Every professional discipline has its tenets, those foundations without which robust practices are replaced by short-termism and true expertise by loud performance. Medicine has its diagnostics, architecture has its load-bearing principles, legal has its precedents. Strip those away and what remains would be run on fragile bases.
Branding is no different. Beneath the business orientation, the marketing science, the visual creativity, and the clever messaging, there’s a set of fundamentals. And their presence or absence is what separates a brand that matters from one that merely communicates.
Michael Jordan famously said, “Get the fundamentals down, and the level of everything you do will rise.” It’s the same in branding.
The more deeply meaningful the fundamentals of your brand are, the more efficiently they’ll frame and direct the business, the easier and less expensive it will be for its expressions and marketing to work, and the more aligned every manifestation—every personification of the brand—will inevitably be.
The opposite is also true: the shallower your brand fundamentals, the harder your marketing needs to work, the more it will cost, and the more disconnect there will be between the intent and effect of your efforts.
The role of positioning and architecture in agentic branding
When it comes to brand, there are two imperatives operating within today’s governing context:
- Meaning (i.e., brand positioning)—a deeply meaningful brand guides the company’s operations, very much becoming what some call the organization’s “operating system.”
- Go-to-market (i.e., brand architecture)—a strategy for taking the whole branded proposition, including company, business, product, and brand, to market as a whole.
The governing context these two fundamentals are now operating in? Path to choice. This is the marketing funnel as it’s being transformed by agentic mediation, rooted in the proper codification of brands amidst AI. (You can see an intelligent examination of this shift in Thomas Marzano’s Brand Constitution manifesto.)
In other words, a deeply meaningful brand with its compelling go-to-market articulation will fully exploit the power of the AI-enabled path to choice. The opposite is also true: a shallow brand, with little depth to offer the marketplace, will break down under the mechanical scrutiny of AI, thereby forced to make ever more costly marketing investments.
How do you ensure your brand avoids these pitfalls?
Start with what I call “the science of brand.” Usually done by businesspeople, marketers, economists, and gurus of all kinds, it’s an examination of your organization across its:
- various strategies
- operations and culture
- markets and customers
- industry dynamics and trends
- competition
- offerings
- guiding parameters for relevance, differentiation, and distinctiveness.
Well summarized, the result will be a complete and organized baseline of facts that you must use to make a consequential determination: what “brand” can, should, and must do for your organization—and, just as important, what it can, should, and must not do.
Deciding what “brand” will do for your organization
“Brand” can do many things for your organization. A noted business guru identified seventeen things that “brand” can do; I, myself, have identified twenty-six. But they’re all generalities, akin to listing the answers to “What can breathing do for you?”
The key here, and the mark of a good brand strategist, is to identify specifically how “brand” can augment your organization’s business, in its industry, against its competitors, based on its strategic plans. Every other parameter is fodder for lectures about branding as a wider discipline and too generic for immediate application.
To make said decision, you’ll need to address the fundamentals of brand positioning and brand architecture—the everlasting cruxes of strong, resilient brands.
Brand positioning: the act of identifying organizational meaning
Your brand’s position is the core concept you want it to own. Whether you call it your brand’s promise, essence, or something else, it’s what contains the meaningful depth. And it can come in different flavors:
- a holistic promise (“We Bring Good Things To Life”)
- a positive outcome we enable (Airbnb’s “Belong Anywhere”)
- an exhortation while we’re at your side (Nike’s “Just Do It”) that . . .
- . . . can even be a warning of sorts (American Express’s “Don’t Live Life Without It”).
Note how a brand position can be shaped around the subject of either me, you, or it. I used taglines as examples, but that’s not to say that your tagline and positioning are one and the same. They can be, but a formal tagline can also be an interestingly worded version of the positioning. Nike’s positioning, for example, is all about how “if you have a body, you are an athlete.” That’s then translated into the short, cool, and very memorable “Just Do It.”
Your brand’s positioning should become the driving force of all your company does, and it’s your job as a strategist to bring it to bear in influencing and articulating:
- how your company operates
- how your company goes to market
- what products your company offers
- how your company markets its offerings (via behavior, identity, and communications)
- how your company services its public.
