chapter 1 of brand: it ain’t the logo*

Brand:It Ain’t the Logo*

"From Bangkok to Beijing and Sydney to Singapore, Ted's advice rings truebecause the branding principles he so clearly articulates are universal.This makes Brand: It Ain’t the Logo a must-read for marketing success inany hard-fought international arena."

Ron McEachernPresident, PepsiCo Asia

Brands are more important than ever to the survival of North American business. Our manufac-turing base continues to disappear, epitomized by the dismal Branding performance of icons like Ford,Chrysler and GM. The thickening fog of hyper-messaging – the unprecedented amount of commercialmessages that flood media channels and the minds of target audiences – is making it increasingly diffi-cult for Brands to attract and retain either customers or the best employees – the latter amidst ourworsening labor crisis.

Yet at this critical moment, “Brand” is widely misunderstood. Egged on by business schools and thead industry, a wide swath of senior executives at companies from startup to Fortune 500 equate theirBrand with their logo or advertising tactics. These executives believe, therefore, that the Brand isn'ttheir responsibility – but that of the marketing department alone.

With passion, irreverence and colorful stories drawn from his 37-year career, Ted Matthews vividlyillustrates that North American business leaders – if they want their Brands to flourish – must acknowl-edge that A Brand is what people think of you™. And that all the time and money that marketersspend on advertising is pointless if every employee isn't consistently doing what the ads say they will.

CEOs must appoint themselves CBOs – Chief Brand Officers – because they are the only people who canprotect the Brand from their own executives and ad agencies, and who can make delivering the Brandeveryone's responsibility. Only then can the Brand realize its full promise: to be the principle aroundwhich the entire company is organized, to attract and retain the best employees, and to enjoy thegreater strategic effectiveness and huge cost savings that come with consistently on-Brand behavior.

ted matthews persuaded adidas to bring back The Three Stripes. He convincedEnergizer not to kill the Bunny. But it’s still not about the logo. Over the course of a 37-yearcareer, he has preached proper Brand understanding and relentless consistency enroute to some ofthe most successful Brand evolutions in North America – at companies including adidas, Steelcase,Toshiba, Oxford Properties, Benjamin Moore, Steam Whistle Brewing, Kinross Gold and Honda. Ted is Brand Coach and Founding Partner of Instinct Brand Equity Coaches.

greg de koker is Brand Coach and Managing Partner at Instinct. Greg’s client list includes Bombardier Regional Aircraft,The Beer Store, Canon, Macquarie Financial, Suzy Shier and CanWest Media.

andris pone is Brand Coach and Partner at Instinct. His client engage-ments have included Fairmont Hotels & Resorts, KingSett Capital, PrincessMargaret Hospital Foundation and Warrillow & Co.

*It’s what people think of you™

ted matthews with greg de koker and andris pone

“Brand: It Ain't the Logo* should be required reading for anyone who sits around the ‘big table’ and for anyone who seeks to influence their decisions.”

Ken WongAssociate Professor, Business and Marketing Strategy

Queen’s School of Business

$25.00 US/CDNBrand Coaching

Brand: It Ain’t the Logo*ted m

atthews

Praise for

Brand: It Ain’t the Logo*

"Matthews and his team are champions of Brand actualization. They validatethe business rationale for emancipating Brand from the confines of marketfads, cyclical ad budgets and management whim. Thus, Brand is justly positioned as a cornerstone in corporate strategy, organizational behaviorand leadership. The impact? The amorphous definition of Brand evolves into a tangible, actionable set of behaviors for individuals throughout anyorganization to embrace and strengthen, or dismiss and destroy, with theirevery interaction."

Michael BoydellFormer Vice President, Yahoo!

"Marketing is going digital. Customers and prospects are interacting withbrands in ways we never anticipated. It is up close and personal…and thereis nowhere to hide. Understanding a brand’s equity, and delivering it consis-tently on-line, is a whole new challenge for marketers. Failure is everywhere – but Ted Matthews’ book is an excellent, easy-to-read roadmap to success in this future."

