How you challenge yourself defines your brand
I’m always on the lookout for any kind of “brand quick take” that can help a company gain insight into its brand. There are many to chose from. This is one I currently use:
How you challenge yourself defines your brand.
What it means
Every company is originally organized around a challenge it sets for itself. In startups, the founders set the challenge, and the challenge becomes the pulse of the business. The challenge runs deep. It is values, process and deliverables rolled into one. Employees “get it,” share it, and feel it. That’s why startups are such an emotional high, in spite of the ridiculous hours.
The nature of the challenge
The challenge is always to advance customers to a higher level, to a new plane of being and doing. This means the company will deliver new tools, new economies, new possibilities, and/or new customer freedoms.
Mature companies
The original challenge can become lost in mature companies. The founders are gone. The original fires are gone. Sometimes the original challenge is still reflected in the company’s mission statement, or the company culture. Often, though, the mission statement is cobbled together to be all things to all people. It doesn’t do much. And the company culture can sink into bureaucracy. The electric challenge that started it all has vanished. At that point, the brand is adrift.
The nadir occurs when a company defines its challenge as, “Just make it through the quarter.” That results in paper brands only used as window dressing.
Your challenge defines your brand
Whether a company is a startup or a mature enterprise, how it defines its challenge will define its brand. Great companies set great challenges for themselves. The challenge unites company and customer, values and vision. The greater the challenge, the more you demand from yourself, and the farther you can advance your customers.
Your brand translates your challenge into customer context, and leads customers with it. The greater the challenge, the greater the brand.
May 8th, 2006 at 9:05 pm
All good points, but once a brand becomes adrift, is there a way to rescue it? Is the solution to attempt to reunite the company around a single cause, or to acknowledge the fractured nature of the brand and divide mission statements accordingly? Surely the brand manager would be upset at this, but is it in the best interest of the company?
May 11th, 2006 at 5:49 pm
The best way for a company to address this issue is to take a holistic view of itself, its markets and its customers. It has to redefine its challenge. Its brand will be an expression of “what the company is,” “who the company is,” and the challenge that the company defines for itself.
Companies define themselves by their challenge. Their brands follow suit.