TexasDesign

We looked at where branding went wrong in the first installment of this discussion last month. Specifically, branding is no longer a differentiator because most firms claim to do it, because the word is defined too broadly, and because your activities (behind closed doors) are not all that different than what you did before you called it branding. Real differentiation, for yourself or for your clients, requires significantly more pain and permanence than we see currently.

So branding is diluted and ubiquitous, and this is unfortunate because all the claims of those who aren’t really doing it are bringing a hollowness to the few who really are doing it well. The firms who got on the branding bus didn’t really know where it was going, but they wanted to be on it when it arrived. Now that all these buses showed up at the same place and clients assume everyone does branding, the “me too” firms are going to need a new mantra.

That new mantra seems to be sustainability, and unless we think more carefully about this movement than the last one, we’ll continue to suffer the marginalization that accompanies me-too trends.

Concerns about Sustainability

Here are my concerns about sustainability as a marketing tenet, followed by some suggestions about how you might approach sustainability…in a more sustainable way. I care about this and I don’t want to see yet another wasted opportunity as you attempt to get a place at the table, so to speak, where you can have an influential role in your client’s affairs. Marketing-related firms are embracing sustainability, but the context for their beliefs and activities is troubling for multiple reasons.

First, sustainability is being defined too narrowly because it has become a synonym for environmental impact. It’s like applying a single-issue test on a political candidate, ignoring the sum total of what they believe, say, and do. It’s the new litmus test for some of your clients, and now for many of you. Of the many important characteristics that might accurately describe a given company, “greenness” is accorded an unfortunately greater role than those other characteristics that have just as much to do with sustainability (see below). Featuring sustainability has become too much like a sound byte without intellectual rigor. Sustainability is worthy of our attention, but the way it’s being handled is convenient, trite, and simplistic.

Second, sustainability is not generally coming from deeply held beliefs. As it is embraced by a significant portion of your clients and the competing firms in your space, sustainability seems more like something being wrapped around the same realities rather than a foundational belief upon which the entire company is rebuilt. It’s more co-option than assimilation. It’s as if we’re more in love with the idea of sustainability than we are with sustainability itself. The level of hypocrisy is staggering.

Third, some of the companies you are helping are using it largely as a marketing tool. And as one of the primary influencers on their marketplace, you’re an “accessory after the fact,” in the language of Law & Order. As consumers express a preference for products/services from companies that embrace sustainability, some companies are playing the game and telling customers what they want to hear. Every time we help a company lie about their sustainable practices, we undermine true sustainability (theirs and ours).

In spite of all this bad news, the good news here is that we have an opportunity to be relevant and to make a difference. Or we can thoughtlessly get on the bus again, caring more about being on it with the rest of the oblivious gang than knowing where it’s going. Let’s look at how that might happen.

How Sustainability Could be Sustainable

Acting in more sustainable ways is a very good thing indeed, but if we are not authentic (and aligned internally as we pursue it), the brief moments we get on stage will turn open consumers into skeptical critics. Here are some suggestions about having a deeper impact on the world around you.

First, start internally before you preach externally. Assess and then embrace the true cost of following your conscience and lead by example. It’s very popular but entirely too easy to suggest how other people should spend their money. Start with your own.

Second, don’t ignore the broader definition of sustainability. Your carbon footprint matters, but I’m not sure it should matter more than running a genuinely “sustainable” business. That would be one that cares about financial health, management culture, work/life boundaries, doing effective work for clients, and even the sustainability of your own role. Taming chaos today by solving the same problems you fixed yesterday doesn’t ooze sustainability. The best way I could synthesize this point is as follows: control follows viability, and impact follows control. Be the right sort of firm in order to give you the sort of control that can be wielded on behalf of clients that need it (even if they don’t know they need it).

Third, be yourself even if it isn’t all that sexy. Generally ignore what others are doing and craft something that’s real, authentic, and substantive, so much so that you’ll still be energized by it a decade from now. That’s the sort of real differentiation that accompanies genuine branding. If you’ve done it right, the message on your web site can remain virtually unchanged for years and years. That, my friends, is a component of sustainability, and throwing my Venti Latte into the recycling container is more lip service than substance.

