The Brand Gap

by Marty Neumeier

  Testing, or validation, is the process of measuring brands against meaningful criteria. All brand expressions, from icons to actual products, need to score high in five areas of communication: distinctiveness, relevance, memorability, extendibility, and depth.

  DISTINCTIVENESS is the quality that causes a brand expression to stand out from competing messages. If it doesn’t stand out, the game is over. Distinctiveness often requires boldness, innovation, surprise, and clarity, not to mention courage on the part of the company. Is it clear enough and unique enough to pass the swap test?

  RELEVANCE asks whether a brand expression is appropriate for its goals. Does it pass the hand test? Does it grow naturally from the DNA of the brand? These are good questions, because it’s possible to be attention-getting without being relevant, like a girly calendar issued by an auto parts company.

  MEMORABILITY is the quality that allows people to recall the brand or brand expression when they need to. Testing for memorability is difficult, because memory proves itself over time. But testing can often reveal the presence of its drivers, such as emotion, surprise, distinctiveness, and relevance.

  EXTENDIBILITY measures how well a given brand expression will work across media, across cultural boundaries, and across message types. In other words, does it have legs? Can it be extended into a series if necessary? It’s surprisingly easy to create a one-off, single-use piece of communication that paints you into a corner.

  DEPTH is the ability to communicate with audiences on a number of levels. People, even those in the same brand tribe, connect to ideas in different ways. Some are drawn to information, others to style, and still others to emotion. There are many levels of depth, and skilled communicators are able to create connections at most of them.

  These are the criteria that validate brand design—they provide a reality check for break-throughs. They not only separate true innovation from mere trendiness, they dispel the doubts that can freeze companies into inaction. When managers embrace the twin disciplines of innovation and validation, the marketing department is no longer the place where breakthrough ideas go to die. It’s where they prosper and grow and multiply like magic.

  Testing Might Have Saved Some Of These Companies From The 1999 Swoosh Epidemic.

  Has The Globe Become The New Swoosh?

  Discipline 5. Cultivate

  The Living Brand

  Business is a process, not an entity. Successful businesses are those that continually adapt to changes in the marketplace, the industry, the economy, and the culture. They behave more like organisms than organizations, shifting and growing and dividing and combining as needed. Unlike the old corporate identity paradigm that prized uniformity and consistency, the new brand paradigm sacrifices those qualities in favor of being alive and dynamic.

  Perfection? It never existed. Control? Fuhget-aboudit. As entrepreneurial consultant Guy Kawasaki advises his clients: “Don’t worry, be crappy.” Let the brand live, breathe, make mistakes, be human. Instead of trying to present a Teflon-smooth surface, project a three-dimensional personality, inconsistencies and all. Brands can afford to be inconsistent—as long as they don’t abandon their defining attributes. They’re like people. For example, in the morning you can wear a T-shirt, and in the evening a dress shirt. One moment you can be serious, and the next laugh out loud. Despite these apparent inconsistencies in your dress and demeanor, your friends and colleagues will still recognize you. What makes you “you” is deeper than appearances and moods. I’ll venture one step further, and say that brands that don’t project depth and humanity tend to create suspicion among customers.

  If People Can Change Their Clothes To Suit The Occasion, Why Can’t Brands?

  The old paradigm in which identity systems try to control the “look” of an organization only result in cardboard characters, not three-dimensional protagonists. The new paradigm calls for heroes with flaws—living brands.

  Every Day You Write the Book

  A living brand is a collaborative performance, and every person in the company is an actor. When a rep lands a customer, when an admin takes a phone call, when a CFO issues a profit warning, when a product manager gives a demo, when an accountant pays an invoice—each of these events adds depth and detail to the script, just as surely as a new ad campaign or website does. People “read” the script in their experiences with the company and its communications, then retell their version of it to others. When people’s experiences match their expectations, their loyalty increases.

  Drama coach Stella Adler often told her students, “Don’t act. Behave.” Living brands are not a stylistic veneer but a pattern of behavior that grows out of character. When the external actions of a company align with its internal culture, the brand resonates with authenticity. If a brand looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, walks like a duck, and swims like a duck, then it must be a duck. If it swims like a dog, however, people start to wonder.

  Does The Company’s Behavior Match The Company’s Image?

  The Brand as a Compass

  Let’s say you’ve differentiated, collaborated, innovated, and validated. You’ve decided who you are, what you do, and why it matters. You’ve added the left brain to the right brain, and one plus one now equals eleven. You’ve zigged when the competition zagged, and you’ve ditched your outmoded logo for an distinctive brand icon. Finally, you’ve used audience feedback to banish the “fear of stupid” from your corporate culture. Your brand is heading up the charts with a loyal tribe of customers and collaborators, and your margins are higher than ever. What’s your next move?