Do the above well, and over time, your brand’s positioning will cement itself in the public’s mind, becoming synonymous with your company name the same way Volvo is synonymous with safety and Patagonia is synonymous with social commitment. After all, your brand is ultimately what the public thinks it is—or as Jeff Bezos is said to have once proclaimed, “Brand is what they say about you when you’re not in the room.”
Craft the positioning, ensure that your C-suite intends to live and support it, implement it accurately and forcefully, monitor it for accuracy and effectiveness, and measure its uptake and staying power. Do this with the willingness and readiness to apply corrective actions as needed, so that public sentiment (including every last brusque comment on Quora or Reddit) matches what you intended your brand to be known for.
Examples of “meaningful depth” in brand positioning
Let me offer a couple of examples of what I mean by a positioning’s “meaningful depth,” using real engagements.
I once worked with a genetic testing company whose claim and promise was to “reveal the answers inside.” I think we can agree that, while these words are intriguing, they carry little depth; they merely state what the company does for a living. It’s slogan-ish copywriting, rather than meaningful positioning. I recommended they alter it to something rooted in their role within the industry at large, shifting from general health to healthcare specifically. The result? “Healthcare. Illuminated.” (It ended up being used as their formal tagline, as well. And yes, we discussed at length whether it should be health or healthcare.)
Similarly, I served a global data management company whose stated “promise” was along the lines of protecting your data and turning it into a competitive advantage—again, just a (partial) explanation of what they did for a living, plus a valuable but platitudinous kernel about exploiting the power of data. I reminded them that “data” is a reflection of someone’s hard work, be it individual or collective. The ad agency then turned that into the tagline “Elevate the Power of Your Work.”
And, while I haven’t collaborated with them yet, let’s not forget the powerful example that is Airbnb and their “Belong Anywhere” positioning. Those two words represent a whole new business, which is radically different from stating the facts of their business (e.g., something bland like “A New Way to Hotel”).
All of these cases exemplify how a new, deeply meaningful and actionable perspective—worded in an interesting way—required entire companies to expand their actions, behaviors, products, services, and outreach, thereby permitting and setting the stage for significantly more successful business.
So, how do you know whether your brand’s positioning has meaningful depth?
Some say a brand’s positioning is meaningful enough “if it costs you something.” I don’t disagree, but let’s be more precise: if your positioning doesn’t require your company to do things differently than in the past, then it has no meaningful depth. “Revealing the Answers Inside” didn’t require that one genetics company to do anything different; they could have simply continued making excellent genetic tests. Their promise had no effect on their business, aside from some potential superficial recognition brought about by clever wording.
The rise of storytelling as a failed crutch for bad brand positioning
One final thought on the depth of brand positioning (or lack thereof) before we continue on to the other essential brand fundamental, brand architecture. And it has to do with the increasing popularity of “storytelling” as it relates to a brand’s success in the market.
Up until the mid-1990s, the corporate identity—as a discipline—yielded a perception-influencing veneer for the business: logo, colors, and a bunch of related organized visuals. It was at that point that my generation of professionals evolved the discipline into corporate branding. “Brand” became a beam of light within which everything one said or did resided. As mentioned earlier, it was akin to a company’s operating system, dictating everything.
Starbucks’s focus on being “The Third Place” (home, office, Starbucks) dictated its store layout, couches, internet, snacks, bathrooms, and hours-long hospitality even after selling you a single cup of coffee. Airbnb’s “Belong Anywhere” isn’t just about being “a new way to hotel,” but rather a meaningful root enabling an offering that includes both your stay and special, local experiences. And all this time, we used storytelling as a tactic—we just called it “communicating and celebrating the brand positioning’s depth.”
Now, back to today. Why is storytelling coming back with such emphasis? Why are we seeing new corporate titles along the lines of “Vice President of Marketing & Storytelling”? If your brand idea and promise is meaningful, then it has naturally fertile narrative dimensions. Unlimitedly so, in fact. But if that promise is just a shallow slogan, then your marketing communications teams must work very hard, leveraging ever shinier “storytelling” to make it mean something. Which is exactly what’s happening.