Tony MillerFormer CEO MacLaren McCann and

Vice Chairman of McCann Worldgroup

“Ted Matthews has taken the mystery out of branding and, in so doing, hasgiven executives a powerful competitive weapon. Tomorrow I become theChief Brand Officer of my company!”

Real BergevinCEO, NuComm International

One of Canada's 50 Best Managed Companies™ for six consecutive yearsAuthor, Call Centers for Dummies

“Brand: It Ain’t the Logo* contains a concise message that is delivered very effectively. The lessons can be applied to companies in every industry. If youhave an emerging brand or an established one, you have to read this book.”

Jerry PatavaPresident & CEO, Great Gulf Group of Companies

“Brand: It Ain’t the Logo* is an enjoyable read with a host of clear rules andcolorful stories that will inspire CEOs and their CMOs to build great brands.”

John BogertChief Marketing Officer, Coleman Natural Foods

Praise for


“This is a book about perspective and understanding. The kind of perspectivethat marketers need – not just for themselves but for those with whom theywork every day and rely upon for support at planning time. Brand: It Ain'tthe Logo* should be required reading for anyone who sits around the ‘bigtable’ and for anyone who seeks to influence their decisions.”

Ken WongAssociate Professor, Business and Marketing Strategy

Queen’s School of Business

“Ted Matthews wraps a persuasive argument in a lively read. This book ispacked with fascinating examples that back up its clear-sighted analysis ofhow to build your brand, and – just as important – how not to.

If you want highfalutin academic analysis, look elsewhere. But if you wantclear, convincing and actionable advice on how to build your brand, you'vecome to the right place.”

Jim McElgunnSenior Editor, PROFIT Magazine

“Ted gives us pause for thought that branding should become a corporate metric.If companies were to directly correlate the billions of dollars they spend onbrand-building to their ROI, I suspect they would discover it to be negative – because they fail to grasp that a brand, indeed, “is what people think of you.”

Neil GlasbergPresident and CEO, Invis

Head of Mortgage Services, HSBC Financial

“Brand: It Ain’t The Logo* is a great read. I couldn’t put it down. Great stories and great insights. I plan to lay it on our MBAs to help them in GettingItDone!”

Brendan CalderProfessor, GettingItDone

Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto

“In Brand: It Ain’t The Logo*, Ted Matthews offers a simple, logical and inspirational manual made especially compelling by his insistence that theCEO must be the Chief Brand Officer.

As well as being a must-read for every CEO and their teams, this book is asales and marketing "bible" for every organization and I will definitely make it a must-read in my company!”

Karen KerswillVice President, Global and Multi-National Sales, HRG North America

Table of Contents

Chapter 1 Consistency, Management and Time 1

Chapter 2 What “Brand” Really Means 11

Chapter 3 Be Remark-able 17

Chapter 4 Own a Point of Difference 27

Chapter 5 A Brand's Worst (and Next Worst) Enemies 35

Chapter 6 Build a Foundation 47

Chapter 7 Be the CBO 57

Chapter 8 Marketers: Surrender Your Brand 65

Chapter 9 Listen to Your Stakeholders 71

Chapter 10 Evolution, Not Revolution 81

Chapter 11 Branding is a Process, Not an Event 87

Chapter 12 Every Touchpoint Matters 97

Chapter 13 Make the Story Live and Breathe 107

Chapter 14 Be the Corporate Mythographer 115

Chapter 15 Inspire the Team 123

Chapter 16 Stop Giving 131

Chapter 17 Mine the Equity 139

Chapter 18 Protect Your Brand 147

Chapter 19 Ride Your Brand Through the Storm 155

Chapter 20 Make Them Want You 163

Appendix A Endnotes 167

Appendix B Index of Brands 171

Appendix C Brand Foundation: Instinct Brand Equity Coaches 173

[1] Consistency, Management and Time

It took me the better part of a 37-year

career in marketing communications

to convince myself that my definition

of Brand was the right one – and to

start convincing others.

