Month: July 2013

Boring old brand-building

Brand building is boring work. What works best is absolute consistency over an extended period of time.

Al Ries and Laura Ries, The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding

The Rieses are right. Building a brand can be tedious work.

And who likes tedious? Certainly not creative people like us, right? We want variety. We want new.

And certainly not academic schools, departments, research centers or programs that want to do their own thing  — “make a big splash!” — rather than stick with the university brand.

Tim Nekritz wrote about this issue recently. He describes it as a personal branding issue. Which it certainly is. Personal branding applied to academic programs is a new twist, and one I hadn’t thought about before Tim wrote about it.

But this issue of everyone wanting his or her own brand — of every department, every program, every student group, every sports program — is even more deeply entrenched in our culture. Because it’s embedded in our human nature.

We humans are easily bored.

We get tired of the same old thing. We crave something new.

Think about it. What graphic designer would be content to merely enforce an institution’s graphic identity standards, day in and day out, without desiring a more creative outlet of some sort? That’s why they’re doing freelance work at 1 in the morning. (More about that in this infographic. But I digress.)

The most successful brands are those that find a distinctive niche in the marketplace and stick with it. Which means they must be consistent — in their messaging and identity. Even established brands, when they make changes, are most successful when those changes are not jarring to the customers. (Contrast Starbucks’ successful minor tweaking of its graphic identity in 2011 with the great Gap logo debacle of 2010.)

One of the key takeaways from the recent CASE Summit, which I wrote about in my previous post, was “routine matters.” People notice the regular, not the irregular. This applies to the world of branding as much as it applies to our behavior.

Safe sports cars?

Or consider an example from Al and Laura Ries in The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding.

“Volvo has been selling safety for thirty-five years,” write Al and Laura Ries. (My edition of this book was published in 2002, so tack on another 11 years to that figure.) And selling safety has worked for Volvo. Even when Consumer Reports ranks some other make and model as the safest brand, Volvo is usually perceived as the standard for safety.

But “every once in a while,” the Rieses write, “someone at a company like Volvo gets a bright idea. ‘Why should we limit ourselves to dull, boring, safe sedans? Why don’t we branch out into exciting sports cars?'”

A Volvo sports car? (Yes, there is such a thing. To Volvo’s credit, they stick with their brand messaging, pointing out that the C30 Sports Coupe provides “large car safety in a smaller package.” Still, I’m not sure the two ideas — safety and sports cars — go together so well. I agree with the Rieses here. Volvo has diluted its brand by expanding into the sports car line.)

The higher ed example

Let’s apply this principle to higher education. The president of a liberal arts college decides it should add engineering programs, because STEM is all the rage. I think we see some schools jumping on the MOOCs bandwagon because they’re either 1.) afraid they’ll miss out on a hot trend or 2.) wanting to be perceived as a leader in the brave new world of higher education. But does the question ever occur to them: Will this dilute our brand?

“You should limit your brand,” advise the Rieses. “Your brand has to stand for something both simple and narrow in the mind. This limitation is the essential part of the branding process.”

Maybe that’s why colleges and universities have such a tough time with branding. They don’t like the idea of limiting themselves. That’s just human nature.

But “Limitation combined with consistency (over decades, not years) is what builds a brand,” say the Rieses.

Decades, you say? That’s a long time to be doing boring brand work.

But if we stick with it, it will pay off.

Friday Five: #CASESummit takeaways

A picture of me taking a phone photo of me with speaker and author Guy Kawasaki during the 2013 CASE Summit. (Thanks, @CASEAdvance, for the photo.)
A photo of me taking a photo of me and speaker-author Guy Kawasaki during the 2013 CASE Summit. (Thanks, @CASEAdvance, for the photo.)

For an excellent recap of the 2013 CASE Summit, check out this Storify curated and posted by CASE’s Jen Doak (@jpdoak). CASE also has a collection of photos from the event on Flickr.

The 2013 CASE Summit, which wrapped up last Tuesday, was by all accounts a success. Record attendance, great presentations and presenters, positive comments all around, packed rooms for nearly every session and a new format modeled on TEDx that people seemed to appreciate.

I gleaned a lot of good ideas and inspiration from the event. Here are the top takeaways in terms of leadership, management and communication.

1. In our communications, we assume too much. According to one of our speakers (Frank Flynn, a professor of organizational behavior at Stanford), managers tend to assume that the people we are sharing information with know what we do.

If something is obvious to us, we assume it’s obvious to them. That isn’t so. We tend to undercommunicate, Flynn says. He cited research showing that on 360 evaluations, managers are 10 times more likely to be perceived as undercommunicating than overcommunicating. And as Flynn also noted, communication is typically seen as the most critical skill a manager can have but is also the one on which we are judged most harshly.

The takeaway: Don’t assume people know what I know, and work on being a better communicator.

2. Routine matters. In higher education, when we want to attract attention, we usually devise something that will make a big splash. (That’s also true in other fields.) We launch marketing campaigns and capital campaigns. We introduce a new “brand,” complete with a new logo and graphic identity. The trouble is, if these big splashes don’t translate into routine behavior, then we are not as likely to have our messages stick. People notice the regular, not the irregular. (This again comes from Frank Flynn’s talk.)

The takeaway: If I want to get a message to stick, I must communicate it in a routine fashion and develop consistency in my behavior.

3. Default to “yes.” In Guy Kawasaki‘s presentation on “Enchantment,” he outlined the 10 steps anyone can follow to enchant their stakeholders. (Here’s a good summary of that list.) Many of those tactics resonated with me. But the one that I found most challenging was the idea of making “yes” my default response in any situation.

I worry about over-committing to people, projects, etc. I’m a classic “underpromise and overdeliver” kind of guy. But Kawasaki’s point is that “yes” opens the door to further discussion, while “no” slams the door shut.

Kawasaki posted something about this recently on LinkedIn: Do You Have A Yes Attitude? “A ‘yes’ buys time, enables you to see more options, and builds rapport,” he writes.

The takeaway: Learn to say “yes” more. Or at least, “not yet.”

4. Stories trump data. Andy Goodman‘s entertaining talk on the power of storytelling reminded us all that “numbers numb and jargon jars, but stories get stored” in our memories. Just as we tend to over-rely on the big splash for our communications, so we also assume that bludgeoning our audiences with data and facts will persuade them to support our cause. But data and facts serve us best when they are woven into our stories of real people.

The takeaway: Rely more on stories than data to communicate to audiences, but don’t be afraid to use data to support those stories.

5. We over-rely on broadcast messaging. Sending out mass email messages is not a very effective way of getting people to do something. One-on-one communications is far more effective. We all know this, of course. But what I didn’t know before hearing Frank Flynn talk about this is that broadcast messaging “diffuses responsibility,” sometimes to the point where none of the recipients feels any compulsion to act. When we get a mass email or other broadcast message, we think, “It’s not just me” they’re asking, so surely someone else will help. But when the message is customized and targeted to individuals, the individual thinks, “Oh, crap, they’re talking to me directly,” and feels compelled to act.

The takeaway: Rely less on broadcasting, focus more on personal communication.