Branding is often confused with marketing communications. Marketers are busy creating ads and taking them to the market, rather than investigating and presenting the characteristics that define and qualify the personality of the Brand to its consumers. The focus seems to be only on reaching the targeted segments with a message, any message, whether the message projects the brand's intended personality or says something that's completely against it, is considered inconsequential. The nature of these marketing communications is such that the collective impression created on the receiver is left to chance.

This gamble of chance is then measured in terms of the number of impressions on videos & banners, click-throughs on digital ads, downloads from websites, visits to the booth in an event, and meetings arranged with the prospects. A marketer declares victory when there are enough email addresses generated from a campaign, which in some ways is considered the essence of having the marketing function in the organization.

It is important to note that most marketers and brand managers are appraised on the basis of the number & estimated value of the deals influenced by advertising campaigns.

In the end, this unguided-outreach-centered approach to marketing might seem like an effective way to keep the marketing function aligned to the primary objective of the businesses, i.e. to generate revenue. Yet, this approach misses out on an important opportunity to build a Brand.

Building a Brand is akin to building a person's character. Every organization has a personality, which is a manifestation of the management philosophy followed by its business leaders, and the policies & processes that govern the final product delivered to the customers. It is this personality that the news magazines & journals write about, the organization's employees identify with, the new recruits adapt to, the partners learn to implement, and the prospective customers evaluate.

To be able to identify an organization's personality characteristics is the first step toward nurturing a brand. Brands with a clearly defined character are trusted by customers with larger deals and greater risk capital when compared to brands with an ambiguous defined character. A brand with a strong character is perceived, by customers, to have differentiated services and products. These brands often command higher profit margins on new products even before the product launch. You can imagine the benefit of having a character-sum brand in the fast-moving industries where products have a very short marketable life and are often rendered obsolete by new technology in a few months.

Examples of brands that failed to recognize the need to build character into their brand persona include music bands that disappear after a single hit, actors & actresses who could not carry forward their popularity from one act to another and football teams & players that fail to win fans and sponsors despite world-beating talent.

I conclude this post with a quote from Steve Jobs on character building but will follow it up with one on some pointers on how a brand could identify, build and promote its character. After all, What's a Brand without Character!