“How the hell is a new logo going to turnaround our company?”

(Almost) An Instinct client

Sometimes I wish I'd done my career the other way around.

I spent the first 30 years of my working life running a marketing company,Promanad Communications. I sold it 1998 and left two years later, and forthe past seven years, I've had a Brand Coaching practice here at Instinct.

I enjoyed the Promanad years immensely. However, we could have usedour resources – and our clients could have used theirs – much more effec-tively.

If only we had all understood what a “Brand” truly was.

In 1971, after studying at the Ontario College of Art, I started up Promanadwith my father. Coming from a design background, I tended to think ofBrand the same way that my client CEOs and all the ad agencies did – asmainly a matter of “creative,” the industry term that describes the ideas,words and design behind marketing and advertising materials. In otherwords, I believed, just like everybody else, that a Brand consisted mostly ofa logo and advertising.

Even so, I tried to convince my clients that all of their marketing and adver-tising campaigns had to be built on a powerful communication device Icalled a “core idea.” Core ideas, like the Marlboro Man, Nike's silhouetteof an airborne Michael Jordan or Subway's Jared (the guy who lost 200pounds eating hoagies), express the essential truth of their Brands in waysthat are relevant and compelling to the target audience.

It's vital that core ideas can stand the test of time, because if you want tokeep your Brand in a customer's head, you had better first, tell them some-thing real and essential about your Brand, and second, be consistent andnot change the message all the time. Otherwise, people won't know whatto think of your Brand from one day to the next.

The Challenge

Consistently communicate the core idea. For a variety of reasons, it was analmost impossible discipline to drive through client organizations whenPromanad was growing in the 1970s and 80s. The main culprit was that,ironically, the ad agencies were then at the height of their power. Theywere in a position, quite the opposite of today, to easily deliver big salesincreases for their clients.


2 *It’s what people think of you™

Television typified how relatively straightforward it was. We lived in a uni-verse of 13 channels, not 500 or a thousand. Because there were fewerways to distribute corporate messaging, and because the overall pace of lifewas slower, customer attention wasn't nearly as fragmented as it is today.Relatively focused customer attention meant that advertisers just ran theirspots to the huge audiences provided by the main networks, and the salescame rolling in.

The Tyranny of New Ideas

If a given campaign didn't work as well as expected, it was no big deal.Renewed success was as easy as the next new idea, creating a cavalier atti-tude among the ad agencies and their clients – which was, in fact, one ofthe main reasons that good campaigns failed in the first place. Theyweren't given time to take root, because the ad agencies and their clientswere constantly rolling out new advertising with new core ideas – or withno core ideas at all.

Corporate Amnesia

Then there were the inevitable personnel changes that have always been apart of doing business. Even if we did manage to focus the minds of a clienton communicating a consistent core idea, our contacts within the compa-ny would eventually move on, and that company's commitment to work-ing on consistent Brand communications went out the door with them.There was simply no corporate memory.

The people who replaced them, quite naturally, came into their new jobswith a burning desire to prove themselves. But people don't typically set outto prove themselves by simply perpetuating the ideas of those who camebefore them. These “New Friends” inside the Brand organization discardthe ideas of their predecessors – often, even if the ideas were working beau-tifully – and insist on their own new program in a bid to make their mark.


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Consistency was almost impossible to drivethrough client organizations.

And so the client would direct us to abandon the “old” ideas and work onsomething new. We would grudgingly turn our backs on all the time thatwas spent developing the old ideas, abandon any momentum that mayhave been built up in the target audience, and start all over again.

Kill the Bunny?