  Pass out the compasses. Every person in the company should be issued a personal shockproof brandometer—a durable set of ideas about what the brand is and what makes it tick. Because no decision, big or small, should be made without asking the million-dollar question: “Will it help or hurt the brand?”

  The secret of a living brand is that it lives throughout the company, not just in the marketing department. Since branding is a process, not an entity, it can be learned, taught, replicated, and cultivated. Continuing education programs can get everyone in the company onto the same page, while seminars, workshops, and critiques can keep outside collaborators singing in tune.

  Protecting the Brand

  The growing importance of the brand has a flip side: its growing vulnerability. A failed launch, a wandering brand focus, or a whiff of scandal can damage credibility and decrease brand value. And now, thanks to globalization, bad news not only travels fast, it travels far. The Firestone tire fiasco quickly deflated the value of the Ford brand by 17%, from $36 billion down to $30 billion. And in one year alone Amazon lost 31% of its brand value in trying to extend its online book niche into an online bookmusiccameracomputerappliancebabyfurnituretoy niche—with predictable non-success. During the same period, the value of the Starbucks brand grew 32%. Why? Starbucks protected its brand as it reached its aromatic fingers further into middle-America, spreading the experience but keeping the focus tight.

  For brand knowledge to become imbedded throughout the organization, it has to be protected against “evaporation,” the tendency for decisional wisdom to disappear as experienced people leave the company. The long-term success of any brand depends on the constant regeneration of corporate memory. Since key people tend to stay in their positions only two to five years, the challenge is to capture brand knowledge and pass it to the next generation intact. How? With a brand education program that’s distributed throughout the company and its creative network, guaranteeing the survival of the brand, while keeping it open to feedback from the brand community.

  Where Are All the CBOs?

  As I said earlier, three basic models have evolved for managing large-scale creative collaboration. The first two are the paths of least resistance: outsourcing stewardship of the brand to a one-stop shop or a brand agency. The preference among advanced branders, however, is the third: internal stewardship of the brand with the help of an integrated marketing team. Intel�
��s worldwide creative director, Susan Rockrise, calls this a “virtual agency,” a concept she has pioneered for the better part of a decade. Intel, and other companies who favor the integrated marketing model, have learned how to recruit best-of-breed creative firms from around the world and get them to play together on an all-star team.

  The more a brand becomes distributed, the more it requires strong, centralized management.

  Creativity can quickly turn to chaos in the absence of adult supervision (as any parent knows). And while controlled chaos is necessary for innovation and change, uncontrolled chaos can make a brand schizophrenic and confused.

  The growing need for internal stewardship has given rise to the appointment of what we might call chief brand officers, or CBOs—highly experienced professionals who manage brand collaboration at the highest corporate level. CBOs are rare birds, because they need the ability to strategize with the chief, and also inspire creativity among the troops. In effect they must form a human bridge across the brand gap, connecting the company’s left brain with its right brain, bringing business strategy in line with customer experience. A CBO is the executive who lies awake at night thinking, “How can we build the brand?”

  The main reason CBOs are rare is that few formal programs have been established to train them. Unlike CEOs, who can begin their careers with a degree in business administration, CBOs have to pick up their skills on the fly, working their knowledge back and forth in various positions at advertising agencies, corporate marketing departments, design firms, and other creative and consulting businesses until they reach a level of mastery. While they may start their careers with a degree in marketing or design, neither program by itself can teach how to combine logic and magic in the necessary proportions. Those who do master this alchemy tend to command middle-six-figure salaries in companies. Fortunately, this has not gone unnoticed by progressive business colleges and design schools, who are now scrambling to catch up.

  The CBO Forms A Bridge Between Brand Logic And Brand Magic.

  The Virtuous Circle

  In the last century, many companies found themselves trapped in a vicious circle of R&D investment, initial market success, competitive pressure, and pricecutting, until commoditization eventually forced them out of the market.

  Branding creates the opposite effect—a virtuous circle. By combining logic and magic, a company can ignite a chain reaction that leads from differentiation to collaboration to innovation to validation and finally to cultivation. Built into cultivation is the mandate to question all assumptions, leapfrog the status quo, and begin the cycle again. With each turn, the company and its brand spiral higher, taking it further from commoditization and closer to the Holy Grail of marketing: a sustainable competitive advantage.

  A brand is not a logo. A brand is not a corporate identity system. It’s a person’s gut feeling about a product, service, or company. Because it depends on others for its existence, it must become a guarantee of trustworthy behavior. Good branding makes business integral to society and creates opportunity for everyone, from the chief executive to the most distant customer.