It’s far easier to tell stories than it is to craft a deeply meaningful brand idea or promise. And in the absence of the latter, brands need to keep storytelling themselves in infinitely new ways and at far greater costs and diminishing returns—or, as my favored late-night talk show host, Jon Stewart, says (albeit in a different context), “All trailers, no movie.”
Brand architecture: a comprehensive way to go to market
Both your business and brand need a presence in the marketplace. A good brand strategist will always merge the company, its business, its offerings, and its brand into a singular multifaceted perspective, taking the whole branded proposition to market.
Achieving such coalescence requires two activities: portfolio management and brand architecture.
Portfolio management comes first and is a strategy—a business- and market-driven rationalization of which offerings should make up the portfolio, so that assets are established and leveraged in a way that optimizes value. I use the term “offerings” because portfolio managers concentrate on optimizing factual product propositions, while ignoring all other parts or assets of a company.
The key activities at this stage are:
- research (qualitative and quantitative)
- portfolio mapping
- identifying business cases
- assessing equity.
The goal is to answer questions such as, what should I offer and in which category based on my business strategy and revenue goals? What needs investment? How are competitors set up, and how should we respond? Portfolio management requires business acumen and financial management skills—very little branding per se, other than recognizing the role it plays in the given industry and competitive environment. The result of a typical portfolio management process is a clear view on “here’s what I do or make.”
Brand architecture comes second and is a method. Taking what portfolio management has deemed important business-wise, brand architecture is a framework that allows all assets (including both products and nonproducts) to go to market in a relevant, harmonious, integrated, and value-adding way. The goal? To optimize brand power.
Here, you might decide to “brand” something that portfolio managers deemed unimportant, or vice versa. The key activities at this stage are:
- defining the relationship between the corporate brand, its business units, all offerings, and both product and nonproduct assets
- determining how to integrate acquisitions and surface all types of third-party relationships
- crafting all required verbal and visual components.
This is where you answer questions such as, how should the organization go to market? How should its various parts and assets relate back to the corporate (source) brand, and to one another? Which asset influences the marketing funnel, regardless of revenue? Which is the source brand of which asset? And, in the end, how should each part and asset be identified?
Rather than merely clarifying “here’s what I do or make,” brand architecture forcefully tells the world “here’s how we can serve your needs.” And even in situations where sheer clarity is the primary goal, a brand strategist’s role is to add value to that clarity.
What are nonproduct assets, and why do they matter?
Nonproduct assets are the forgotten children of branded families: the dozens of assets and properties (think programs, services, technologies, methodologies, and marketing constructs) that can potentially become ingredients and differentiators. All of them matter and need to be identified, either in a branded or unbranded way.
In addition, your company might also choose to go to market in collaboration with other parties via co-marketing and co-development, partnerships and sponsorships, joint ventures and licensing. Each of these assets and properties has a distinct role, with all of them typically geared toward serving the revenue-generating ones—which makes delineating and documenting their interdependencies imperative.
You must expand your view of what brand architecture is and ensure your organization’s entire proposition goes to market.
It should now be clear why and how the general pundit’s view of brand architecture as “Branded House vs. House of Brands” is insufficient, inefficient, superficial, and, in fact, disingenuous. The model is based primarily on the relationship between a corporate brand and its business units, along with the role of said corporate brand when it comes to products. It completely ignores the larger organizational universe within which it all resides. (And at any rate, those two constructs generally coexist in many large companies, Unilever and Procter & Gamble included.)
Most curious, however, is the idea that between those two extremes sit what some conveniently and meaninglessly call “hybrids,” which, if you ask me, is one of the most useless terms in branding. All it means is that it’s neither a Branded House nor a House of Brands, but rather something in between. If that’s true, and most companies are indeed hybrids that come in countless flavors, then industry experts should do a better job of offering guidance as to what those flavors are and how they operate.
In closing, brand fundamentals will always matter
My final words of advice? Do brand positioning and brand architecture well, and you’ll be able to properly craft the visible parts (e.g., verbal, visual, and behavioral) of your brand’s promise, as well as all its expressions. There will be no disconnect between your brand’s intentions, their delivery, and how the world perceives and experiences it all.
Happy branding.
Cover image: Nikolay N. Antonov