Brand Grenades - A fresh look at brand dynamics

Look at the many and varied definitions of brand, and then, think about which elements are important, and which lie under the control of the brand officers.

If we take a contemporary, comprehensive, realistic look at brands in their typical scenarios – out in the world, we rapidly see that the brand elements that impact most on the success of the enterprise are ultimately those which lie at the further reaches of our control.

We’re not talking here, mind, about who has the better product. We’re looking only at commercial success – Betamax vs. VHS, Microsoft/IBM/Intel vs. Apple - and brand as a critical driver of same.

We are thus obliged to consider that the success of our branded product or service lies in the hands of the communities (or networks if you prefer) of stakeholders. In the pharmaceutical business, this can be a minimum of 10-15 distinct groups (from KOL’s across to investors and the board of the business itself).

One more “brand grenade” before we move on …

Brand Messaging – that sacred cow of monolithic brand thinking – has also spun out of our control.

How? The most critical messages are no longer those that we push out to the market. They’re the observed, shared and noted behaviours and statements (to themselves and each other, tacit and explicit) of belief about our brand that, partly due to our own endeavours, partly due to, well, all sorts of factors, our key stakeholder groups manifest.

The realpolitik of brand takes yet another twist!

The good news …
… is that once we get engaged with the real world interface between our brand and our stakeholder groups, we can, if not control, then certainly meaningfully influence, a lot more than we might have initially expected. Like:

• The relevance and value of the brand's informational communications;
• The responsiveness of the brand's communicators to the needs of its stakeholders, according to specific need;
• The quality and mutual value of the ongoing dialogue with specialists and opinion leaders, especially as indications evolve over time;
• The brand's adherence (behaviourally) to what it stands for, its principles (this will come under increasing scrutiny in the coming years...);
• The brand's support for and engagement with its key communities, understanding interactions both within and between them.

Rational Visioning works inward from envisioned and rational success criteria to target the optimum brand proposition and core brand meaning, and then outwards again to create the behavioral route to achieve that success across the entire lifecycle.

It's a fresh approach to unwrapping the real and meaningful potential of your brand, of internalising fresh behaviors and beliefs across your organisation that resonate with the brand's core meaning to all external stakeholder groups.

To discover a little more about truly meaningful approaches to healthcare brand development, devised to add value and energy to your brand development processes, contact Top Dog at Doghouse, brian@doghouseonline.net, or for a broad view check out their website www.doghouseonline.net. It might be of interest to anyone who has only obsolete or orthdox brand development models to work with.