Branding’s Copernicus moment

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In the sometimes strange world of branding, there’s a revolution going on. It’s a bit like the Copernican revolution in cosmology, because it’s all about what’s at the centre of things: brand, or something else? For twenty years, particularly for people in the branding world, it’s been orthodox to make brand central. The view has been that organisations should use their brand – the ideas they want to stand for – to drive everything they do. But that’s changing.

You feel the controversy vividly when you talk to CEOs. We’ve recently interviewed almost fifty leaders around the world, and we asked them, among other things, how important their brand is to their decision-making. Although 41% put brand in the centre, there’s a powerful and growing group of 34% who strongly disagree. It’s almost a theological debate, with brand enthusiasts on one side, and a bunch of brand sceptics on the other. Like any good controversy, it’s not just an intellectual thing: the two sides feel strongly about this.

Clearly, there’s a big group of CEOs – many of them with a marketing background – who see brand as a powerful internal driver. They’re the brand enthusiasts. ‘Our brand is everything – it’s the ethos throughout our company’, says one UK start-up. An Indian CEO says: ‘Brand is extremely important. It defines the company that stands behind it’.

Many explicitly use brand as a decision-making tool. In the middle east, one CEO says: ‘Brand is the framework within which people can take decisions’. Over in the USA, another leader reckons: ‘Your brand has to be a fundamental input – and has to drive your decision-making’.

For several CEOs, brand matters because it’s the customer view. ‘Brand sets the expectations and experience for consumers so it is very important that decisions are made in line with those outcomes’, says one Indian CEO. An American CEO sums it up: ‘More and more the values you have are what the consumer is buying. Your brand has to be a fundamental input – and has to drive your decision-making.’

But talking to many leaders, you get the sense that they use the word ‘brand’ mainly because it’s fashionable – particularly in areas like professional services or not-for-profits, where it’s still a relatively novel business buzzword. As one British CEO candidly admits, ‘We use the word “brand” a lot, though I’m not always sure we know what it means.’

Partly because it’s such a slippery concept, many CEOs are edging away from the word. They’re moving the concept out to a distant part of their organisation’s solar system.

This is partly a recognition of business realities: you can’t always afford to do what’s theoretically best for ‘the brand’, and sometimes you have to optimise for short-term commercial gains instead. Brand, in other words, is just one of many competing priorities. One US leader says: ‘It’s one of many factors’.

An Indian CEO pushes ‘brand’ even further away: brand ‘does not influence decision-making’. ‘Brand is not central at the moment’, says one no-nonsense European CEO: ‘we’re focused on practical things like building our mobile network’.

More starkly still, one British CEO told us: ‘I generally don’t think about brand’.

And maybe they’re reflecting a wider public scepticism about branding – that it’s all words, all ideas, all messages, all spin. As one Indian CEO says, ‘Assets and actions speak louder than words.’ And, for him, this means that: ‘Brand never drives decision-making: it is the consequence of good decision-making.’ An African leader echoes this, seeing brand as merely ‘a lag indicator of fulfilling our purpose’.

My own view on this is changing too. I used to think that brand should sit at the centre of any diagram – a big idea driving everything the organisation does. A decade ago, I even wrote a book about this. Now, for all sorts of reasons, I think it’s more accurate, and more helpful, to think of brand not as the cause of what the company does, but the effect. Your brand, fundamentally, is the bundle of thoughts, feelings, actions and impulses about you that people have out there in the world – and that’s why it’s so powerful.

So for a lot of leaders, brand is the effect of what they do, not the cause. It’s not a burning boardroom topic. It has lost its fashionable shine. Brand is no longer at the centre of their universe. Why is this happening?

Internally, CEOs are focusing more on inputs than on outputs. They want to create the conditions for success, rather than over-determining what success looks like. They’re more interested in internal culture than external brand. Many CEOs now believe that creating a healthy internal culture is the best way to build a sustainable business, rather than pushing people to achieve aggressive externally-measured performance targets. They focus on defining a purpose – but not over-defining it. It needs to be open enough for employees to bring their own purposes to work each day.

And externally, the maturing of web culture has exposed an important truth: it’s not companies who create brands but consumers. More than ever, brands are defined by, made or destroyed by, shared by, interpreted by, expressed by consumers and what they do and say. Companies can’t control this: they can only indirectly nurture it.

So what should drive a business? Maybe it’s not brand but purpose. If a business has a clear purpose, and therefore does the right things, a strong brand will be the eventual consequence. But it’s not a closed or grandiose or self-serving purpose: it’s more like the base camp than the flag on the summit. As one of our CEOs says: ‘it’s a platform from which employees can explore’.

And the eventual consequence can’t be a closed or defined or controlled brand, but something consumers can adopt, adapt and do things with. It’s an open purpose inside the organisation, which in the end creates an open brand out there in the world.

And this is revolutionary: for those of who work in branding, it’s almost like the Copernican revolution. We no longer live in a neat, closed world, with brand at the centre, but in a messier, less controllable, more open universe, where the CEO may start the job, beginning to create meaning for their organisation, but it’s employees and consumers who then take on the job, and who may take things further than the CEO could ever imagine.