Darren Taylor

Mark Schreiber

Branding for the

New Millennium
 Darren Taylor
Mark Schreiber

Branding for the New Millennium

Darrens understanding of brand is second to none. With a refreshing
mix of insight and humour, he puts the spotlight on what businesses
both for profit and for purpose businesses really need to be focused
on in the 21st century.
Mary Jo Capps, CEO, Musica VIva Australia

For many years, we have benefited from Darren and his teams creative
flair and essential communication of our Botany Foundation brand.
Professor Pauline Ladiges, AO FAA, Professorial Fellow,
School of BioSciences, The University of Melbourne

Copyright 2017 Darren Taylor

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,

distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including
photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods,
without the prior written permission of the publisher, except for short
quotations in critical reviews.

This PDF copy is not for commercial distribution, and should not be shared
without permission of the publisher.

Book design by Taylor & Grace

 To Rebecca Austin
for seeing possibilities, forging
special relationships and inspiring me
to commit my thoughts to paper.

To Kent Stringer for your gentle,

steadfast touch of kindness and sunlight.
 1 Why Brand Strategists Are
as Important as Accountants 6

2 Brand Evolution 13

3 What Is a Brand? 23

4 Australia As a Case Study 29

5 What Is Brand Strategy? 36

6 Branding vs Marketing 40

7 The European Union As a Case Study 47

8 Brand Models and Key Messages  55

9 The Cult of the Personal Brand  61

10 Building a Brand Culture 67

11 Measurement and ROI 72

12 My Love Affair with Branding  79

 1

I
was scheduled to give a speech to a group of 60 accountants.
It was arranged by my friend and coach, Ernest Stabek, a business
consultant and himself an accountant. So I can tell you in all hon-
esty that some of my best friends are accountants.
But accountants are the nemesis of the brand strategist. They are the
whales of the consulting sea, while we are the jellyfish, floating aim-
lessly in the reef. And when they see us float down to the depths they
swallow us up. You dont belong here. Get back to the surface with the
aquarium fish. Dazzle the sunbathers with your shiny colours, poison
them with your marketing mumbo jumbo, but dont plumb the depths,
we dont need you here.
And we often scuttle away; I know I have. So Im not just saying they
dont understand us, that theyre bean counters with long conference
tables and were creatives with grand pianos and sky lights. (I do have
a grand piano in my office, but more about that later).
No, I think many of us dont understand ourselves. Were living
in the past, reactive rather than proactive, following directions rather
than leading. Happy to float at the surface with the aquarium fish.
But I firmly believe branding has changed in the last few decades and

6
that companies and organisations, even small companies, even not-for-
profits, even, in some cases, individuals, ignore branding at their peril.
And Im writing this book to convince you why.
But first I had to convince the accountants.

*
Ive been in the brand business for 20 years, almost half of that with
my own agency, Taylor & Grace. Grace left several years ago, but I have
a team of about nine, which puts me somewhere in the middle of the brand
agency food chain, which runs the gamut from solo consultants working out
of their homes to traditional Mad Men advertising agencies with a brand-
ing department, to the big international consulting firms like Interbrand.
Im in the category of boutique agency and can call myself a million
dollar consultant, a moniker made famous in the book by star consultant
Alan Weiss. Yet despite my experience and success, I still sometimes
well pretty much all the time feel intimidated by accountants.
After all, we like to draw pictures and they like to add up numbers.
(Or when it comes to marketing budgets, subtract). We agonise with
our designers over whether to use Pantone blue 2174 or 2726, while all
accountants see is red and black.
Often the person I work with on the client side is a marketing director,
especially in bigger companies. The author of Million Dollar Consulting,
Alan Weiss, urges consultants to deal directly with the economic buyer,
but thats easier said than done. In the case of a recent client the economic
buyer was not the marketing director but her boss, an accountant. She was
terrified of him. He didnt want to fund her own marketing department,
let alone outside agencies.
My client was a professional association. But despite their long histo-
ry and resources, they hadnt taken the pulse of their members in years,
and they had exciting new offerings they needed to communicate to
their markets. But did they even understand what those markets were?

7
The marketing director wanted us to conceive and implement a brand
campaign, although she admitted shed have to squeeze out the funding
in dribs and drabs, a marketing brochure here, a poster there, and if we
were patient and dutiful maybe it would eventually add up to something
resembling a campaign.
I told her what she needed first was research some focus groups and
surveys to make sure their brand was aligned with their market. Other-
wise our efforts, and her budget, might be wasted. She asked if we would
make the case to her boss. So I put together a proposal to present to him,
but he wasnt convinced. So my team put together another proposal, and
we went back and forth over a period of months. In retrospect I proba-
bly should have walked away, but I liked their organisation and knew
if given the chance I could help them grow. But I didnt get that chance.
In the end they contracted for a couple of brochures, in effect telling
me Im a jellyfish, go swim at the surface with the aquarium fish.