It’s time to broaden our perspectives and be more balanced and authentic marketing partners who tell the truth, regardless of where it leads. It’s time to drop flippant uses of the word branding, and it’s time to take a more sustainable approach to sustainability. Seldom have larger businesses embraced a message as significant as this to marketing firms, and whether genuine or not, we have an opportunity to engage in meaningful conversation and move from the transactional work we’ve been doing to the consultative role we’ve longed for. Just keep in mind that good consultants aren’t always popular, but they do have a point of view and they are honest.

Too many firms are like fleas, jumping from one dog to the next as they desperately try to get to the county fair. They so long for relevance that they embrace the message the audience gives them rather than being the expert they could be. Let’s take a leadership position on this and take advantage of a rare opportunity to reverse the marginalization that we have allowed to date.

Next month we’ll look at how you can unbundle implementation from the rest of your service offerings and enhance it in the process.

This monthly article is devoted to business advice to small marketing firms. So when we get to the second part I hope you’ll read the following guidance in a business context and not as guidance about politics or environmental concerns.

What I see happening is another unbalanced pursuit of something that’ll give you traction as “branding” fades and “sustainability” takes center stage. I put both of those in quotes because “branding” has not been practiced with integrity and “sustainability” is about to take the same path. Let’s talk about branding first.

Branding Is Not a Differentiator

Look at web sites for your competitors and you’ll have to search everywhere before you find one that doesn’t trumpet branding as something they specialize in. Branding as a concept has been around for decades, but branding as a word has become ubiquitous in the last decade and it is no longer a differentiator. Even if you are in the minority and really practice branding authentically, the overuse of the term can rob your positioning of the substance you need to “make yourself real” (if I can borrow from the Velveteen Rabbit).
So branding as a concept is more valid than it ever has been, and clients need it more than they ever have, but the word itself is nearly meaningless as a differentiator, for these reasons.

First, everybody does it. Instead of telling your prospects how you’re different from those who don’t practice branding, it merely defines the category: you are a branding firm and now I know what sort of work you do, not how it’s different from all the other firms in the same branding space.

Second, the word is defined so broadly that it always seems to require an asterisk after it. On one end of the spectrum it can be used as another word for identity work. At the other end, it can be used in its purest sense to refer to the sum total of what customers think a product, service, or company stands for. Further, public relations uses the word very differently from design or advertising.

Third, branding describes an activity that’s not significantly different than what you were doing before you called it branding. Are you doing primary research now before formulating a plan for your clients? (Not secondary research, but primary research?) Have you applied branding repeatedly to similar situations to the point where you’ve been able to notice and then articulate very specific principles that help you find the truth quicker the next time you do it? (Are those written down in a document that you could email to me right now?) Have you developed a real process that’s not descriptive but truly prescriptive for your client work? (Do your new employees spend their first full day going over the process so that it really informs the work they are about to do with their new employer, and is that process significantly different than how they did it from the employer they just left?)

Where Branding Went Wrong

This is all historical now, of course, but let me make one other point before explaining how sustainability is the new branding. The point I’d make is that your own positioning got watered down with the advent of mass-produced color printers and PowerPoint presentations about twenty years ago. When those tools became available, firms like yours began to change their positioning based on what they were pitching, shaping the promises based on what the prospect wanted to hear. In the process, nearly every firm became unpositioned with a position du jour in the quest to smother opportunity with interest. It was the big unbranding movement, and we’re still paying for it. You quit being yourself and became something different with each pitch. Your POV looked at things from the client’s perspective and not your own expert one.

As a culture, we came to understand branding as putting a tattoo applique on at tonight’s party so that we could “be somebody” tonight without having to embarrass ourselves by wearing it at work the next day, settling back into our normal persona. That is not branding, folks.

Branding is what you do when you look out across your field and can’t tell the cows apart–when there’s a danger of mixing your cows up with the neighbor farmer’s cows. You reluctantly heat up the poker, wrestle the cow to the ground against their will, and burn a big chunk of the cow’s ass, permanently. Branding is the smell of burning flesh and hair, and it’s not something they sell at Neiman Marcus. It’s the smell of (nearly) permanent, considered choices that are based on truth and reality.

Real branding doesn’t happen without pain, anguish, and a (largely) permanent decision. That’s my perspective, and it’s why I think much of this talk about branding is a crock–we’ve watered the term down and misused it to the point where it now hardly means anything. That’s unfortunate, too, as there are some firms out there doing really, really good work in branding. And even beyond that, your clients deserve better work from you. The world doesn’t need drive-up branding, and by providing it without taking the process seriously, we have undermined the very foundation of our expertise.

