As many argue, we are all competing to impact on audiences who have become jaded by traditional brand communications. Today’s consumers are time and trust starved and are erecting and fortifying their defenses against commercial onslaughts. Consequently, clients expect of their brand communication partners or advertising agencies to develop campaigns that break through the clutter to create branded impact. In turn, agencies rely heavily on their creative teams to conceptualise creative messages that present these clutter busters. So, we encounter the current brand communications challenge:

1. Clutter levels are increasing.
2. Consumers are erecting and intensifying selective awareness and attention barriers.
3. Clients are demanding brand communication solutions beyond the
traditional, the tried, the trusted and the expected.
4. Creative teams are expected to produce more arresting message concepts and executions that will break through clutter barriers to impact on consumers. Given these demands we, as brand communication players, need to question the mindset with which we approach the brand communications challenge.

Surely the following strategic questions must be put to strategic planners and agency heads:
• If consumers are erecting and fortifying their defense mechanisms against the daily commercial onslaught, is it wise to rely solely on the creativity of the expected advertising message to break through clutter barriers?
• Should we not be investing in creative strategic thinking before the so-called creative process starts?
• Should we not be disrupting norms to create unconventional and unexpected points of actual communication contact that, in total synergy with the creative campaign concept and execution, will achieve branded impact?

The Alternative Brand Contact as a Solution If the vast majority of brand communication messages arrive in expected and conventional formats, for example the 30 second TV ad or radio spot, why not consider the value of utilising the medium in a form that will be experienced by consumers as unconventional or unexpected? Why perpetuate the norm and rely wholly on the creativity of the actual message to break through clutter? Can the point of contact itself not demonstrate creative strategic thinking and succeed in achieving impact through its unconventional and unexpected status? The alternative brand contact is defined as a point of planned contact with the brand that is experienced by consumers as unexpected and unconventional. The alternative brand contact is by definition media neutral. It is not the medium that defines the alternative brand contact as unconventional or unexpected, as we so frequently tend to do in industry. In other words, the tendency to move from an inside-out industry perspective to compartmentalise alternative media into some or other below-the-line public bathroom intervention. It is the consumer’s experience of the point of contact as unconventional and unexpected that positions it
as alternative.

Alternative brand contact planning is a planning process that aims to develop unconventional brand contact strategies that break through commercial clutter barriers to achieve branded impact. An alternative brand contact can appear in any form, in any potential communication space and is defined by consumer experience, not by media type!

The Research Study
The desire to investigate the role and nature of alternative brand contact planning and more truthfully, the frustration with the lack of creative strategic thinking in brand communications planning (strategy is strategy, media is media and the creative team must deliver the big clutter busting idea), spurred a recent qualitative exploratory research study among integrated

communication agencies and companies in South Africa. This three year study culminated in 2003, in the design of a new planning model which aims to produce unconventional and unexpected brand contact strategies. Of significance is that all integrated agency teams and clients interviewed, were in immediate agreement that creative strategic thinking and alternative brand contacts, in comparison to conventional traditional message formats, have greater potential to break through clutter to achieve branded impact. However, the greatest challenge was found to be the mindset of the players involved – the client, the agency, the media planners and the media owners. Many agency teams and clients argued for example, that:
• “We need a paradigm shift – from the staid and the boring to alternative, fresh and innovative ways to capture attention and achieve impact”
• “Conventional media planning is a massive stumbling block” – “there should be a greater willingness to experiment and put ideas to the test”

“It requires brave clients and open-minded communication partners”

The single most critical requisite to alternative brand contact planning, undertaking creative strategic planning and disrupting brand communication norms, is a fertile planning mindset. The study essentially unveiled that the mindset of the client and agency is more powerful than any creative planning technique, tool or model. In constructing a mindset conducive to alternative brand contact planning the following became apparent and in many ways remain open to debate, experimentation and further research:

Branded Impact
Firstly, agencies and clients must embrace the planning mindset that a campaign strategy, whether based on the need to launch and support a sales promotion or to build a corporate citizenship profile and presence, is implemented to ultimately contribute to the process of building the brand. A mindset that is focused on the identity and the needs of the brand is foremost. There is no point to breaking through the clutter if we are not going to do so in the name of the brand!

