Is Your Brand a Clutter Cutter?
I have the honor of speaking today at the 2011 Postsecondary Career & Technical Education Summer Conference, at which I’ll be discussing It’s a New Brand Day: Brand Building in the Day of the New… New Economy, New Business Environment, and New Media with educators, implementers, and trainers from our State’s career technical institutions.
There are several core Brand Building principles that we’ll talk about, as well as some of the things going on in this Day of the New that impact our brands and our efforts in building them. So I thought I’d take the opportunity to roll some of those principles out here.
The first is this: We live in A LOT of clutter.
We are inundated, as never before, with products, services, companies, campaigns, and efforts all aiming to set themselves apart from the pack, to be distinct, and most of all to be desired. In trying to achieve that, a lot of them have thrown ungodly amounts of money at advertising, marketing, and PR efforts that say, “Hey! Look at me! You’ll like me!” But what a lot of them have learned is that there’s not enough money in the world to buy true desire, connection, and trust. Those things have to be earned, and you earn them by how you behave over time.
Before you can build your brand, you have to understand your brand – its values, its mission, its reason for being – and integrate it consistently into everything you do. This tells you and your entire organization how to behave in virtually any and all situations. And that’s a lot bigger than the latest cutesy-tootsy ad campaign!
Behavior and quality, over time, build trust. Trust cuts through the clutter. And advertising – if it’s any good – should help to confirm what already is, not just tell a story of what should be.