*
I cant tell you how often Ive lost business from satisfied clients.
Thats right. The ones Ive pleased. The ones who like me. We all have
relationships that dont work out, clients we dont see eye to eye with,
or are impossible to please. But I think youd agree that a general prin-
ciple of consulting is that rejection comes from the dissatisfied clients,
not the other way around.
But I cant tell you how many times Ive submitted a brief to a cli-
ent who says, This is great, its just what we need. But we cant afford
to do branding.
Or we do a project for a client who loves the results but never commits
to future work, or even cuts the project short, citing funding prob-
lems. How many times do you think Ive heard the phrase, We dont
have the budget right now?
Or, as I just described, a marketing director approaches us to help

8
them rebrand, or do a campaign, but needs ever more refined proposals
to get approval, in effect asking us to do the work in advance.
These are the same companies that write cheques to IT consultants
and insurers and, of course, accountants, without a second thought.
No CEO in their right mind would say, I balanced my books last year,
why should I do it again? Or, We have an untrained intern file our taxes
and weve never been audited. So why hire a CPA? Or, Due to cutbacks,
this year were just going to add up the even numbers?
But brand consultants hear these excuses all the time. For some
companies its their default response when I get a meeting. We already
have a brand. Why should we pay you to tell us what we already know?
Or, We use marketing interns and at that age kids like to work 60 hours
a week. Or, Due to cutbacks, this year instead of a campaign were just
going to print new business cards.

*
I dont mind the phone calls that dont get returned, the proposals
that dont get accepted when the reason is that theres no connection,
theres no unity of purpose between what I do and what the client
or potential client wants. But I find it hard to stomach the clients who are
on the same wavelength, whose brand or potential brand I adore, who
compliment my work and always return my calls and are eager to meet,
but who in the end waste my time because theyre not going to put their
foot to the pedal. Accountant, green light. Brand guy, brake.
What happens all too often is that we dont do branding at all,
we do marketing. We dont do strategy, we make brochures. We dont get
retainers, we get projects. And then one day, or night, a client calls frantic
because an overseas competitor is eating their lunch, or theyve lost their
government funding, or their entire industry is being disrupted. Darren,
we need a new name because Acme Chimney Sweeping just wont cut
it anymore. Or, Darren, our association is coming apart at the seams.

9
Can you stitch the stakeholders back together? Or, Darren, our sales
team is telling us our customers dont know who we are. We need
to differentiate ourselves. And finally, after maybe 40 years in business,
their company has stumbled on the concept of differentiation!
And in each case I say Sure, come on over, lets talk. Well see what
we can do. But what Id like to say, is Call your accountant.

*
Theres a reason experts are experts. They have specialised knowl-
edge and experience. They have capabilities those outside their field
do not. Which is why organisations employ or partner with so many
different kinds of experts. And all companies understand this. They
couldnt function without accountants and lawyers and IT engineers
and customer service professionals, and on and on. Until you come to
brand strategists, where they draw the line. Which nobody understands,
or worse, everybody thinks they understand.
And its our fault. Its my fault. Thats why I wrote this book. Thats
why I stood up before 60 accountants and said, Im a brand strategist
and Im here today to tell you my job matters just as much as yours.

*
So why arent we understood and appreciated? Why do brand experts
do such a poor job of explaining what we do? Maybe were like psychi-
atrists. Have you ever met a normal psychiatrist? I think they go into
psychiatry to understand themselves. Or have you ever met someone
with a communications degree who knew how to speak without jargon
and buzz words? Maybe its the same for brand people. Maybe we go into
this field because we want to define our own brand.
But I also think theres a historical reason brand is so poorly under-
stood, and that is because the nature of branding has transformed
radically in the last few decades. Ill explain this more in a later chapter,
but I think those my age and older are tied to a paradigm of advertising,

10
publicity and identity that the digital world has deleted, while millenni-
als in my field, and Y and X, and all the other alphabetical generations,
are so fixated on digital media marketing that they reduce brand success
to ephemeral feedback, to likes, shares, and SEO.
Another reason is that brand emerged from the coat tails of market-
ing, and all too often its still clinging there. The Mad Men want brand
under their control, though they just want to do campaigns, not the less
glamorous deep-dive business side of brand strategy. And brand strat-
egists, frustrated at explaining themselves, call themselves marketers
to get business. Ive been guilty of that myself, having often called myself
a Brand/Marketing Agency.
Finally, I think we arent understood and appreciated because this
field attracts creative people. Are creative people ever understood?
We dont see the world in black and white, but in 1,114 Pantone colours.
So why should we settle on one definition of who we are?
We may be forced up to the reef with the aquarium fish, but we dont
swim in schools. Were an idiosyncratic species and, like the psychiatrist
with OCD, we can give you the direction you need, though we ourselves
float aimlessly.

