Your Brand Is All You Have: How to Build, Protect, and Preserve It
I bet you know who McKinsey is. Deloitte, too. Probably Accenture, Gartner, and BCG as well.
That’s brand recognition.
A funny thing about a brand—once the brand becomes familiar enough, the brand itself becomes more important than the product.
What does McKinsey actually do? That’s not the easiest question to answer.
But if you worked for a big enough company, and you could hire McKinsey to solve a problem you were having, there’s a good chance you’d do it. Nobody gets fired for hiring McKinsey.
The brand transcends the product. That’s why Apple can sell you an iPhone and the latest hit tv show. Why Amazon has transcended the “online bookstore” to become “the everything store”...and a cloud platform for the world’s largest businesses with AWS.
Your brand is your company’s most important asset. It accrues value slowly, but if you do the right things, it can increase in value indefinitely.
Do the wrong things, and your brand can lose its value instantly.
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Sometimes leaders think of a brand as an investment you make after you’ve achieved success. Brand is commonly equated with pricey marketing campaigns that aren’t designed to immediately drive leads. But while you can, and eventually must, invest in marketing to build your brand, they aren’t the same.
Your brand is, basically, what people say about you when you’re not in the room. You build it with every conversation, every sales interaction, every customer service touchpoint, and every satisfied (or unhappy) client.
And you have to protect it fiercely.
I was $2 million in debt, digging my way out of a huge financial hole. During a session with my business coach, he told me “The brand is all you have.”
Of course, I’m thinking, “Why are we talking about this? I’m in survival mode, and my brand is the least of my concerns right now.”
But he was right.
We make hard decisions all the time in business. We have to. But we have to make those difficult decisions without damaging the brand.
Those decisions can be costly. It’s not just the direct investments like sponsorships. When you cut the fees for a client in dire financial straits with a massive overdue invoice, you’re protecting the brand. When you pay out an employee who you let go, even if they were underperforming, you’re protecting the brand.
Damaging the brand can be indirect as well. Cheapening your product or service can improve your margins, but if it costs you customers, it isn’t worth it. Trust me. You don’t even need to run the numbers.
Ditto for treating your employees or your vendors poorly. Your culture is part of your brand, too.
I don’t care if only 20 people know who you are or what your business does. If even one person knows, you have a brand, and you need to build it, protect it, and preserve it.
[Eric closing]
PS - True story about damaging your brand. The Walt Disney Company is one of my all-time favorite brands, and the company has done an amazing job building and protecting its legacy.
But in the last decade or so, Disney has made decisions that have eroded their brand. Increasing ticket prices. Decreasing entertainment. And more recently, cutting holiday decorations. Ask any Annual Passholder, and they’ll tell you that Disney has far fewer decorations up around Christmastime than in previous years. In fact, they just announced that one of their tentpole holiday displays was disappearing from their highest-end hotel.
The cost savings from these moves were likely significant—millions of dollars dropping right down to the bottom line. But the Passholders have noticed. We still love the magic of Disney, but we don’t feel as warmly about the brand as we used to.
Cutting the holiday budget may have helped them hit quarterly earnings goals. But in the long run, I think it will cost them.
