Few areas of marketing are as misunderstood as branding and messaging. Many, many smart people confuse the issues involved here, at great cost to their business.

Some of where the confusion lies, I think, is in what the term “brand” has come to mean. The image that most people get in their head when they hear the word is a Coke bottle, a Wheaties box, or some other mega-brand. For those companies – consumer package goods companies, auto companies, phone companies, and so on – their “brand” is the result of years, often decades of heavy mass-market advertising.

Typically, the most important elements of their brand package are those that can be quickly absorbed… often, their visual brand (logo, packaging, colors) and tagline (“Just do it”). Companies like this will invest millions in careful study tinkering at the margins with their brand – should their logo be icy blue, or sea blue? What images should they use on their package?

Most of us aren’t in that business. If your product or service meets any of the following conditions, you need to think about brand very differently:

• Not sold to a pure consumer audience (B2B, or a combination of B2B and B2C)
• Relatively high price point
• Not supported by mass-market advertising
• Complex purchasing process (not a simple transaction)
• Some post-sales customization or support required

If this describes your company’s offering, it means that while quick-hitting brand elements – the logo, the tagline – still matter, they are just part of the conversation. While the mega-brands focus on making their brands as broadly relevant as possible, you need to make yours deeply relevant.

The focus is on depth, not breadth – and that makes all the difference. It means answering different questions, such as:

• What is the overall mission of my business?
• What are the key elements of value that we provide to our customers?
• What are the aspects of our business that makes us capable of delivering that value?
• Who is the decision-maker for my product? The influencer? The enabling partner? 

Taking the above into account, you have to nail down your core brand promise, pillars, and supporting proof points, and translate them into compelling messages. While your core brand promise should be consistent, the way you express it might be quite different to different audiences (customers vs. merchant partners, for example).

This is no longer a limited “branding” discussion; it’s really about how you represent your company and products to your customers and other audiences. Once we define branding this way, you take it out of the hands of the “brand cops” – the people who get mad when the company logo doesn’t have the right space around it on a brochure – and make it the domain of everyone else.

Think about the other people in your business – your partners, employees, sales people, marketing staff. How would they answer the questions above? What would they pick as the elements to highlight about the business? What words would they use?

Why is so much marketing bland and generic? Early in my career I did a lot of corporate communications projects – copy writing for brochures, web sites, and so on. Most of the time, the work went well; when it didn’t, it was often because an interesting dynamic took hold on the client team. You might recognize this effect from your own experiences.

Get a group of stakeholders in a room and ask them what they want from a communications project. The answers will usually be something like:

• “We want to stand out.”
• “We need a clear, simple story.”
• “We want something that will really make our customers react.”

Here’s what that same group might say later, when presented with the draft copy:

• “I like this, but it feels too bold.”
• “We say we do X, but we also do Y and Z – shouldn’t we also say that?”
• “I like this part here… and this part there… can we combine them?”

Great communications never come out of a committee. The natural tendency of the group is to target what is distinctive and new, to question it, and strip it away. This effect is greatly magnified if there no clear decision-maker; now the communications project has to satisfy everyone. The draft review becomes a big consensus-building process.

If your messaging or communications project goes down this path, you won’t end up very far from where you started. The group will retreat towards familiar, comfortable messages and themes.

Interestingly, at the end of projects like this, clients are often very satisfied; they are flushed with their success in achieving consensus. They feel validated – “the group really came together there” – and that good feeling colors how they see their messaging. They are delighted with the outcome, even if they have the same dreary, cluttered muck that so many companies do.

If you are running a communications project or working with a creative agency on messaging, here’s how to avoid this:

• Take input from many – but limit final content decisions to few. Or just one, ideally.
  
• Work with the right talent. If you want distinctive communications, review their portfolio to see if they’ve delivered in the past. Does their stuff sound like everything else you’ve ever read?
  
• Test with your target audience. Unless you test your messages through focus groups or surveys, you won’t know how they resonate. Everything else is just talk. In the messaging work we do, whenever possible, we test for impact.