Planning Relevance and Planning Exploration
Secondly, both client and agency must have the confidence and desire to move from an outside-in, consumer oriented and a zero-based, media-neutral planning platform. We are referring in real terms to planning relevance and planning exploration. Planning relevance suggests a complete and thorough understanding of what the target audience perceives as conventional and will experience as unexpected. Norms can hardly be broken if they are not firstly understood in consumer terms. Also, moving from the outsidein, agency teams and clients argued that alternative brand contact planning is not only consumer oriented to deliver what will be experienced as unexpected but also, and critically so, to achieve positive brand impact. If the alternative brand contact fails in its consumer and brand relevance it will be perceived as an invasion, an irritation and erode the value of the brand. Planning exploration on the other hand presents a zero-based and media-neutral
freedom to not allow preconceived ideas to cloud the way, to not indulge the all too frequently encountered “we’ve always used billboards, so what’s you’re problem?” planning mentality. Planning exploration recognises the critical value and creative strategic potential of moving from a clean planning slate and not to be bound by enforced or induced planning outcomes. Alternative brand contact planning must be positioned and experienced as a planning philosophy that spans all media and communication spaces.

Salivating
Thirdly, we meet up with a planning mindset that salivates to conceptualise strategic points of brand contact that are sure to break through the clutter. Jean- Marie Dru, author and Chairman of the BDDP Group based in Paris, advocates and applies Disruption in connections or contact planning. South Africa’s Net#work BBDO and media partner Nota Bene similarly work on high levels of creative and strategic integration with a “space planning” rather than a “media planning” model. As one of its planners reason “We think in terms of communication spaces rather than media”. Engaging material and models are being developed and experimented with by a number of agencies and clients, both locally and globally. But quite evidently, it is the mindset and the desire of the teams, clients and individuals involved to produce unconventional solutions, that bring these innovative models to life, that make their planned outcomes possible.

Integration and Ousting Turf Battles
It is fourthly quite clear that those agencies and clients that present the unconventional and unexpected contact strategies move from outside-in, zero-based and media-neutral planning platforms in highly integrated planning environments. Clients are encountered in planning and conceptualisation sessions and the agency planners are present in brand reviews and co-develop the communication briefs. Thus the brand identity and communication needs are clearly defined, planning challenges are identified and valuable levels of mutual understanding, trust and confidence in alternative contact planning evolve between client and communications partner.

Also, no turf battles are encountered within the agency, between strategy, media and creative – “the result is a team driven to look for opportunities”. And as another agency director argued – “You need a culture of creative integration. You can’t have a silo mentality. You can’t be protecting turf. You need cross-pollination across all avenues and you need the structure to support it”. Integrated planning and brainstorming is pursued and the unconventional contact idea can come from anywhere and from anyone. After all, the integrity of the integrated agency is evident in its planning mindset and not in the array of services it has available!

Media commission based = Media-biased
The final mindset requisite, like the need for an integrated planning environment, is a characteristic of the agency business model and its relationship with clients. Unconventional and unexpected brand contact planning can not be pursued in a planning environment that is media biased and the traditional media commission-based remuneration platform is by its very nature just that, biased. Zero-based and media-neutral thinking is a futile exercise in a planning environment and business relationship that dictates expenditure. As one of the agency directors interviewed put it, “No agency working on commission can function on a media neutral platform”.

Those agencies and clients that demonstrate high levels of alternative brand contact planning recognise that a mindset conducive to developing unconventional and unexpected strategic interventions, can only be shaped and developed in a fee and/or performance-based remuneration relationship. In conclusion, alternative brand contact planning presents a planning philosophy that is committed to the development of unconventional and unexpected brand contact strategies that break through commercial clutter barriers to achieve branded impact. Although planning models, such as the one developed in response to this study, are of experimental and research value to clients and agencies alike, it is the mindset with which they are embraced and implemented that ensures potential success. Mindset is the equity value sought and much needs to be done to ensure it is successfully recognised, supported and cultivated.

Brand building is a process of identity creation and requires that employees consider and deliver the brand promise in all that they do, at every point of contact with stakeholders, from consumer markets to special interest groups.

For example, the engineering-centric company Google, as Brin (2007:53) explains requires that all their people, from divisions ranging from new product design to legal advice and finance, consistently devote around 20 percent of their time to explore and implement innovative practices. This is intended to ensure that the brand remains true to its promise to organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.

Concurring, authors such as Mitchell (2005:4),  Christensen, Marx and Stevenson (2006:73) and Gobe (2007:69) reason that brand building requires a brand culture within which employees understand the concept and importance of the brand, demonstrate a deep understanding of what the brand stands for and are emotionally committed to live or act upon the brand promise.

