Branding Beyond the Super Bowl

Linda Jeo Zerba

With the Super Bowl (of advertising) upon us we can sense the anticipation building. There’s as much buzz around who will have the most outrageous spot this year as there is about what team is going to win. But, we wonder – since when did the beacon of a successful brand become a 30-second multi-million dollar spot that is so over-the-top you aren’t even sure who the company behind it is or what the ad is for?

Branding. . . it ain’t what it used to be.

In the olden days (and by that, I realize we could be talking about last week as easily as we could be talking about 1957, given our swiftly moving culture), people used to throw around the word “branding” as casually and as often as they would talk about the weather. It’s been a long-abused term that lost its meaning and focus somewhere along the way. And, along this lost way, it took a weird turn where suddenly what people were really talking about wasn’t branding at all. They were talking about advertising.

Advertising was the giant behemoth that drove branding. It was about who had the slickest Superbowl ad, who had the sexiest women or the funniest line. It was all about awareness, shock value and an odd kind of short attention span where things changed constantly and there was little need to concern yourself with things like relevance or consumer connection. The thinking was simple – be sexy, be bold, be bad ass and get noticed. And, if you were lucky, you’d get people to talk about how shocking or funny your ad was and it might make headlines in USA Today. That was branding in the olden days.

Today, thankfully, the conversation is shifting. Brand leaders are recognizing that successful branding is much more than just cool advertising. Gone are the days where a company could resurrect itself by throwing money at an ad campaign. Today, branding is driven by a rigorous process that requires focus, intense clarity and commitment across all facets of the business, not just communications. What you say or how you say it is no longer enough.

So, that leads us to examine the question: what is branding? And, if it’s not based on advertising or communications, what should it be based upon?

The bigger conversation that the world’s top brand leaders are having revolves around what a brand means, and not just what a brand does. To guide these brand leaders, we’ve simplified the conversation and the discipline even further. In our view, branding begins with definition.

There are three components to Brand Definition: ambition, filter and philosophy.

Ambition:
The core of Brand Definition is a positioning statement – the articulation of how the brand and consumer ambition align. All too often, brand owners mistakenly think that the positioning belongs to the brand itself, leaving the consumer out of the equation. But, if you consider the most successful brands today, their positioning statements reflect their own internal ambition in the very same way as their consumer’s. Nike doesn’t own “authentic, athletic, performance” separately from the consumer. It is universally shared as an ambition between brand and person. It represents a perfect alignment of ambition, whether we are talking about Kobe Bryant, the brand manager of the soccer division, or an 8-year-old little leaguer.

Filter:
The workhorse of Brand Definition is a filter. Filters are the lens used to evaluate critical brand decisions. Filters represent the central, differentiating and proprietary elements of the brand. Filters are used to facilitate decision making and weed out impurities, misdirected ideas, or unclear initiatives. Brand leaders, like Bonnie Hammer, head of NBC Universal’s USA cable network, credit the consistent use of brand filters as the key driver of success. Through USA network’s application of universally understood brand filters the network has achieved absolute clarity when it comes to knowing which shows get the green light and which shows do not. And no one can argue with a track record of 18 consecutive quarters of the highest ratings of any network on air.

Philosophy:
Many people have defined brands as the emotional connection between product and people. And so, with Brand Definition, the heart beat of the brand is its philosophy (often expressed as a manifesto). This may be the single most motivating force within a brand. Brand Philosophy is the emotive language that rallies the people within an organization around the central vision. This is the thing that makes you sigh, makes you feel proud of your job and your company, and the thing that says all the right things. It’s what connects the dots between what the brand is and what it strives to be.

Brand Definition is about taking branding to a new place, starting a new conversation, with a new focus. It’s about creating a larger canvas that stretches well beyond advertising, giving organizations a completely new tool kit to play with. It means that branding is taking on a much more important role, waxing philosophical in some respects, while at the same time providing a detailed roadmap for the organization to make decisions every day, across every aspect of the business. But remember, branding isn’t a religion; it’s not built on blind faith, but rather rigorous process and honed tools that ensure the success and vitality of business.

Introducing Brand Definition – the new model of branding.

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