The Brand Is Everything You Do Besides Marketing

// September 17th, 2009 // Employment Branding

In a recent presentation by a marketing manager on how a particular consumer brand stacks up, I heard the following.

“We’ve got brand recognition that’s 18 points above the market, which means 95% of people who purchase the type of product we make know who we are. We’ve got some negatives, such as a perception that we’re not timely with our delivery, we’re not particularly innovative and our people aren’t proactive, but overall the brand is strong. ”

The Marketing manager was very proud of his 18 points of brand recognition.

Along with this message came a graph, marking areas against the industry standard. “Brand” was up 18 points above average, where things like “Timely delivery”, “Competitive price” and “Great service” were all under average, by between 5 and 7 points a piece.

Added up, the negatives overwhelmed the positive “Brand” message. So by industry standard, the graph makes this statement: “People know who we are, but they think we’re expensive, sloppy and boring by comparison to the market.”

This is not good brand recognition. In fact it’s terrible.

If you’re going to push a campaign out there so widely that the whole market knows what you’re doing, you should probably be doing it well. It’s going to take more work to change negative opinions than it would have to fix the problem in the first place.And it’s going to require an under-the-microscope evolution, as opposed to a quiet one in the background.

Your brand isn’t your marketing. It’s how people view every single thing you do.