Brand builders will need to fully consider the underlying parameters that define a brand culture. While effective, internal brand strategy tools and communications can be designed and implemented to create understanding of the concept of brand and convey the intent of the brand promise, it may still be critically short of creating and building an organisation of emotionally connected people who believe in the brand. To ensure that employees grow to feel for, value, trust and have regard for the brand, is a more complex challenge for brand builders. This article shares four key thoughts on what attributes brands need to have in order for employees to believe in them. Brand builders should consider and invest in these as they determine and direct successful delivery of the brand promise.

The study: when do people believe in the company or organisational brand?
The author conducted four individual workshops in 2007 with a collective sample of 96 middle and senior management professionals from various South African companies. In tandem, the opinions of a convenience sample of 19 opinion leaders in the branding and communications industry in South Africa were assessed. The research revealed four distinctive factors that influence employees’ belief in the company or organisational brand. They are presented below, in order of perceived importance.
The exploratory research results: employees believe in the brand when…

1. The brand ’walks its talk’, both internally and externally. Two principles, although interrelated, emerged from the study of literature and the exploratory research in attempting to isolate the most influential variable in employees’ belief in the company or organisational brand. Firstly, for employees to believe in the company brand, it must be seen to deliver on its brand promise in all that it does, at each and every point of contact, both externally and internally. Brand integrity and credibility requires coherent brand contact performance. The research revealed that a brand promise executed merely at a superficial level is likely to meet with employee ridicule and does not lead to a growth in internal brand pride.
Secondly, employees are more likely to believe in the company or organisational brand that delivers its promises even-handedly to its own employees as well as to its most valuable customers. The first requisite for employee belief in the company or organisational brand is to ‘walk the brand talk’, both internally and externally.

2. Operational systems guide; encourage, recognise and reward on-brand behaviour, and recruitment systems create natural brand-fit. The need for operational processes and systems to guide, track and support the brand identity and on-brand behaviour is expressed in literature and was reflected in the exploratory research study as follows:

• A need for the design and implementation of brand focused job role descriptions, performance criteria and business reward models.
• A need for brand sessions aimed at emotionally engaging employees. For example, Lego evolved its brand positioning by implementing regular ‘dream-out’ sessions in which employees are invited to share their dreams for the brand.
• A need for projects dedicated to the employee-brand relationship. For example, Outsurance’s ‘staff helping South Africa out – 24 projects, 182 staff members’ is directed by employees’ community involvement.
• A need for company recruitment and interview models that create employee brand-fit, thus avoiding an internal brand condition that Colyer (2003:3) describes as “trying to squeeze new employees until they fit or are fit to burst.” Senior management respondents, in particular, repeatedly pointed out that people were more likely to believe in the company or organisational brand if they could naturally identify with the brand, and had ‘the same value system’ or ‘belief system’ as the brand. The respondents sampled in this study were uniformly of the opinion that for employees to believe in the company or organisational brand; operational systems needed to guide, encourage, recognise and reward on-brand behaviour and recruitment systems needed to identify natural brand-fit. These seem to be current operational brand needs of companies and organisations in South Africa.

3. The brand vision; identity, actions and employee’s roles in brand building are fully understood and felt to be worth believing in. Mitchell (2005:5) argues that “Employees need to have a clear and powerful view of what they are part of and where the brand and business are going.” Concurring, Christensen, Marx and Stevenson (2006:73) reinforce that a strong company culture will be guided by a belief in its vision and the best methods to
achieve it. In this exploratory study respondents stated that an understanding of the brand identity and an individual day-to-day role in building the brand was a prerequisite for people to believe in the brand. They furthermore argued that companies and organisations needed to keep employees well informed of any shifts and changes in brand direction if they wished to nurture and develop belief in the brand. Finally, respondents were also convinced that employees would believe in a brand if its products and services, track record, identity and citizenship were respected and admired by society at large. A logical conclusion is therefore that for the people of the company to believe in the brand; the brand vision, identity, brand actions and employee’s role in brand building must be both well understood and well worth believing in.

4. Leadership lives the brand. Ollins (2003:89) cites that brand credibility depends on leaders and management who base their actions with sincerity and integrity on the brand promise. The exploratory research study reinforces the notion that employee belief in the company brand requires ‘the executive to live the brand values’ and ‘behave according to the brand code’ in all that they say and do. The influence that leadership of the brand has on employee belief is seen to be a critical factor. When considered in relation to other factors this critical influence becomes more apparent. The company or brand can only ‘walk its brand talk’ internally and externally if its leadership exhibits the proper deep-seated brand values. It is also the leadership of the brand that directs the brand vision, identity and operational systems to guide, encourage, recognise and reward onbrand behaviour.