11
 2

M
y message to the accountants and they were surprising-
ly good sports because I challenged them to accept me
as a peer was that brand was not elective to business
but fundamental.
But it wasnt always this way. Fifty years ago, unless you were a major
consumer company that advertised on TV and other mass media, you
could get by without having a brand. You could succeed and grow and
fend off threats without an articulated brand strategy.
So what changed?
Everything changed.
In Seinfeld the friends meet up at a Manhattan diner whose sign just
says Restaurant. And this was typical of successful neighbourhood
diners in the 50s and 60s. Then McDonalds came along. And the
unbranded neighbourhood diner might have had a better hamburger
than McDonalds, but McDonalds understood and communicated who
they were better than any other restaurant, and the Golden Arches
pardon the pun ate their lunch.
So what changed? Everything changed. But I believe what makes
brand a necessity now rather than a luxury are these four pivotal

13
transformations: the rise of the corporation; the speed of innovation;
globalisation; and the end of information asymmetry.

The rise of the corporation

People talk about the power and danger of international corporations,
and in aggregate weve certainly never seen anything like the Fortune
500. But the Apples, WalMarts and Toyotas of the world pale in com-
parison to a corporation chartered by Elizabeth I in 1600 called the East
India Company.
The East India Company was so powerful it bought Singapore.
It eventually had its own military and led to Britain ruling the seas.
It was, in effect, a quasi state. But any modern start-up would recog-
nise its structure, based on publicly sold shares that rose and fell on an
exchange. This came about because England wanted to exploit the new
trade routes to India, but even if Elizabeth sold the royal jewels it wouldnt
bring in enough money to build all the ships and bribe all the maharajahs.
The only way to scale company trade sufficiently to satisfy the ambition
of English businessmen was through capitalism.
Now the Dutch, who were also a world naval power at that time, had
their own East India Company. Actually theirs came first, and the Dutch
created the worlds first stock exchange as well, in Amsterdam. The build-
ing abutted the red light district, by the way, the worlds oldest profession
smack-bang next to the worlds newest.
A few shots were fired now and then between these militaristic
companies, but over the course of their histories they didnt much com-
pete with each other. Like the Sicilian families in The Godfather, they
carved out their own territories, except in their case they werent neigh-
bourhoods in New York City but entire countries. The Dutch colonised
Batavia, what is now Indonesia, and England took the big prize, the jewel
in the crown, India.

14
 Now the East India Company wasnt just incredibly capitalised, it was
also protected by the Queen from competition, at least from other British
companies. That meant when the EIC sales rep visited the local maharaja
to sign a trade deal he didnt have to give him a quill pen stencilled with
East India Company. The company didnt have to commission Shake-
speare to write an East India jingle, or Turner to paint EIC billboards on
the road to Rajasthan. They didnt have to worry that the Acme India
Company would be taking the maharaja tiger hunting tomorrow.
Fast forward a couple of hundred years, to the country that started
a revolution by throwing hundreds of chests of East India tea into Boston
Harbour. The Industrial Revolution had created unprecedented tech-
nological growth, and the rise of corporations fuelled the expansion
of pioneer countries like America and Australia, which wouldnt have
been possible without the railroad. And the railroads wouldnt have been
possible without the corporation, because rail infrastructure was the
most expensive undertaking since the building of the Great Wall.
The railroads were so important we still remember the names of the
tycoons or robber barons who built them: Vanderbilt, Morgan, Stan-
ford. In fact their names are better known than the railroads they owned,
because the railroads were monopolies, so their owners didnt have
to brand them to differentiate them from competition. There was
no competition. Instead there was fierce consolidation, particularly
through the deals made by financier J.P. Morgan. The rail barons owned
the land their tracks ran on, and sometimes the towns themselves,
labour was cheap imported from Ireland and China and passengers
had little choice in routes. Painting the engines of the Sante Fe red and
gold, or labelling the trestles that carried the Baltimore and Ohio B&O
was the extent of brand strategy for the greatest industry the world
had ever seen.
But automobiles were a lot cheaper to produce than trains.

15
And, fortunately for drivers, no one owned the roads. There were cer-
tainly large corporations like Ford, but there were also many tinkerers.
In 1908 there were 243 automobile manufacturers in the United States
alone. And while this number would fall sharply after the First World
War, the surviving companies found themselves competing for the same
drivers. So branding was a necessity to differentiate themselves from
all the other manufacturers. They put their brand on their cars in the
form or marques a circle inscribed with a three-pointed star, a stylised
propeller, a leaping jaguar, a prancing horse. They advertised in newspa-
pers and the new medium of radio. Soon they could show off their new
models in four-colour print in magazines like Life and Look.
But while corporations took over the automobile industry, family
businesses still dominated the High Street. It was very expensive to build
a corporation, and scaling was slow.
The end of World War II saw an unprecedented boom, both in
technological innovation and consumer power. The rationing of the
war gave way to abundance. Kitchens equipped with appliances from
Sunbeam, garages with Holdens, cupboards stocked with Campbells
soup. Radio had given advertisers access to peoples living rooms, but
through voice only. Television created a new paradigm by allowing
companies to demonstrate their products visually and reach ever larger
numbers of viewers.
Corporations began spending millions to market their wares, espe-
cially consumer products in fields where competition was high and
differentiation low. What makes one cigarette or soft drink better than
another? Madison Avenue told you what to buy.
The corporations expanded, diversified, always looking to dominate
markets or enter new ones. While the East India Company may not have
changed much from one decade to another, a small motorcycle company
called Honda shocked Detroit and the world by building small, ener-