Complicit with the Brand's New Friends were its “OldFriends” – the people on the client side who were bored oreven hateful of the Brand message and were willing to dosomething, anything, to change it. Eventually it happens inevery organization. I had Energizer batteries as a client forseveral years and every year we'd have a meeting to work ontheir strategy for selling through retail stores. Not a single

meeting went by without one of the Energizer execs pleading with me:“Do we have to use that damn bunny again?”

Luckily we managed to convince them, year in and year out, to stick withthe bunny. But the Energizer folks were an exception when it came tounderstanding the importance of consistency. They were able to suppresstheir murderous urges because the bunny – a powerful core idea – was sucha runaway winner.

Formalizing the Brand (Part One)

Old Friends and New Friends kept our clients' Brand communications in aconstant state of flux. I wondered: how will stakeholders – employees, cus-tomers, investors, suppliers, the media – know what to think of this Brand?How are they supposed to figure out what the Brand is from one day to thenext?

That's when it hit me. How the customer views the Brand is in fact whatthe Brand is. Nothing else matters. The company's execs and its market-ing department, busily preparing their next brochure or ad campaign,might think they know what the Brand is, but all they really know is whatthey want the Brand to be at that moment. It is stakeholders, each andevery one of them, who get to decide what the Brand is.

In other words, A Brand is what people think of you™.



Instinct

Somewhere along the line, I noticed that entrepreneurs, in contrast to man-agers trained at business schools, seemed to instinctively understand this.They “just knew” that their Brand wasn't their logo or their advertising.They grasped that their Brand was the sum of every experience ever had,by anyone, with their organization.

The name of our firm, Instinct Brand Equity Coaches, embraces the entre-preneur's instinctive understanding of Brand. As they launch their enter-prises, entrepreneurs can easily articulate the key elements of their Brand,especially their core purpose, vision, mission, position and values. Theymight not even think of these foundational elements in terms of “Brand” –they might not even have a label for any of these thoughts – but they focustightly and relentlessly on them and ensure they are delivered to customerswith ruthless consistency, because they understand that failure to do someans the end of their fledgling business.

The Brand Foundation

In a bid to protect client Brands from the whims of Old Friends and NewFriends, we at Instinct have adopted the entrepreneur's innate flair forBranding – by articulating the key Brand elements in a Brand Foundation.

The Brand Foundation is created to survive the marketing manager, execu-tive or CEO who replaces you and yes, your own boredom or impatience.

Managers

One of my key early assumptions was that the highly-paid, business school-trained executives at client companies knew, by virtue of their educationand job position, what a Brand really was. These were the men and womenwho were not pure entrepreneurs, who (through no fault of their own) had-n't had to figure it all out for themselves to prevent their livelihood fromgoing up in smoke.

But eventually I realized that these professional managers thought a lot likethe ad agencies did. They thought the Brand was basically the logo andthe advertising. I would tell these managers that proper Brand disciplinecould launch their company to new heights. But very recently, during the


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writing of this book in fact, I met a top executive who asked: “How the hellis a new logo going to turn around our company?”

Don't get me wrong: I like professional managers. Some of my best friendsare professional managers. It's not their fault that they've always equatedthe Brand with the logo and the advertising. They think this way becausethe business schools they went to, no matter how highly regarded, onlytalked about Brand in marketing class.

Because they only learned about Brand in marketing class, they relegateBrand management to their marketing department when they becomeCEOs, and then they don't especially worry about it from that point onward.

Formalizing the Brand (Part Two)

They don't realize that because a Brand is what people think of you, it'severything. It's every touchpoint that anyone ever has with your business.And when the Brand is this important, it can't be delegated away, but mustbe owned by the CEO – the only person in the organization with the cloutto make sure that employees are delivering the Brand at each and everypoint of contact.

This Book – Why Now?

The core purpose of my firm is this:

To advance the sustainability of North American businesses, reinforcing our freeenterprise system and ensuring our continued prosperity as a society.

