The brandgym blog

Brand Onion Worshipping

This week's bit of genius from Brandcamp is about worshipping the "brand onion":

Whether you also use an onion, or some other shape (donut, key, flying saucer), to summarise your brand positioning, the risks are the same:
- Too much clever language
- Complex to navigate
- Hours/days/weeks wasted on word-smithing: what I call "pyramid polishing"

Now, some sort of tool can be useful to capture a detailed positioning. But here are some ways to make sure that your brand vision really gets used to create a better mix, along with the links to more detailed posts:

1. Avoid Strategy Tourism
This is the over intelectual time-wasting of working on strategy, disconnected from the business.

2. Sell the cake, not the recipe
Any brand tool is a recipe...and beyond the brand team, no-one is interested in the recipe, they want to see "the cake". In other words, they will be excited by the innovation and communication the positioning will inspire. So, bring you story to life with visuals, sound and best of all, examples from the current or future mix

3. Think less, do more
Bring the positioning to life instead of word-smithing...play with it, and take it for a test-drive. You'll learn more about the positioning, and you'll end up with a "prototype mix"

4. Pour your heart into it
Try writing a brand manifesto, as alternative to a brand onion. This allows you to break out of the boxes of such a tool, and express more emotion

5. Write a team t-shirt
Most "brand essence" statements are backward-looking summaries of what made you famous, not inspiring rallying calls that inspire you to create the future. Try to write the slogan you'd put on a team t-shirt to get something more motivating.

Strategy Tourist or Brand CEO? (Brand Vision - Part 1)

Here is the first of a series of posts with key headlines from the new book, Brand Vision: How to energize your team to drive business growth. This one is about the risks of "strategy tourism".

Strategy tourism is an explanation for the poor success rates of brand visioning exercises. In research for the book with marketing directors only 9% of them said that most/all such exercises added value to the business. Put another way, 91% said that most/all were a waste of time, effort and money! Ow. And hands up, I've been involved in some of those types of projects, even though I'm now obsessed with trying to ensure a vision drives business-building actions.

The summary of strategy tourism is shown below, though most people have a pretty vivid picture in their minds of what it is from the name alone. Its an intellectual process that is heavy on debate and light on action. People try and fill in the boxes on a complex positioning pyramid/diamond/donut, and then agonizing over specific words. And when they do get onto action, they only discuss communication and not the bigger challenge of fixing the product or service.

In contrast, "Brand CEO's" are the leaders who successfully create a vision for their brand that energizes the team to drive growth. They  lead through their actions more than their words, saying less and doing more. They have a passionate belief in the brand vision to the point of being evangelical. And they earn the respect of the whole business, not just marketing, by having a deep understanding of what creates value in the business. In some cases they are literally the CEO (Steve Jobs, Michael Dell) but they also exist in consumer goods companies in the form of the very best brand or marketing directors. One example is Silvia Lagnado, the architect of much of Dove's Campaign for Real Beauty, and now leading the Knorr brand for Unilever.

Any good examples of other brand CEOs? Or strategy tourists!?

The next highlight from Brand Vision will introduce the idea of a "visioning journey" that you can take a team on to create an inspiring vision and, just as importantly, an action plan to drive growth.