16
gy-efficient cars and outcompeting General Motors, Ford and Chrysler
when the oil crisis in the mid-70s signalled the demise of their gas guz-
zlers. And Honda wasnt the only one. Sony, Samsung, Heineken, News
Corp and many other small corporations took the world by storm.
Because of the resources, ambition, and sophistication of modern
corporations they could staff giant marketing departments. They could
hire the Mad Men on Madison Avenue. Branding was no longer some-
thing the owners wife did. When the new United States of America
needed a flag, the Continental Congress passed a vague law calling for
a flag with thirteen stripes, alternate red and white; that the union be
thirteen stars, white in a blue field, representing a new constellation.
And, as legend has it, George Washington gave a rudimentary drawing
to seamstress Betsy Ross to sew it up.
Now, of course, we would have committees and subcommittees,
style guides and focus groups. The United Nations formed a committee
to create an insignia and hired an architect to design it with the stricture
that it must scale down to fit on a circular pin 116 inches in diameter.
The European Union flag of 12 yellow stars on a blue background was
approved after scores of submissions and votes among the various mem-
bers of what was then called the European Council.
So branding required research, feedback, teams of experts. An entire
industry emerged to capitalise on capitalism.
Still, not every company needed to brand. If you built submarines you
didnt have many competitors and you only had one client, so you didnt
have to differentiate your product. Can you name three companies that
manufacture nuclear submarines? Two? One?
Nevertheless, the sex appeal of branding so infected modern capi-
talist culture that during the Cold War one way to distinguish East from
West Berlin was that the West was filled with branded products, like
Coca-Cola, while the East only branded its ideology, and its Wall.

17
 Branding was so seductive that even an organisation that has
no need to brand, that had a cosmic monopoly I mean that liter-
ally, a monopoly on the moon created one of historys best known
and admired brands: NASA.

The speed of innovation

Not only was technology advancing with the advent of the Indus-
trial Revolution, it was advancing ever faster. In 1970 Alvin Toffler,
in his bestselling book Future Shock, warned of the negative effects this
dizzying rate of change was having on society.
One of the effects was a new threat to corporations. And innovation
wasnt just technological. It was also social. Levis was a small company
that made durable pants for labourers. Then the hippies came along and
wore jeans as a fashion statement, and Levis became a huge apparel
company. The same thing happened with tennis shoes. Adidas made
shoes specifically for sport for tennis or soccer, but Nike expanded
them for everyday wear.
By the time Apple came along innovation no longer happened inter-
mittently, like the transition from the train to the automobile, or the
gas lamp to the electric light. It happened constantly. Just look at the
music business. LPs and phonographs were the only game in town for
decades. Stereo was a great advancement, but it didnt threaten the record
business. Then tape came along reel-to-reel, cassette, 8-track. Then
CDs, then DVDs, then MP3, then streaming. The last 20 years have not
been an easy time to be in the music business.
The stress from innovation meant that corporations could no longer
depend on particular products or services for their survival.
If you made vinyl records in 1980, good luck to you. Tower Records
was a landmark store on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles. Then the
CD came along and it was gone. Virgin Record stores are also gone.

18
But Richard Branson didnt brand his empire as a music business.
So Virgin as a brand is still going strong.

Globalisation
In the days of the East India Company globalisation meant entering
a market warships first. Were a bit more civilised now, but the battles
are 24/7.
When The Times of London was the worlds leading newspaper in
the 19th century, could any of the English aristocrats reading it in their
clubs have imagined it would one day be conquered by Australia?
Did giant retailers Kmart and Sears think they would be supplanted
by a store from Arkansas?
Who predicted that China would supplant Japan as the top commer-
cial power in Asia, and perhaps in the world?
If you go to Paris you will see unbranded patisseries and bistros.
The Seinfeldian Restaurant is still alive in some places. But not for
long. In America, Australia and in most developed economies, the small,
independent, unbranded shop has become virtually extinct across many
sectors bookshops, hardware, sporting goods, pharmacies replaced
by national or global brands.