Conclusion
The central purpose of internal brand building is to ensure that all employees understand and believe in the brand promise.
This culture requires:

• The brand to consistently deliver its promise, both internally and externally.
• Systems to guide, encourage, recognise and reward on-brand behaviour.
• The brand vision, identity, actions and employee’s role to be well understood and felt to be worth believing in.
• The leadership of the brand to believe in and live the brand with integrity and sincerity.

Flowing from this, it seems self-evident that employees’ belief in the company brand depend on the leadership, management and performance of the business. To build an organisation of people who believe in the brand and coherently deliver its promise, internal brand building must be integral to business and brand strategy.

Everything visual we can call visual identity design. Here’s why…

When people that work in any position of authority in a company are:

1. Aware of their roles as experience designers;
2. Are able to weave a specific ethos into these experiences.

The result is an impossible to copy competitive advantage.

Getting the above right is a sure way to attract and retain staff and customers. Sometimes they call this ‘branding’ – but then logo design and advertising is also called branding so people get confused. The problem is most managers do not see themselves as experience designers. It is far too smarmy. Instead they are in the game of getting stuff done and making money – sometimes the stuff they do smacks of a certain ethos (like when they’re talking about branding – item 4 on the agenda), but mostly they just do stuff. But while they are fixing stuff, changing stuff, buying stuff, selling stuff etc they are usually impacting the unique experience of their staff and customers – usually unknowingly. Isn’t that bizarre? That lack of awareness. It makes them so replaceable and it turns business into a lottery. Yet, we live it everyday.

It confounds me as to how this concept is still a relatively novel one and how it mainly lives in the realm of brand consultancies. Somewhere deep down all of us know that as consumers we make purchase and loyalty decisions based on how our experience is being uniquely shaped by the people in organisations. Sure, there are many organisations that practice excellence in their field, but how many create a uniquely excellent experience? Most companies follow the herd in their category – aiming to just be one of the members of the category. Why not try and do stuff differently in a specific direction, surely this is the most fundamental thing that a business is based on? I guess it’s a case of not having the initial definition in place – we have a very well defined set of visual rules but normally scant regard for principles that shape our behaviour. So the visual stuff is aligned with military consistency but behaviour is potluck. In a world where we make decisions based on as set of experienced behaviours this is crazy indeed.

Homegrown Experience Heroes

How many established coffee shop chains, airlines and insurance companies scratch their heads at the likes of our very own Vida E Caffe, Kulula,com, Discovery and Outsurance – asking why are they klapping us in customer and staff acquisition and retention? Its simple: these new players realised that to beat the incumbents all they had to do was to place as much, if not more importance on human behaviour as they do on the size and shape of their logo.

Patrick Carmody heads the Field Of Brand Strategy At Vega and consults in the same field.

He blogs at www.patcarmody.com (my colleagues are saying: ‘So pat, are you designing the staff experience or the customer experience, and what have you done to enhance the experience lately – don’t they know I just work here!).

Marketing today is all around us and as the world progresses at a lightning speed marketing techniques and tactics become a discipline of survival. Much like a martial art, marketers and brand specialists need to design competitive marketing strategies to achieve market dominance in their chosen categories.

As marketing educators we have a huge responsibility to our students and the marketers of future generations. We need to re-emphasise the value of being a consumer as part of the education process. Further to this is the notion of empathy, marketing and strategy are ‘feel’ disciplines that are practiced in a solution based environment and as marketing speeds on and the art of satisfying customer needs becomes ever more critical, so too does the need for trained specialists in the field of marketing and branding.

The best way to understand the marketing and branding process therefore is to feel what its like to be a consumer, for in understanding the process that drives as consumers we are better able to understand and identify with the needs of our target audiences. As crime around the world escalates and becomes a concern for public citizens the need for self defence skills increases and the best fighters often have expertise in a blend of styles and similarly marketing specialists who understand the style of their consumers and can adapt any shape or form to consumer needs and wants will perform best in the market place.

The concept of brands too assumes greater importance than ever before. If one can say that the ultimate objective of marketing and branding strategy is to create sources of uniqueness which are visible to the customer, difficult to copy and sustainable in the long term, then the process of brand loyalty assumes ever greater importance in satisfying customers and their unique needs. Although the concept and focus of marketing moves forward at lightning speed the principles and techniques of satisfying consumer needs and wants reside in simplicity. Simply put brands must continually deliver powerful and positive experiences, which are repeated and consistently perceived as being favourable on the part of consumers. Marketing education needs to emphasise this realism much like the martial artist would need to train against a real fighter with unpredictable techniques to prepare for battle and in so doing achieve a successful outcome.