How Sustainability is Following the Same Tortured Path

Now fast forward ten years and here we are with sustainability as the new hot term. Are we defining the term largely in environmental terms, or does it have a broader, deeper meaning that might very well reverse some of the marginalization that marketing firms have been suffering? If handled correctly, could we have an opportunity here to be more relevant and make a greater difference in the business lives of our clients? How could an emphasis on sustainability be (ironically) unsustainable? How could we be more honest with prospects…and ourselves?

This is such an interesting time in the intersection of marketing and culture that I hope you’ll stay tuned for next month’s installment.

Contributed by Chuck Lustig, of ExcitingWriting Communications

Strike: The modern meaning of this word developed from the Old Norse, striuka, “to deal a blow.” By around 1325 “strike” came to mean “to deal a blow” and “to collide.” The first use of “strike” to refer to a labor dispute came in 1918. When sailors refused to go to sea, they would “strike” the sails. The first use of the word as a baseball term came in 1841; the first time, to describe a military attack, 1941. (Courtesy: Online Etymology Dictionary, ? 2001 Douglas Harper)

Bat: This word derives from Late Latin, batter, “to beat,” then progressed to Old French, batte, then made its way to the Gaelic batt or bata, meaning “staff” or “cudgel.” It then migrated into Celtic and made it into Old English as “batt,” then passed into Middle English as batte, a stick. The first use of the word “bat” as a kind of paddle used to play cricket dates from 1706. (Courtesy: Online Etymology Dictionary, ? 2001 Douglas Harper)

Ball: This word came to us through Old English from Old Norse and Old German. It was probably brought to Britain, then inhabited by Celts, by Germanic tribes (the Angles, Saxons and Jutes) around the 5th Century C.E. “On the ball” came into usage as a sports term in 1912. “Ball and chain” as a prisoner restraint came into usage in 1835. The song “Ball and Chain” was recorded and popularized by Janis Joplin in 1967 but was composed and first sang by Moma Thornton. (Courtesy: Random House Unabridged Dictionary, except for the part about Janis Joplin)

Fan: The first use of this word was in the 1880s and, interestingly enough, its first use was to describe someone who loved following baseball. It then expanded to other sports and then to cultural and other endeavors. “Fanatic” is derived from the Latin word fanaticus, meaning literally “pertaining to a temple.” The Latin word for temple is fanum, which came to be associated with wild religious rites. So when people go wild over baseball, remember “fan” started out describing religious enthusiasm. (Courtesy Katherine Barber, Six Words You Never Knew Had Something to Do with Pigs.)

Run: This word started in Iceland as rinna, then migrated to Germany in the form of rinnen, then to Old English, as rinnan, then to Middle English as rinne and finally to its current form in Modern English.

Base: Deriving from the Greek word basis, which then became the Latin word basis which morphed into “base” in English, something upon which something else rests. Just as a statue rests on its base, a base became the place a player rested between plays.

Ump: “Originally in the 14th Century the word was noumpere, from the Old French nonper, meaning “not a pair,” that is, a third party considered to be an impartial judge. Noumpere came into the [English] language in the mid-1300s but by the mid-1400s, people had redivided the word? thinking that “a noumpere” was actually “an oumpere.” Thus, the word lost its initial “n” and came down as “umpire.” Initially, it meant an arbitrator in a dispute. In sports, its use dates from the 1700s.” (Courtesy Katherine Barber, Six Words You Never Knew Had Something to Do with Pigs.)

Here are a few expressions that derive from baseball.
How often do we use them without being aware of their origin?

• That was a curve ball!
• That was a change-up!
• That one came out of left field!
• Was he off base or what?
• Three strikes and you’re out!
• I struck out on that deal!
• I didn’t even get to first base (with her)!
• Ballpark some figures for me, why don’t ya!
• That was a minor-league (or bush-league) effort!
• This is how things are done in the big leagues.
• I’ll give you a rain check.
• Take a seventh-inning stretch.
• Right off the bat, he says to me?.
• Ask hardball questions.
• He pitched him softball questions that were easy to answer.
• He’s already got two strikes against him.
• They were just running up the score.
• Just get on base, will you?
• Batter up!
• She hit a home run with her presentation!
• They brought in a heavy hitter!
• That’s the way the ball bounces.
• He dropped the ball.
• Batter up!
• Let’s bat around the idea.
• He went to bat for him.
• Keep your eye on the ball!
• Play ball!