You don’t control your Brand
A few days ago while having a distribution channel discussion, the topic of brand dilution came up if you don’t sell directly to the customer and somebody said “you lose control of your brand”… And an automatic trigger fired on my head… “you don’t have control of your brand!”.
I’m not a brand/branding expert, but I read enough books, talked with enough branding experts and went trough enough pain to know a thing or two about branding. If you think your brand is your logo, tagline, font style and corporate message, then yes, you control it, but you are wrong about what a brand is.
Brand is the perception that people have on their head of what your company, products and services represent. Unless you have a mind-control device, you can’t control exactly what people think about your product. Case in point: GM. Do you think GM wants to have a brand of poor-quality, gas-guzzlers cars? But that’s people perception.
The only thing you can do is to influence how people see your brand. It takes time and a lot of effort to shift that perception from point A to point B. It’s much eaiser to start from zero than from an existing perception (if done right).
The last thing I can say about branding is that actions speak louder than words. Translation: Your product/service will build (or ruin) your brand much faster than any marketing campaign.
