The collaborative art of brand sustenance

Sustaining a brand isn’t a transactional matter between client and agency. It’s shared growth in the future of all, writes our guest author.

The perennial question asked in most brand management teams is, ‘What do we do with this brand next year?’ It’s a pertinent question that needs to be asked a long time before the next year arrives.

A lasting brand grows from the foundation of what has come before. The structure is built over time and while every current team is just building another storey, the customer sees it as a whole. Brands that have been built over decades, are tended to by marketing professionals who are steeped in the brand’s public image, perception and messaging integrity.

There is a deep grammar that keeps brands rooted in their core values and eventually becomes integral to the consumer’s experience. Brand preference grows and keeps existing customers close. The promise, keeps new customers coming in.

Every marketing professional involved needs to be party to the process. The brand management, the advertising agency, the messaging team and the distributors of that messaging, need to be on the same page. Sustaining a brand is not a transactional matter between client and agency. It is shared growth in the future of all.

Individuals may be replaced. Owners do, occasionally. Ad agencies shift. The brand does not. A tree never strays from its roots. Experienced people on all sides of the process know this to be true. Long-standing brand values remain sacrosanct and steadfast. Only individuals change around it. A brand is like a mighty machine. Individuals are merely interchangeable machine parts around them. This brings us to the task of keeping everybody pulling together in the right direction.

The first and most essential task is to make every member of a new team aware of the brand’s roots and provenance. The ‘who’, ‘what’, ‘where’ and ‘why’ of the brand. It’s place in the universe of other products, competitive brands and their individual legacies. If you sell a cookie brand, know your competitors as well as other popular snacks. Brands do not work in a vacuum.

Then there is the matter of the shifting sands. Trees may not move away from their roots, but the forest may change. Competitors fall away, consumer preferences change, technology changes public behaviour.

In the 1970s, jet set was the name of an elite class of people who could travel by airplane. You will not find lobster and champagne on in-flight menus as they did, back in the day.

Radio killed the evening newspapers because people could just hear breaking news any time of the day. If we learn how each industry evolved, we know how our brands can. Decide when to step around the dunes and when to pick up a shovel.

The third piece of advice here is quite obvious: stay contemporary. To tell the truth, this is easier than it’s made out to be. Young people are always driven by the same emotions, though priorities change generationally. Women will always want to be wanted, the ‘by who?’ changes. Ambitious people look up to successful people. It’s just that the definition of success changes.

None of this can be done by individuals hitting the ground running, even if they are at the highest positions in any organisation. The brand is larger than any individual, even if he writes the cheques. It takes time, intelligence and effort to dig into every nuance of a brand.

Too often, we barrel into messaging without the benefit of diligence. Speed kills. Expediting advertising before a comprehensive understanding of a brand, can kill it.

David Ogilvy famously said advertising is not created by committee. That is true of advertising. But in the case of brands, it’s a concerted effort by every stakeholder, that keeps the monolith standing.

(The author, Nidha Luthra, is executive director at Thought Blurb Communications)