Monday, May 8, 2017

This Brand Is Your Brand, This Brand Is My Brand | Forrester

In my role as adviser to marketing leaders, I am often met with the question: "How do I figure out if it is better to invest in brand or to invest in something else?" To which I often respond with a perplexed, "Is there anything else?"

Brand is what keeps the lights on in my home and the bar stocked with Bourbon, so you will excuse my brazen partiality. But hear me out. Companies take products and services to market and create experiences for prospects and customers - these are "things" that they manage. Brand is an all-encompassing perception that holistically reflects how these "things" are viewed. When the organizational gods draw their charts, they more often than not drop brand in the domain of marketing. Indeed, there is an umbilical relationship between brand and marketing, but it would be entirely erroneous to view brand as circumscribed by marketing. Anything and anyone that shapes brand perception drives brand.

The brand does not belong to the CMO alone. It belongs to all, from the CEO on-high, to the front-line brand ambassadors. It runs from the fountainhead of marketing through every part of the business, from ritzy show rooms, through distribution warehouses, to IT data centers. If you listen hard, you may hear a Woody Guthrie variant reverberate off cubicle walls: "This brand was made for you and me." This is the anthem for modern marketing.

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