In the classroom therefore we need to train our students to be and think innovatively regarding brands, products and services. We need to teach them to have confidence in their abilities and to take risks. We need to further endow them with the capabilities of becoming proactive thinkers. To achieve this is certainly an arduous task requiring much commitment and focus, but it is certainly achievable. Beyond what one can intellectually grasp lies the challenge of researching the way one feels, the notion of why one is brand loyal and the desire to inwardly review the way one behaves as a consumer.

The essential elements of the marketing mix all drive a product and/or service and the brand becomes an element of brand and the brand becomes the crowning achievement of the marketing process. All companies should strive to develop in their customers a focus on becoming brand ambassadors for their respective businesses, which is the highest level of marketing achievement in a fastly evolving world of competitive strategy. So this simple principle that confirms the saying that less is more and more is less is ever prevalent in our modern society.

Create a positive perception for your brands and encourage your students to develop the combined skill of intellectual innovativeness and creative flair through feeling and reflecting and experiencing their actions and reactions as consumers. Differentiation from a branding perspective is the key to successful marketing strategy and as the gaps narrow down to achieve this differential advantage it becomes more and more difficult to create and then sustain these gaps, but it is possible. In class situations it is always beneficial to ask students to search for those gaps and discover them themselves.

These gaps can be thus discovered as consumers and found in all common consumer behaviour around the world. What is extraordinary today becomes ordinary tomorrow and obsolete the day after and as the whole concept of creativity in marketing develop and evolve. Today’s businesses need to develop core competencies more than ever and then in order to achieve market dominance they need to develop key strengths for their various target markets.

Marketing and branding has always been key to business survival and always will be. Just the perceived manner of this growth assumes more importance as time moves on yet the principles and concepts remain fundamentally clear. Business strategy therefore often involves the development of business mission and visions in order to timeously and successfully achieves business objectives. As marketing educators we are ideally positioned to take advantage of the new trends that focus on satisfying customer needs in an ever-increasing competitive market place.

The future of marketing and branding belongs to the innovators of tomorrow, those people that can think and develop creative avenues of thinking and strategic differentiation in all that they do. As the 21st century evolves the dilemma of choice becomes an ever increasing challenge. In other words how do we persuade consumers to purchase our product or service over and above that of competitors? Strategic differentiation is the answer and a solution-based approach to marketing thinking is a critical step forward in the evolving process of marketing strategy. Due to the great proliferation of information both locally and globally marketers need to strive to find better ways of communicating and interacting with their target audiences.

What better way to address all these platforms than to develop outcomes based brand education, which challenges our youth to think and develop creatively.

Lets make a start and recognise the value of ideas and concepts which lie in the minds of the next generation of great marketers, our students who are the future of marketing and branding and who will carry the torch forward deeper into the century before us.

The right time for branding is now so lets focus on providing our customers with the timeless principle of the best possible value in every interaction with them.

Neil Levy is a lecturer at Vega The Brand Communications School

Does brand precede business or is business the cause and brand simply a consequence or the effect of the business?

Let us consider the mindset of an entrepreneur in order to begin the ABC of branding. All entrepreneurs who start something significant begin with an idea, a concept vision or dream. This, in my view, is the starting point of a brand. Often the personality, attitude, name and even reputation of the entrepreneur are associated with the entrepreneur’s vision. However, for the concept to attract financial and other support the entrepreneur must develop and refine the concept into an offer he or she believes will satisfy a fundamental human need and be wanted or sought by enough people able and willing to pay for the envisioned product or service. Through a process of firming-up the value proposition implicit on the product or service, and by clearly defining a potential set of buyers, changes and additions are made through an ongoing research and development cycle. This ongoing transformation is about adding individual identity as entrepreneurs know that consumers have choices and therefore search for points of meaningful difference. They seek products and services that will add, in their perception, more value than alternative offerings.

The A-Z of branding, therefore, is all about ways of creating and adding as many layers of desired value as possible. It begins with the conceptualizing of the product or, in the case of Google, a service. Embedded in the initial concept and prototypes will be the vision, value set and competitive intent of the entrepreneur or founder. It is the originator who implicitly assumes a role of both leadership and management until other resources can be afforded to enable the delegation of brand management.

