The Untethered Brand: Part 2, A Symbiotic Relationship

This week, we explore the connection between branding and innovation. Brands rely on innovation to maintain the implicit promise they offer to their users. Similarly, innovation looks to branding for guidance and importance. The Symbiotic Relationship between branding and innovation.

Having explored how branding, innovation and design can be understood in the context of brand-driven innovation, it's time to learn how the three are connected to each other. How do they need each other and in which ways can synergies be forged? In this article, we will delve into this connection between branding and innovation. You will learn why this mutual dependence exists, how brands can drive innovation and how this process can fulfil a brand's promise.

The brand as relationship: process and content

As mentioned in the previous week's article, the brand possesses unique qualities when it comes to brand-driven innovation. Let's delve deeper into these qualities by examining the role the brand plays in brand-driven innovation and the insights it offers on the essential qualities it should possess.

When a brand leads innovation, it initiates a transformative journey to enhance a situation or add value. This involves two key aspects:

1. The brand sparks and drives this transformative process.
2. The brand motivates individuals involved in innovation to enhance or create value.

Essentially, the brand has a dual responsibility:

• Firstly, it plays a pivotal role in the process, igniting a culture of change.
• Secondly, it serves a strategic role in guiding the necessary changes.

The brand's process role is to inspire and set in motion the innovation process. It does this by creating a vision, purpose or goal that people can rally behind and work towards.

The brand provides a sense of direction and motivation for those involved in the innovation process. By embodying values, beliefs and aspirations, the brand sets the tone for how the innovation should be approached and executed.

The brand's content role is to provide a foundation for innovation by defining the brand's essence, values and core purpose. This serves as a framework for generating new ideas that align with the brand's identity and promise. The brand's content acts as a guidepost, ensuring that any innovations are in line with the brand's overall strategy and vision.

The brand as relationship: a bridging function

When we closely examine the dual roles of a brand, an intriguing pattern emerges. From a procedural standpoint, where the brand ignites processes and sparks innovation, it must act as a connector between the marketing division, largely responsible for the brand in most organisations, and the areas where innovation thrives, such as Research and Development, design, or even manufacturing.

Acting as a liaison, the brand bridges the gap between marketing and innovative departments. While innovation can indeed occur within the realm of marketing, for a brand to foster innovation, collaboration with departments beyond marketing is crucial. The brand nurtures a synergy between marketing and the organisation as a whole, fostering a shared comprehension that links the two.

Delving deeper into the brand's content role, a similar trend emerges: to propel innovation, the brand must challenge those engaged in innovation to enhance existing circumstances, resolve issues, or develop products or services of value. This necessitates the brand to rally the organisation's inherent qualities and skills that drive progress, unlocking the organisation's potential. However, these qualities must be harnessed in a manner that delivers value to the end user.

Essentially, the brand must possess an intimate understanding of the organisation's user base. Once again, the brand acts as a bridge, this time between the organisation's internal strengths and qualities, and the values and preferences of its present or prospective users. By fostering this relationship, the brand establishes a connection between the organisation and the external world, emphasising a mutual understanding between the organisation's strengths and their value to the user.

The brand is essentially the connection that an organisation establishes with the external world. It serves as the foundation for the mutual comprehension shared between marketing and innovation, as well as between the organisation and its users.