Ready, Fire, Aim

There is a considerable amount of marketing money wasted each year because of ready, fire, aim. That’s marketing without first establishing a clear brand identity and personality. Even worse, some companies struggle along hoping marketing or advertising will define their brand. Marketing, advertising and other communications activities should clearly convey and enhance the brand identity and personality, but it is usually an ineffectual, expensive and backward process to let marketing try to create the brand.

A recent article in Business Week (A Practical Guide To Branding) does a nice job of delineating the roles and hierarchy of branding, marketing and advertising. It also reinforces the futility of the ready, fire aim approach mentioned above. As Karen Klein, the article’s author, points out: “Your brand is the genuine ‘personality’ of your company.” It’s based on reality and is rooted in the actual experience people have with your brand. Any attempt to fabricate that brand through marketing is going to be a waste of time and money. However, once you have defined your brand’s personality, all types of offline and online marketing tools become wonderful ways to send a clear message to customers.

A new and interesting book on the subject of brand personality is Personality Not Included: Why Companies Lose Their Authenticity And How Great Brands Get it Back. There is an insightful interview here between Guy Kawasaki and the book’s author, Rohit Bhargava.

Bhargava says personality is what brings a brand to life, and he says: “The real first step is to focus on what I call the three core elements of personality: being unique, authentic, and talkable. This means making it OK for your employees and customers to talk about you.”

Bhargava goes on to say that the companies that have a broken brand personality all share one thing: They attempt to silence their employees. Through policies, fear or control, they don’t let their employees become evangelists for the brand.

If you want to improve your marketing ROI this year, start by looking at your brand and make sure what you see is a clear brand identity and personality staring back at you. Then empower your communications team (internally and externally) to convey that picture to the marketplace.