From Brand Equity to Enterprise Change

Branding is about your identity (and goes beyond managing your logo)

It is a truism that the only constant is change. And enterprise, if you like, is a story of how and why things change. Unfortunately, strategies and portfolios change far more often than psychologies, behaviours or cultures. That’s a paradox every c-suite member faces – and subsequently, each of us marketing and comms folks who are tasked with the nerve-wracking implementation stuff. And I believe: branding can play a key role here.

This little piece attempts to explore not how brands transform their visual or verbal design – but how they may utilize their equity to transform the enterprise. It is not about exploring the transformation of branding as a discipline, but its opposite: the branding of transformation as an enterprise strategy.

In other words: how might companies not only strategize their brand but evolve beyond that, to strategize their transformation, leveraging their brand? A nuance, perhaps, but a key one nevertheless. Can brand become more than a mark of origin? Can it be a way of changing and positive evolution? Can brand become more than an aesthetic discipline, can it become the strategy itself?

Peter Drucker went on record to say enterprise consists of only two essential things, innovation and marketing. Aside from innovation within marketing, how can innovation itself be branded? To explore this topic is to see brand as a much more dynamic factor than it is usually portrayed – and certainly much more than an intangible asset requiring some financial modelling to justify a smaller budget cut than proposed by Controlling.

Brand equity itself originated as a concept to justify marketing spend. Now let’s move beyond this self-centric view and consider the benefit of the whole. Branding began literally in the caves of Lascaux with painted livestock given marks of ownership. The word 'brand' – with its Germanic connotation 'to burn' – marks ownership and origin literally burned onto the outside.

But isn’t brand also an inner game?

In a world of homogenous, often exchangeable products and services, is the inner game of brand the ultimate factor that can make a meaningful difference? In a world beset by the need to transform digitally at speed – a transformation that goes far beyond mere digitization of analogue processes, of course – this seems to me to be the dramatic question: What part of the business remains the same so that all the rest can truly evolve? And as we struggle through a lengthening crisis unknown in the past decades, we ask ourselves another key question closely following on that one: When we change, how can we do so in a way that is unique to us and true to our inner nature, needs and wants?

It seems to me that the brand is (or should be) as much the expression of the company’s soul as its outer clothing. Clothing has its fashions. Souls have their innate style. They are about 'Haltung', they are about identity.

In addition, branding is a matter of belonging – and the human desire of being seen to belong (expressed in our social media age by the thumbs-up icon). Who are we? Who are we not? Who do we want to be? Who do we not want to be?

So as companies evolve through activities revolving around raw materials and money through products and technologies to intellectual property and ideas, can it be that the brand is not something external and ex tempore but innate, instinctive and intuitive?

Can we brand transformation just like we brand a product, a service or an ecosystem? Can the way we do it become far more significant than what we actually do when we talk about awareness campaigns and trademark compliance?

If this is the case, as indeed I feel it to be, then 'transformation' itself is the label that needs the message, the description that needs the drama. Instead of simply defining – the role of leadership and strategy – is branding the language of dramatization, the story of how? While strategy can make you think, branding can make you move. If culture eats strategy for breakfast, brand might be the dinner.

Branding transformation is more than a theoretical or rhetorical exercise. It is a dramatic realization of how brand essences such as beliefs, attitudes and behaviour can be the driving forces of real change – not just targets or commitments. In that case, every transformation would be different, and we would stop using that concept in the singular.

We should aim to deploy corporate brand not as a tool but the entire toolkit. Not as a single discipline but an entire way of working. Leadership, reputation, strategy and even culture are open to change and fluctuation. Perhaps the brand is the agent of change, the dynamic constant moving within a moving element – mobilis in mobile like Nemo’s submarine Nautilus.

Especially in legacy organisations with all their luggage, meaning most of the companies around – greenfield and start-up businesses are in a different state of maturity – transformation is the number one issue and task for leaders. But how to transform beyond clichéd rhetoric of disruptive and agile get-shit-done-ism? Management consultant slides usually map out a change process but don’t ususally make you feel and actually do the change. Something more is needed that goes deeper and creates an emotional connection, speaking to our intrinsic motivators.

Let us think beyond mere rebranding, transforming the brand discipline or function itself. Branding transformation means using the brand directly as an active protagonist in changing what needs to be changed.

How might a brand actually do that?

Just as economies have evolved from production paradigms to experience ones, so too the idea of brand has evolved away from rudimentary concepts of loyalty controlled by the enterprise towards advanced notions of community shared by the world. In an era of ubiquitous availability and quality, connection and relationship trump all. Even if you are selling energy as a product or service, it is the idea of energy that you sell which counts (provided that your offer, pricing and service form a solid foundation, of course). The ideas of what you do and what you stand for, and not only the objects or the technologies, are what your customers relate to and buy into in the long-term.

While being true to your enterprise DNA, that idea should also offer an ambitious stretch towards the future – like a suit that is slightly too spacious, encouraging you to grow into it. An idea that is true in the here and now, and at the same time fuels imagination and ambition.

I strongly believe that brand and brand ideas are what can help people and enterprise most during these times of turmoil. Resilience may have been the word of 2020 in Corporate Land. Now, in 2021, what we require is actual anti-fragility. We need the learning and not just the survival.

Brand is not an extrinsic factor to be selected like curtains or soft furnishings, rather it is an intrinsic element that aids us in finding true north, deselecting all the things we do not wish to do (as the word 'decide' implies in its real sense of cutting away), and it helps us to bond beyond transitory success or failure in a family of equals. Brand is not a platform strategy – platform strategies are choices enabled by healthy brands.

Brand is the constant in the continuum.

Next episode: Revolving, Evolving, Loving – How brands can drive transformation