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This monthly article is devoted to business advice to small marketing firms. So when we get to the second part I hope you’ll read the following guidance in a business context and not as guidance about politics or environmental concerns.

What I see happening is another unbalanced pursuit of something that’ll give you traction as “branding” fades and “sustainability” takes center stage. I put both of those in quotes because “branding” has not been practiced with integrity and “sustainability” is about to take the same path. Let’s talk about branding first.

Branding Is Not a Differentiator

Look at web sites for your competitors and you’ll have to search everywhere before you find one that doesn’t trumpet branding as something they specialize in. Branding as a concept has been around for decades, but branding as a word has become ubiquitous in the last decade and it is no longer a differentiator. Even if you are in the minority and really practice branding authentically, the overuse of the term can rob your positioning of the substance you need to “make yourself real” (if I can borrow from the Velveteen Rabbit).
So branding as a concept is more valid than it ever has been, and clients need it more than they ever have, but the word itself is nearly meaningless as a differentiator, for these reasons.

First, everybody does it. Instead of telling your prospects how you’re different from those who don’t practice branding, it merely defines the category: you are a branding firm and now I know what sort of work you do, not how it’s different from all the other firms in the same branding space.

Second, the word is defined so broadly that it always seems to require an asterisk after it. On one end of the spectrum it can be used as another word for identity work. At the other end, it can be used in its purest sense to refer to the sum total of what customers think a product, service, or company stands for. Further, public relations uses the word very differently from design or advertising.

Third, branding describes an activity that’s not significantly different than what you were doing before you called it branding. Are you doing primary research now before formulating a plan for your clients? (Not secondary research, but primary research?) Have you applied branding repeatedly to similar situations to the point where you’ve been able to notice and then articulate very specific principles that help you find the truth quicker the next time you do it? (Are those written down in a document that you could email to me right now?) Have you developed a real process that’s not descriptive but truly prescriptive for your client work? (Do your new employees spend their first full day going over the process so that it really informs the work they are about to do with their new employer, and is that process significantly different than how they did it from the employer they just left?)

Where Branding Went Wrong

This is all historical now, of course, but let me make one other point before explaining how sustainability is the new branding. The point I’d make is that your own positioning got watered down with the advent of mass-produced color printers and PowerPoint presentations about twenty years ago. When those tools became available, firms like yours began to change their positioning based on what they were pitching, shaping the promises based on what the prospect wanted to hear. In the process, nearly every firm became unpositioned with a position du jour in the quest to smother opportunity with interest. It was the big unbranding movement, and we’re still paying for it. You quit being yourself and became something different with each pitch. Your POV looked at things from the client’s perspective and not your own expert one.

As a culture, we came to understand branding as putting a tattoo applique on at tonight’s party so that we could “be somebody” tonight without having to embarrass ourselves by wearing it at work the next day, settling back into our normal persona. That is not branding, folks.

Branding is what you do when you look out across your field and can’t tell the cows apart–when there’s a danger of mixing your cows up with the neighbor farmer’s cows. You reluctantly heat up the poker, wrestle the cow to the ground against their will, and burn a big chunk of the cow’s ass, permanently. Branding is the smell of burning flesh and hair, and it’s not something they sell at Neiman Marcus. It’s the smell of (nearly) permanent, considered choices that are based on truth and reality.

Real branding doesn’t happen without pain, anguish, and a (largely) permanent decision. That’s my perspective, and it’s why I think much of this talk about branding is a crock–we’ve watered the term down and misused it to the point where it now hardly means anything. That’s unfortunate, too, as there are some firms out there doing really, really good work in branding. And even beyond that, your clients deserve better work from you. The world doesn’t need drive-up branding, and by providing it without taking the process seriously, we have undermined the very foundation of our expertise.

How Sustainability is Following the Same Tortured Path

Now fast forward ten years and here we are with sustainability as the new hot term. Are we defining the term largely in environmental terms, or does it have a broader, deeper meaning that might very well reverse some of the marginalization that marketing firms have been suffering? If handled correctly, could we have an opportunity here to be more relevant and make a greater difference in the business lives of our clients? How could an emphasis on sustainability be (ironically) unsustainable? How could we be more honest with prospects…and ourselves?

This is such an interesting time in the intersection of marketing and culture that I hope you’ll stay tuned for next month’s installment.