Get out and live with it

Continuing on from my “(other) brand checklist” story, this week I am taking a quick view of a key brand checklist principle that is easy to overlook: You’ve got to get out and live with your brand in action.

A short interview with Richard Branson popped up this morning that got me thinking about this. In the interview Branson says: “I’ve never worked in an office and strongly believe it’s vital to get out there and live with our businesses.”

Yvon Choinard, the CEO of Patagonia, says something similar, as do the leaders of many great brands. And I don’t think it’s a coincidence. David Neeleman, the founder and ex-CEO of US airline Jet Blue regularly subbed for flight attendants on the routes to stay in touch with the day-to-day of the business. Lou Gerstner spent the first months of his turnaround of giant IBM doing nothing but travelling and talking to people from all areas of the business so he could make the right decisions – which in the end included “defragmenting” the organisation and bringing it back to one core brand.

Executives who sequester themselves away from their brands, outsourcing their care and feeding to one area of the business (usually marketing), or worse, to outside agencies, often find themselves wondering what went wrong. “Why can’t I get traction?” I often hear asked.

If people within the organisation don’t see their leaders living the brand, it is unlikely they will. And if the people inside don’t buy it, there is next to no chance that customers, or other stakeholders will.

Back to Virgin for a minute. Richard Branson spends six months a year jumping all over the world, visiting the various Virgin outposts, spreading the particular enthusiasm and perspective that has made Virgin so successful. You could say he “brands” by example.

In contrast, I wonder how many past or current CEOs of for example – Telstra, spend any time in their stores working side-by-side with their staff serving customers? How on earth can they have any idea where the gaps in their brand are if they aren’t?

It isn’t nearly enough to do surveys or bring in the so-called experts. Once you know what your brand stands for and have done the work to embed it across the organisation, you have to get out and live it. It’s not just about example, it’s also about understanding. As a company leader, if you don’t own it no one else will.

See you next week.

Michel Hogan is a Brand Advocate. Through her work with Brandology here in Australia and in the United States, she helps organisations recognise who they are and align that with what they do and say, to build more authentic and sustainable brands. She also publishes the Brand thought leadership blog – Brand Alignment.