  Take-Home Lessons

  Here’s a quick summary of the ideas covered in THE BRAND GAP. Sprinkle liberally throughout your brand presentations, or try adding a different one to the bottom of each business e-mail you send—you may be surprised at the conversations you’ll start.

  On Branding

  A brand is a person’s gut feeling about a product, service, or company. It’s not what YOU say it is. It’s what THEY say it is.

  Branding is the process of connecting good strategy with good creativity. It’s not the process of connecting good strategy with poor creativity, poor strategy with good creativity, or poor strategy with poor creativity.

  The foundation of brand is trust. Customers trust your brand when their experiences consistently meet or beat their expectations.

  Modern society is information-rich and time-poor. The value of your brand grows in direct proportion to how quickly and easily customers can say yes to your offering.

  People base their buying decisions more on symbolic cues than features, benefits, and price. Make sure your symbols are compelling.

  Only one competitor can be the cheapest—the others have to use branding. The stronger the brand, the greater the profit margin.

  A charismatic brand is any product, service, or company for which people believe there’s no substitute. Any brand can be charismatic, even yours.

  Differentiate

  To begin building your brand, ask yourself three questions: 1) Who are you? 2) What do you do? 3) Why does it matter?

  Our brains filter out irrelevant information, letting in only what’s different and useful. Tell me again, why does your product matter?

  Differentiation has evolved from a focus on “what it is,” to “what it does,” to “how you’ll feel,” to “who you are.” While features, benefits, and price are still important to people, experiences and personal identity are even more important.

  As globalism removes barriers, people erect new ones. They create tribes—intimate worlds they can understand and participate in. Brand names are tribal gods, each ruling a different space within the tribe.

  Become the number one or number two in your space. Can’t be number one or number two? Redefine your space or move to a different tribe.

  Collaborate

  Over time, specialists beat generalists. The winner is the brand that best fits a given space. The law of the jungle? Survival of the FITTINGEST.

  How a brand should fit its space is determined by the brand community. It takes a village to build a brand.

  By asking left-brainers and right-brainers to work as a team, you bridge the gap between logic and magic. With collaboration, one plus one equals eleven.

  For successful precedents to creative collaboration, look to Hollywood, Silicon Valley, and the cathedral builders of the Renaissance.

  As creative firms become more collaborative, they’re also becoming more specialized. The next economy will see a rise in branding networks—groups of “unbundled” companies cooperating across the value chain.

  Three basic models have emerged for managing brand collaboration: 1) the one-stop shop, 2) the brand agency, and 3) the integrated marketing team. Choose any one or create a combination.

  Speak in prototypes. Prototypes cut through marketing red tape and let gut feeling talk to gut feeling.

  Innovate

  It’s design, not strategy, that ignites passion in people. And the magic behind better design and better business is innovation.

  Radical innovation has the power to render competition obsolete. The innovator’s mantra: When everyone zigs, zag.

  How do you know when an idea is innovative? When it scares the hell out of you.

  Expect innovation from people outside the company, or from people inside the company who THINK outside.

  Make sure the name of your brand is distinctive, brief, appropriate, easy to spell, easy to pronounce, likable, extendible, and protectable.

  Logos are dead. Long live icons and avatars.

  Packaging is the last and best chance to influence a prospect this side of the checkout counter. Arrange all your packaging messages in a “natural reading sequence.”

  Avoid the three most common barriers to web innovation: technophobia, turfismo, and featuritis.

  Bottom line: If it’s not innovative, it’s not magic.

  Validate

  The standard communication model is an antique. Transform your brand communication from a monologue to a dialogue by getting feedback.

  Feedback, i.e. audience research, can inspire and validate innovation.

  Research has gotten an unfair rap from the creative community. Though bad research can be like looking at the road in a rearview mirror, good research can get brands out of reverse and onto the Autobahn.

  Use focus groups to FOCUS the research, not BE the research. Focus groups are particularly susceptible
to the Hawthorne effect, which happens when people know they’re being tested.

  Quantitative research is antithetical to inspiration. For epiphanies that lead to breakthroughs, use qualitative research.

  Measure your company’s brand expressions for distinctiveness, relevance, memorability, extendibility, and depth.

  Cultivate

  Your business is not an entity but a living organism. Ditto your brand. Alignment, not consistency, is the basis of a living brand.

  A living brand is a never-ending play, and every person in the company is an actor. People see the play whenever they experience the brand, and then they tell others.

  Every brand contributor should develop a personal shockproof brandometer. No decision should be made without asking, “Will it help or hurt the brand?”