You might find this audacious. But it's exactly why I founded this firm. Thegreat majority of CEOs on this continent fundamentally misunderstandwhat Brand is all about, and I'm passionate that proper Brand discipline isthe answer to three serious threats facing the prosperity of North Americansright now.

The Decline of Manufacturing

First is the continuing deterioration of our manufacturing base, as epito-mized by the depressing decline of the supposed “Big Three” U.S.automakers. Think about the hundreds of thousands of jobs lost at Ford,Chrysler and GM since the 1990s. The weak Brands of these companies



have everything to do with their abysmal showing.

Ask just about anyone and they can easily tell you what differentiates BMW:performance. Volvo: safety. Mini: fun. Ask those same people what Fordstands for and their faces go blank. They're at a loss for a word.

In 2006, CEO Bill Ford announced plant closings, layoffs of up to 25% ofhis company's workforce, and the need to build cheaper cars that peoplewant. That same week, BMW announced record sales and profits on theirpremium-priced vehicles. Ford is so desperate for cash that it's actuallylooking to sell its top division, Volvo – the maker of vehicles with one of theworld's strongest Brand positions.

Led by carmakers like Toyota and BMW, foreign car Brands have differenti-ated themselves so clearly and consistently that in July 2007, for the firsttime in history, the “Big Three” sold less than 50% of cars purchased in theUnited States. Alot of foreign carmakers seriously understand Brand. We'dbetter start understanding it too. If not to save our automotive industry –which may well be impossible at this point – then to assert dominance inthe areas that China and the other economic superpowers-in-waitinghaven't already taken away.

The Labor Market Crisis

For companies with an accurate understanding of Brand, a very promisingarea of opportunity appears in the face of another threat to North Americanbusiness that companies are only recently waking up to: the looming laborcrisis that is already confronting organizations in many regions across thecontinent.

By 2020, the number of Canadians over 65 will double. Add the shrinkingbirthrate and there will be a smaller-than-ever cohort of young peopleentering the working world to replace the old fogies. The graying of theU.S. workforce isn't expected to have much impact until perhaps 2040, but


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Branding is not a matter of personal taste.

another dynamic is at work across North America now. It is our ongoingtransition to an information-based economy, and the increasingly high lev-els of job mobility this shift gives to knowledge workers.

So it's only going to get tougher to find employees, and then to keep them.This is all on top of the high costs of employee turnover in the here andnow. Even the very best companies lose 10% of their people each year, anda super-strong Brand like Wal-Mart can experience annual turnover rates inexcess of 100% at some locations.

How can Branding help your organization stay competitive amid the wors-ening market for labor? Simple. A strong, clearly communicated Brandhelps potential employees understand, buy-in to and stick with your com-pany in a way that high salaries alone never could.

Hyper-messaging

The third threat we face is that of hyper-messaging – the overwhelmingnumber of commercial messages that bombard us each day. Because of theincreasing number of ways in which we receive media, and the ever-greaternumber of tools we have to block out commercial appeals, it's only thestrongest, most disciplined Brands that break through to stakeholders.More on this to come.

Consistency, Management and Time

Let's say that your favorite number is four. While sitting down with youraccountant to review the financials in your business plan, would you askthat all the threes be changed to fours, just because you like them better?

When you're a Brand Coach, this type of thing is a regular request. Itreflects the lack of awareness that Branding is a rule-based discipline likefinance or accounting. So it's my job to tell clients that Branding is not amatter of personal taste – that there are unbreakable rules. As you'll see inthis book, the unbreakable rules of Branding fall under three headings: con-sistency, management and time.

Consistency, because constant changes to your messaging means that stake-holders won't be able to figure out who you are – making it impossible foryou to get and keep their loyalty.



Management, because if the CEO doesn't assume ultimate responsibility forthe all-important Brand, employees won't deliver it in every stakeholderinteraction.

Time, because if you want to earn and keep stakeholder mindshare over thelong term, Branding must be understood as a process, not as an overnightevent.

So start now!


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