The end of information asymmetry

Businesses traditionally had a great advantage over consumers in that
they had an information monopoly. When you stepped into a car dealer
to buy a new car you might know about a model you liked, a colour you
wanted and the engine grunt you needed.
But you knew nothing about inventory or what the dealer actually
paid for the car, or safety data, or reliability, or resale value. You basically
had to trust the dealer, which is why car salesmen went out of their way
to make you think they were your friends, with warm smiles and vigor-
ous handshakes and pictures of their children on their desks.

19
 Vacuum cleaners were once sold door-to-door. A salesman would
demonstrate their suction power to the woman of the house, often by
throwing dirt on her living room carpet. This was an impressive display.
How could she have lived without one of these miraculous machines?
Hoover salesmen, and Fuller brush salesmen, and Encyclopedia Britan-
nica salesmen sold their products on the spot. The housewives didnt
wonder about the competition, and the brands sold Fuller, Hoover, Bri-
tannica were already well known because of branding and advertising.
These were products the housewife could touch and examine.
But after her husband arrived home from the office the insurance sales-
men arrived with the opposite kinds of products abstract, intangible,
complex. He would patiently explain to the young couple why they
needed to plan for their future and how life insurance would allow the
wife and children to keep their home in the event of the breadwinners
untimely death, and that even if he lived to a ripe old age it would be
a terrific investment. Furthermore, insurance was pitched as a moral
imperative, part of being a responsible adult.
This sales strategy worked because insurance was a complicated
business. Whereas door-to-door sales worked for vacuum cleaners and
encyclopedias due to the convenience of buying at home and the promise
of immediate gratification, insurance was by nature a delayed-gratifi-
cation business. But insurance companies relied on their products
complexity and the fact that people didnt want to think about death
and responsibility. Delayed gratification was turned on its head. Think
what will happen to your family if, God forbid, you have an accident
Bankers and stockbrokers didnt go door-to-door, but you had to
put your money somewhere, and they knew you were an easy mark,
susceptible to superficial charm, reassured by their conservative
suits and gold watches, knowing you couldnt get what you wanted
without them.

20
 But the internet and social media took a hammer to information
asymmetry and smashed it to bits, allowing customers to challenge
salesmen, or circumvent them altogether.
Apples famous 1984 Super Bowl ad introducing the Mac personal
computer dramatised this message. A woman hurls a sledgehammer
at an enormous screen where a bespectacled leader is addressing the
grey, listless masses. The leader represents IBM, one of the first globally
successful tech companies, a company that made its living, perhaps more
than any other, on information asymmetry.
IBM was a collector and organiser of information, something which
had become so important to the modern world that it required a new
name data. But data could only be amassed and interpreted through
incredibly large, expensive machines called computers, which in turn
required specialised teams to operate.
The term revolution is overused in my business, but when Apple put
these machines within reach of geeky teenagers, they threw a sledge-
hammer through the screen of information asymmetry.
IBM, late to the party, decided to sell their own personal computer,
but didnt consider the PC important to their brand, so they outsourced
the operating system to a geeky kid from Seattle called Bill Gates, and
gave him such a sweet deal that the software in Microsoft soon outsold
the hardware in International Business Machines.
Nowadays car buyers dont need to step inside a showroom to find
out what the new model looks like or costs. And you dont need to sit
in front of a stockbrokers intimidating oak desk to buy shares. The end
of information asymmetry means the customer is less dependent on
the salesperson for the information they need to buy what they want.
And that loss of dependence is bad for business. How do you adapt?
The best solution is to find another way to differentiate your business.
And the means to that end is branding.

21
 3

T
he controversies swirling around brand are partly of our own
making. My colleagues and I are mostly creative people, after
all. We dont colour inside the lines, we prize fashion over
formality, content over custom. Were more likely to dance than march,
wear a stylish watch without numbers than something called a chro-
nograph, spend half of a lunch meeting interrogating the waiter about
the menu. We dont swim in schools like most of our corporate clients,
but are jellyfish, letting the currents take us from surface to depth.
So certifications and degrees for branding have never quite caught on.
How could they when we cant even agree who we are and what we
do? We have to grab the coat tails of marketing, communications and
even business administration to gain legitimacy.
We cant even agree what brand is! Its bad enough when the public,
when academia, when our clients fumble with the concept of brand. But
when I get together with three colleagues and we have four different
definitions for what we do, thats a problem. If any of our clients expe-
rienced that kind of ambiguity in their corporate messaging we would
shake them by the shoulders and scream, Rebrand!
But because were creatives who are distrustful of labels when

23
they apply to ourselves, we accept that brand is as esoteric as a deck
of tarot cards.
So I propose that brand needs a rebrand.

