The missing piece in your branding exercise

Wouldn't it make your business better if you had a single source... one tool with all the words you needed every time you had to write something, or present something, or answer a question about your business?

I worked for a company years ago who engaged a very high-level, well respected, expensive branding agency to rethink their master brand.

That's what they called it. It wasn't a logo. It wasn't an insignia. It wasn't a branding exercise. It was a master brand.

They spent more than a million dollars on the work.

They spent more than a year on the effort.

To be clear, the name of the organization was an initialization. Four letters standing in for a lengthy description of four long words.

The brand was more than 100 years old.

It was well-known around the world.

The original logo - all in one, bold, conservative color - had a vector diagram illustrating a key rule to the work they did.

And when the branding group delivered its final work.

The new, reimagining of the brand... the thing that was going to take this old-school, establishment, century-old organization into the future... was the same four letters, in a big, square, block font. In ORANGE. Without the vector graphic. Letters only.

More than a million dollars for four block letters in orange.

The big block letters were a different font than the organization carried on its shoulders previously. So I guess, that was a change.

The orange was certainly a change, but there was no connection in that particular color to anything in the brand's history, or name, or founding. Or anything else.

To those of us involved in the day to day promotion of the brand, it didn't seem connected to anything at all.

So in the end... take one guess what happened.

This august, top of its industry, professional organization that named some of the most well-respected professionals in its industry as members, threw the whole project out, used the same old logo with the new font, the old color, and the same old vector graphic.

Then they called it a "master brand."

And released a new style guide that looked a whole lot like the old style guide on how to use it.

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If you've ever done a rebrand. Or worked with a branding agency. You'll understand what I'm talking about here.

Sometimes it goes great and they come up with something astonishing.

Something that connects deeply with your organization, employees, AND customers.

Sometimes... it DOESN'T go that way.

When you talk about a brand style guide, you're talking about a book that a branding agency delivered to your firm as a final deliverable. A bible of sorts for use of your logo, colors, fonts, and rules about how much space you need to use around the logo in different situations. 

Sometimes it includes images to establish context around the tone, or style. Sometimes a short, narrative describing "professional white-shoe tone," or "conversational and casual," or something else.

Sometimes, as with big brand juggernauts like Coca-Cola or Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, these books are many, many pages printed in hardcover format.

Most of the time, you'll find a PDF that gets shared around the marketing department and its contractor agencies to follow when they are designing email campaigns.

Rarely does it get shared outside the marketing group.

But what's missing? Because there's something very important missing.

The story.

The words.

The way you answer questions when someone asks what your organization does.

The way your entire team answers questions the same way.

Every time.

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Your organization should have a brand story - and a tool, or a collection of tools - that makes it easy for your entire team to:

a) know your story

b) repeat your story the same way to anyone who asks - every time

c) make it easy for those people who just heard your story to understand, absorb, remember, and share your story with other people.

Does your organization even have a brand story? One that's written down and easy to remember and share?

Or do your sales team just make up their own stuff based on the individual needs of the day?

Or do your marketing creatives try and reinvent your corporate mission every time they write an ad, an email, a direct mail piece?

Or do your PR experts rewrite or "tweak" the way they communicate your value in every single press release based on what they are thinking at the moment? Or worse, what they think the pub they're targeting wants from them at the moment?

Wouldn't it make your business better if you had a single source... one tool with all the words you needed every time you had to write something, or present something, or answer a question about your business?

Wouldn't it be great if everyone in your organization described your organization the same way in the same words every single time?

THAT is the missing link in the branding exercise.

THAT is what Nymblesmith is all about.