Certainly the value offer and identified market needs to be presented in a business model by which market take-up against the costs of purchasing, manufacturing, and selling the product is forecast. In my experience, entrepreneurs who succeed have a persistent enthusiasm for their vision that becomes a magnet for attracting start-up capital and professional support. Branding is not what you append to the product or service. It contains that which is embedded within the tangible offering. We can then add many layers of value to increase the brand uniqueness.

Products, services and the organisations behind them can be complex so the challenge is to design an easily recognisable symbolic representation of the brand’s ID. This is achieved by design; the giving of a name, selection of a typeface, a colour or palette of colours, and a logo. An icon like the swoosh of Nike or crocodile of Lacoste. It can also include package design that can add significant tangible, as well as a perceived aesthetic value, as we see in the packaging of cosmetics.

To gain traction in the market the various intrinsic and extrinsic elements of a brand must align and work together so the offer is ultimately perceived as being desirably different from competitive brands. We call this the formulation of a brand identity or how the entrepreneur wants the brand to be experienced.

This takes us to other aspects of the A-Z of the brand process. We now have to communicate the offer to a market in a way that is appropriate to the brand’s identity. This communication therefore requires relevant creative concepts and the selection of appropriate media. As always the challenge for this aspect of the process is to ensure that the communication devices are integrated and remain true to the brand’s unique character, but there is more to the brand alphabet. Perhaps the greatest challenge now is the consistent and ongoing quality and delivery of the product or service. This necessitates an effectively designed, led and efficiently managed business model. Value adding must be sought and found wherever possible within the entire value chain of business, from inbound to outbound logistics. Therefore collaborative networks of suppliers, distributors and even competitors need to be created. Competition today is not simply between direct rivals but between the respective networks of brand associations.

With brand business success the challenge, increasingly, is for brands to remain strong internally. Research underscores the imperative for all staff to be brand supporters. To sustain this brand loyalty requires ongoing organisation development, change management and skilled, cross functional brand management. A brand weak inside will unravel through uneven delivery and service outside. Yet if one analysis budget disbursements, very little resources are given to impactful internal brand campaigns.

To sustain the additional resources required by growth, new brands may need to be offered or new products and/or services must be added to the initial brand. This takes us into brand extensions and portfolio management that must result in architecture that makes sense to consumers and the market. This is a large part of modern branding and affords many strategic opportunities. However, if done incorrectly, it can weaken the original brand. It is at this stage when decisions such as building a House of Brands, like Proctor & Gamble or a Branded House, like Colgate has to be taken. There is often a temptation to make one brand mean too many things, to extend or stretch it so far that it loses its ‘shape’ and unique identity.

The XYZ of modern branding is about how to keep the brand fresh and of continued interest to existing customers, but also to become attractive to new customers. The size of most markets creates the challenge to ensure continuous shared meaning between the brand promise and the needs and wants of increasingly overwhelmed customers. This requires brand thinkers to continuously add value, but often this becomes incremental and insignificant if we focus only on the product or service. Modern consumers also want more meaningful value to be added to their communities, societies and environment. This should be anchored to the original values and vision of the founder or entrepreneur and this can be executed through sponsorship, good labour practice, internal behaviour and what has become known as corporate social investment. Good brands and businesses are good because they offer decent products and services which are then communicated in an honest, albeit entertaining, way.

The Zen of branding for the 21st century, in my opinion, needs to be the creation and addition of meaningful social and economic value. It is not simply about profit. Profit is an indication that a brand can be sustained year on year. It is because of the social and economic value that reputations are won and lost. A positive, long-lasting reputation is perhaps the zenith of branding. We are developing better reputation and equity measures to assess the asset value of brands.

We do need to get these measures right because increasing social activism led by ‘no logo’ thinkers such as Naomi Klein question the very existence of brands. This school of thought often misunderstands the holistic A to Z process of brand development, and simply focuses on the mass communication devices which stimulate demand and can indeed have the effect of encouraging consumerism. This is an important argument as it encourages us to get back to the authentic substance of brands. Surely, brands must at least not cause harm and, at best, provide genuine value to society.

From concept to market, from growth to reinvention, the A to Z of branding is a process that can never be fully done. It is cyclical, forever seeking differentiation and cohesion that will deliver to all stakeholders while the game of competition is to neutralise any gained brand advantage.

Gordon Cook is a co-founder and School Navigator for Vega. In addition to lecturing full-time and part-time students, Gordon does corporate training for Vega.