*
Thats not to say there arent already a lot of good definitions out
there. I could fill the pages of this book just with definitions from experts
and academics. One of my favourites is from Wally Olins, the godfather
of brand strategy. Olins received a degree in History from Oxford Univer-
sity, so he had a much broader perspective on the rise of the corporation
and the effects of globalisation than most of his peers in the advertising
business. He let go of the marketing coat tails, formed his own brand
consultancy, and became our greatest thought leader. His books Corpo-
rate Identity, Brand New, and The Brand Handbook inspired a generation
of brand managers and consultants, including myself.
Olins, who died in 2014, began his career in advertising, but then
founded Saffron Brand Consultants, whose clients have included
Goldman Sachs, Lloyds of London and Coca-Cola. He called branding
... a profound manifestation of the human condition. It is about belong-
ing A tribe is a brand religion is a brand. When branding moves into
service, it becomes much more complex. From that point of view, a brand
is a product or service with a distinct personality. That distinctive per-
sonality is what enables people to differentiate one brand from another.
He gave that answer to Debbie Millman, author of Brand Thinking
and Other Noble Pursuits, an excellent disquisition of the idea of brand,
featuring interviews with many thought leaders in the industry.
Olins also conceived the Four Vectors of Brand Tangibility, which
can be found in The Brand Handbook. I use this in many of my pre-
sentations and find it a very useful way of expressing what a brand is
and does. The four vectors are: Product (what the brand owner makes
or does); Environment (where the brand owner makes or sells it);

24
Behaviour (how the brand owner behaves); and Communication
(transmit and receive).

*
Seth Godin, one of my favourite thought leaders, defines brand as,
the set of expectations, memories, stories and relationships that,
taken together, account for a consumers decision to choose one product
or service over another. If the consumer (whether its a business, a buyer,
a voter or a donor) doesnt pay a premium, make a selection or spread
the word, then no brand value exists for that consumer.
Advertising pioneer David Ogilvy defined brand as, the intangible
sum of a products attributes: its name, packaging, and price, its history,
its reputation, and the way its advertised.
Entrepreneur.com defines brand as, The marketing practice of creat-
ing a name, symbol or design that identifies and differentiates a product
from other products.
In The Brand Gap, Marty Neumeier writes that brand is: ... a persons
gut feeling about a product, service, or organisation.

*
On the other side of the brand battlefield are corporate critics like
Naomi Klein and Noam Chomsky, who think brand is about manipu-
lation rather than perception. Talk to any Marxist critic yes there are
a few left and they will tell you branding is a tool of Capitalism. And
while I think this criticism is overblown, its not without merit. Henry
Ford wanted his line workers to be able to buy Model Ts, but can any
Chinese factory workers afford the iPhones they make? Companies
spend millions to create brand identities and market them to the very
consumers who, in effect, are subsidising our fees in the inflated price
of the products. On the other hand, Communist ideology could teach us
Capitalists a thing or two about creating enduring brands. Che Guevara
t-shirts anyone?

25
 *
When your average consumer hears that brands are dependent
on his perceptions and tastes, he says, Whoa, Im the little guy. Im at the
mercy of global corporations. I buy what you tell me to buy.
But when you talk to marketing departments and leadership teams
in corporations, as I do all the time, you find that they feel at the mercy
of consumers. Our Little Guy would be shocked by their insecurity. After
all, the Little Guy votes every time he enters a store. And if he doesnt
vote for a brand often enough, it goes under.
But our Little Guy might respond, Thats a convenient illusion. There
may be hundreds of soft drinks and energy drinks and bottled waters
on the supermarket shelves, but theyre mostly owned by Coke or Pepsi.
So the only choice I really get to make is between which of those two
giants I want to give my hard-earned money to.
But the brand managers at the big companies see threats the Lit-
tle Guy doesnt. Being big just makes us more vulnerable, they might
argue. You cant send an aircraft carrier into open water without a
flotilla of support ships. And we cant send a brand into the marketplace
without a carefully planned strategy. If we get that wrong were sunk.
But the Little Guy is not convinced. You literally force whatever you
want down our throats, he says.
And the sweating brand manager responds, Remember New Coke?

*
While all these definitions are useful, I dont think they do justice
to how the field of brand design and management has transformed
as I detailed in the last chapter from a discipline for large con-
sumer companies to a necessary, continual strategy for all businesses
and organisations.
Many definitions are too narrow. They limit themselves to buying
and selling, company and consumer. But what about not-for-profits,

26
which have become increasingly sophisticated in their brand messaging?
What about governments? What about religions? Religions are brands,
as Olins points out. The most enduring brand is the Roman Catholic
Church, and the most effective symbol ever devised was the cross.
Other definitions, like Neumeiers, focus on perception. This might
be the most accurate description for how brand consultants and corpora-
tions view brand, believing themselves at the mercy of the marketplace.
But surely the creators of a brand have a say in what a brand is as well?
Imagine a company creates a brand in secret, in the middle of the
outback, far from focus groups and YouTube reviewers. But before they
can launch it to the masses a meteor strikes the warehouse and obliter-
ates everything. Was there a brand or not?
So Ill add my own definition to the raucous chorus of my peers:
A brand is the expression of an entity, person, product or service,
as designed by its creator and perceived by the world.

