When your business needs Scarlett Johansson...its time to search deeper for your brand

Look at this headline and image...

Winning an upgrade contract for Scotland's major A-road, required a still of Scarlett in a Scottish film, to lead and lift the article into reader consciousness.

Talk about borrowed interest. Some companies, in certain markets, clearly feel they are not of great interest. They are devoid of heroism. Lacking a compelling story to tell. And their view is clearly shared by those who might tell their stories in the public domain. So Breedon Aggregates needs Scarlett Johansson to arouse any interest to get noticed.

On the surface, Breedon Aggregates might appear to be of low interest and no heroic status to any but those interested in concrete and asphalt... but dig deeper and it's likely to yield a different story. In my experience it's often the case, that what seems like the most unpromising of starts to defining and building a brand that it both competitive and compelling, just requires some more penetrative, investigative persistence and confidence. Ignoring those long-held and superfical cliches of 'professional services' markets or commodity industries, to pursue the DNA and substance of a company.

An industrial rivets business in Aberdeen, making....rivets, might make your heart sink in a search for differentiation and interest levels high enough to engage clients and employees alike. But when you learn that those wee screws hold up the big oil platforms that support the drills and crew that extract oil from the North Sea, in the worst of conditions imaginable, then suddenly that business is doing very heroic work. Work worth talking about, worth reading about, it becomes a business worth working for and buying into as a brand.

Many moons ago, I was luckily enough to work on a brief to help define and promote the brand of an asset manager, with a fetish for the color yellow in its communications. Knowing very little about asset management as an industry at the time, possibly from naivety, I avoided all the conventional places to mine for an investment manager brand positioning and kept coming back to the interesting things, below the surface and beyond the conventional that made Artemis interesting. Their agnostic style and approach to investing, their questioning attitude to the methods and mantras of the rest of their industry; even their strange obsession with the creative color yellow. There was something heroic about how and why they did what they did. Sure, what they did might be deemed broadly a bit same-same as everyone else. But the outlook and ethos of who they were was an inspiration.

Like the 'Wilbur Smith of investing', entrepreneurial, outspoken, maverick and driven purely to realise profits, they were simply 'Profit Hunters'.

The opportunity is always to find the heroic in what your business is, does, how it does it or why. To uncover the secret sauce of your company that gives it a kick. To find the nature of what people, both internally and externally, can 'buy-into'. That's a true brand. One that acts as a cranial source of clear and compelling meaning; more valued and valuable than a mere business alone. Something that people can connect with and 'follow'. Business as an agenda, character and sense of purpose.

All businesses in just about all markets could and should believe in their ability to be heroic beyond the prosaic.

It just takes more effort and energy to create a brand and a story with greater authenticity and integrity, beyond showing a Hollywood A-lister by the side of the A9.

Breedon Aggregates doubtless do have a heroic story of their own waiting to be found, written and told.

MARK TAYLOR acts as independent Brand Counsel to CEO's, boards, start-up's and private equity investors, to uncover the more valued and valuable brands their businesses can become. Clients have included GWR, Isle of Harris Distillers, Network Rail, GIP/Edinburgh Airport, Arriva Group, The Drinks Bakery, Standard Life and Accordance VAT.