You don’t have to “live the brand” to give the brand

“Living the Brand”, an internally-focused branding strategy  heralded by marketing gurus, is being touted in the March 2008 issue of the Harvard Business Review. HBR features a case discussion about how to achieve organizational authenticity at the fictional Hunsk motorcycles. Marty, Hunsk’s new marketing manager, is intent on reinvigorating Hunsk’s brand by making it more authentic.  To make the brand authentic, he wants to make the organization more authentic. So, the new manager initiates an assortment of attitudes and practices that, when taken together, create a strategy of “Living the Brand”. 

Before any organization adopts a Living the Brand approach as a means for achieving authenticity, it should look closely at this strategy– what it promises, what it assumes, what it demands and what it forgets.

Often, Living the Brand programs ask the organization and its employees to become more ‘authentic’ regarding the brand, but less authentic themselves. Living the Brand programs can sacrifice organizational and employee authenticity for the sake of brand authenticity.  

I have a lot to say about Living the Brand programs and I’ll be unpacking this in future posts, but for today, let’s examine what Living the Brand asks of an organization’s employees.

What Living the Brand promises  

Living the Brand programs are designed to teach employees how to perform or display the brand’s values and attributes in their own behavior. Employees are to take the brand’s point of view, follow the brand’s priorities and adopt the brand’s attributes as their own. The idea is that employees (and thus the organization) will be more effective at delivering the brand promise to the customer when the set of attributes that define the brand is infused throughout employees’ behavior. 

In addition to being knowledgeable about their brand, employees are expected to be/live/act like the brand.  The promise of Living the Brand programs is that, if the employees live the brand, they’ll implicitly give the brand experience to each other and ultimately to customers.

What Living the Brand assumes  

Living the Brand assumes that there is a direct link between ‘living’ and ‘giving’. While these actions may appear at the surface to be directly linked, there are actually two underlying processes that create this link. The behaviors of ‘living’ and the behaviors of ‘giving’ are linked through understanding and internalization.  Living the Brand assumes that employees need to enact all of the brand’s attributes values themselves in order to understand them. And, it assumes that as employees perform the brand’s values and attributes they will internalize these as their own.  

This assumption isn’t wrong, it’s just woefully limited. We don’t have to act like an idea in order to understand it effectively. This assumption ignores other pathways understanding. It denies that each of us can be empathic, each of us can be insightful, and each of us can be passionate about things that we are not. 

This assumption also runs counter to years of marketing and advertising practice– using research to help us understand who the consumer is, what he or she wants, and how to provide this to the customer in compelling ways. It assumes that performing an attribute yourself is the best ways to develop a deep insight about it. That’s just not true. 

We can be passionate about products and about what a product stands for without wanting that product for ourselves. I think Porsches are fabulous. I love the engineering prowess and joy of precision, power driving that Porsches represent, but I’m not buying one anytime soon (Sorry Todd). 

What Living the Brand demands  

There is nothing necessarily wrong with considering how a brand’s attributes could be translated into everyday behaviors—the problem is in asking people to perform these behaviors in their everyday work activity.

First, when employees are not already like the brand, having to behave in ways that demonstrate the brand’s attributes might mean asking them to suppress who they really are, how they really feel, and how they really see the world. If you are asked to ‘live it’ but you yourself aren’t really it, then what?  

Second, Living the Brand demands that all employees find a way to enact or perform the brand’s attributes.  This would not be a big problem for the employee who is already somewhat like the brand or who genuinely wants to become more like the brand.  But we can’t assume that every employee will be personally attracted to the attributes of a brand.  For example, what if I worked for NASCAR?  I’m not sure that I currently possess any of the attributes of the NASCAR brand, and I’m not sure I would want to become what the NASCAR brand stands for.  It just isn’t me. 

The assumption that employees should be like the brand may also lead managers to discount the potential contributions of employees who might not perform the brand well, but might understand it nonetheless. Not everyone can express the brand in ways that others will easily recognize.  Although I understand and appreciate the values and attributes of the African-American cosmetic brand Carol’s Daughter,  it might be hard for me, as a white woman, to be recognized by others as a person who is living that brand, as hard as I might try. 

Asking employees to behave as something they are not, and expecting them to be able to do this well, is the same as asking them to be inauthentic.

What Living the Brand forgets 

Living the Brand programs forget that many brands are “made up”.  Consider Hollister, the surfing lifestyle brand. People who work at Hollister as well as people who actually surf know that the brand is fake. The brand wasn’t started by surfers, it was started by marketers.  Hollister has no roots in the sport of surfing or the culture of surfers. 

What must it feel like for employees to act like a brand that they know is a fiction? 

When employees are asked to act like a brand that they know is fake, or made up, they are asked to present themselves as something that they know it be fake. Not only is the brand not them, the brand is not what it says it is. It’s a double dose of inauthenticity. 

To be sure, there are situations where Living the Brand is not problematic.  When certain elements of the brand and the organization are aligned, such as when the brand’s attributes and the organization’s attributes are similar or complementary, when the brand’s values and attributes are functional for the organization itself, when the brand’s attributes are universally appealing, and when all employees have the same potential for embodying the brand, Living the Brand programs are appropriate.  In these situations, asking employees to live the brand does not also ask them to be inauthentic. 

We need to keep in mind that employees don’t have to act like something they are not or to be something they are not to be effective at delivering on a brand’s promise. 

What employees really need to be effective at ‘giving the brand’ are processes for finding insights about a brand, the ability to listen to customers, and the creativity to translate brand attributes into service and product features that customers can appreciate.  And, most important, employees need well-designed organizational processes that allow them to produce the brand’s attributes consistently.

Any leader can find these management challenges exciting, and none of these management challenges ask employees to be inauthentic.

You don’t have to live the brand to give the brand.  

To learn more about Living the Brand, I recommend this book by my colleague, Nicholas Ind.  He presents a thorough, mostly positive view of living the brand.