27
 4

W
hether youre talking about a soft drink, a service,
an international conglomerate, or even a country,
if you dont brand yourself, others will. I know this well.
All my fellow citizens do. Because Australia was branded by foreigners
as a convict nation. But in 1868, the last year convict ships docked in
Sydney Harbour, the population of Australia was only 700,000. Now its
more than 24 million, many of whom are descended from great waves
of immigration from Europe and Asia after World War II. My maternal
grandparents, Jewish Berliners, escaped Europe after the war to settle
in Melbourne. And although my dads side goes right back to convict
stock, youd be hard-pressed to find an actual descendant of a convict
in the pubs of Kalgoorlie or the cafes of Melbourne.

*
In 1938 a flight from London to Brisbane took eleven days. Fortu-
nately that wasnt all in the air. International air travel was more like
Phileas Foggs balloon journey than what we think of as modern flight.
You went up for a bit, then you came down. And if you were in London or
New York it took a lot of stops to get Down Under. So only the very rich
or adventurous visited as tourists.

29
 Our brand was as an exotic former British colony with strange flora
and fauna, immense and sparsely populated.
The Melbourne Olympics in 1956 put us centre stage to the world for
a fortnight and showed everyone we were more than outback and bush.
We had become a cosmopolitan society, with most of us living in cities.
Then jet travel arrived in the 60s, and people could journey here
in a day instead of a week. This was a great opportunity for Australia
to ramp up tourism. But what was our brand? The Italians had Caesar
and Michelangelo, the French had the Eiffel Tower, the Mona Lisa. The
Brits had royalty and Big Ben.
What did we have?
We had koalas. Qantas ran television ads in the early 70s that
featured a koala upset by the influx of tourists. Who is responsible?
he wonders, perched in a eucalyptus tree. And we see a Qantas jet
approaching overhead. This ad won a Clio, advertisings highest honour.
In another spot the koala gives us a tour of the airlines new 747.
He says, I hate Qantas. Hunched in a window seat, he is the cutest
animal ever to appear in an airline commercial, the best ambassador
a tourist board could hope for.
Thats the moment Australia took control of its brand. It was marsupi-
als, wildlife, strange creatures you couldnt see anywhere else. Wallabies,
wombats, platypuses. But mostly koalas and kangaroos. If you went to
Australia and didnt see koalas and kangaroos it was like going to Africa
and not seeing lions and elephants. It was like going to Switzerland and
not seeing the Alps.
The government realised tourism was big business and hired top
advertising firms to create campaigns.
In 1984 the Australian Tourism Commission ran a campaign called
Come and Say Gday, featuring Crocodile Dundee star Paul Hogan. His
offer to, slip an extra shrimp on the barbie for you, popularised Aussie

30
slang around the globe.
But our slang got us in trouble in a 2006 campaign, where model
Lara Bingle wondered, Where the bloody hell are you? after a sequence
of shots from a pub to a golf course to the Great Barrier Reef to fireworks
over Sydney Harbour.
The ad was scrapped and the $180 million campaign was viewed as
a failure. Former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd called it a rolled gold disas-
ter, whatever that means. Tourism was flat for the following year. But
maybe it would have been worse without the ad. Or maybe if Tourism
Australia had stuck to its guns the campaign would have paid off in the
end. Maybe it needed to be swallowed to the last pill, like a course of
antibiotics. But, as Ill explain in a later chapter, correlation is a slippery
snake in the social sciences, and measurement can be like an airport
scale that weighs everyones bags at the same time. How to be certain
which passenger is over the limit?
Personally, I bloody well loved the campaign. I dont see what the
bloody hell was wrong with it. Minha Hong later wrote a paper showing
that bloody hell had a longstanding history of casual use in Australian
English-speaking culture.
What I dont understand is why Tourism Australia didnt do a better
job of researching community standards in the countries where they
ran television commercials and rented billboards, puritanical countries
that will remain nameless. (Britain and the United States). And perhaps
it wouldnt have been quite as controversial if the statement had been
uttered by Russell Crowe or Hugh Jackman, seen as a personal invitation
rather than the sanctioned language of our government.
But my job isnt to analyse advertising campaigns; my job is to anal-
yse brands. And what I often see happen is that creative departments
in advertising agencies fall in love with an idea. Or the bean counters
fall in love with a demographic. Either way, the brand is overwhelmed

31
by other factors. I imagine there were discussions in the Bloody Hell
campaign about Australias brand being informal and casual, friend-
ly in an edgy way. But as Ive discussed, Australia has a lot of brands.
We have koalas and Indigenous Australians, Sydney Harbour Bridge
and the Australian Open. A country or a company doesnt brand every-
thing it is. We have hyper-poisonous box jellies and taipans, but you
dont see those on the Visit Australia brochures. So I wish the question
front and centre had been: Is the friendly informality of the Australian
people, which includes swearing, a core value of our national brand?
If the answer is no, then dont build a multi-million dollar campaign
around that value. And if the answer is yes, then dont back down at the
first sign of resistance. Dont apologise for what you are.
Compare Frances national brand. Do they even have a tourism board?
I have no idea. Because I think the French dont give a shit where the
bloody hell we are. They arent putting another shrimp on the barbie
for us. They dont even notice us when were in their bistros frantically
waving our arms for service.
I recently spent my holiday in Paris because I love France. France may
not have the best advertising. I think Australian advertising is better. But
they know their brand, theyre proud of their brand, they dont apologise
for who they are.
We Australians may be casual, but the French are insouciant, one
of my favourite French words. If I were creating a campaign for them
it might go: You uncultured cretins. Stay the bloody hell away!

*
But whether you like the Bloody Hell campaign or find it misgu
ided, you have to admit weve come a long way. Weve taken control
of our brand.
At the close of the Sydney Olympics in 2000, Olympic president Juan
Antonio Samaranch declared it the best Games ever. It was an auspicious

32
beginning to what business gurus had labelled the Pacific Century.
Sydney and Melbourne consistently ranked among the top metropolitan
destinations by readers of Cond Nast Traveler. And we had our own Eiffel
Tower, our own Taj Mahal, our own Statue of Liberty in the worlds most
recognisable opera house.
Tourism to Australia increased from 3.7 million in 1995 to
6.8 million in 2014. And in 2015 the World Economic Forum rated us
seventh on their Travel & Tourism Competitiveness Index, above Italy,
Japan and Canada.

*
Lonely Planet, which spurred the rise of independent adventure
travel, was founded in Australia by Tony and Maureen Wheeler. They
had travelled overland from London to Sydney and wrote a book about
touring India on a budget. As with many successful entrepreneurs, they
met a need they felt themselves. Because the only guidebooks at the
time were Baedeker, Michelin, Fodors and Frommers, for the white-
collar tourist, not the student traveller.
So Australia did more than rebrand itself. Through the Wheelers we
rebranded the whole travel industry. And of course with our combination
of infrastructure and exoticness we attracted hordes of backpackers as
a result.
Thanks to the Lonely Planet ethos, which sought to experience and
understand other cultures rather than simply replicate the comforts of
home, natives were no longer Aborigines but Indigenous, and Ayers
Rock, which had become a climbing wall for white tourists, was rebrand-
ed back to the name first given it Uluru. It was promoted as a place
for pilgrimage, not sport.

*
In the beginning we let others brand us as dangerous convicts. Then
we branded ourselves as cuddly marsupials. We then tried to brand our

33
people, but in a more friendly, humorous light this time. We really hated
the convict rap. So it was shrimp on the barbie; where the bloody hell
are you? We branded the outback, popularised by Lonely Planet and
Bruce Chatwins wonderful book, The Songlines. We branded our unique
fauna again. However, now it wasnt the huggable koala but a ferocious
man-eater, made world famous by Crocodile Dundee and Steve Irwin.

*
Since Qantas ran their inspired campaign with a loveable koala weve
acquired a reputation as a somewhat more dangerous place, thanks to
Peter Benchley and Steven Spielberg. Jaws frightened the whole beach-
going world over a shark that kills fewer people a year worldwide than
deer or moose do.
Fortunately Hollywood has yet to make a movie about box jellies.
When I compare brand strategists to jellyfish, believe me, Im comparing
us to the harmless species, not to box jellies.
And if you dont know what box jellies are, forget I mentioned them.
Dont ask about our snakes and spiders either.
Branding may be the expression of who you are and why it matters,
but some things should be whispered, or not said at all.

34
 5

M
y profession has the misfortune of having to deal with
not one but two poorly understood terms. Because even
if a client understands brand, they often dont get brand
strategy. They think brand strategy is simply the implementation
of a short-term project, like coming up with a new name, launching
a product or entering a new market. They dont understand brand strategy
is continuous, that a brand strategy conceived for a month or two is not
a real strategy.
Clients understand marketing, sales, and communications strategy
easily enough, because they see those as continuous processes. You dont
outsource to a comms professional to write a speech and then forget
about communications for the rest of the year. Large organisations nor-
mally have comms people on staff, and they wouldnt think of not having
marketing and sales staff. But even very few large organisations, other
than big consumer companies, have brand staff. Why?
Because brand is seen as something you do at the beginning of your
organisational life, or at periods of transition, such as after creating
a new product. But as Ive explained in previous chapters, brand tran-
scends individual projects. Its something organisations need to think

36
about every day.
I define brand strategy as:
The continuous articulation of who you are and why you matter,
expressed in the most powerful and productive way possible.
*
While this may seem like an argument for job security for brand
agencies, the reality is that much brand work is wasted because
it isnt thought out, it isnt contextualised. Like everyone else, I want to
do work that matters, that has a positive effect. A good brand strategy can
save organisations money by preventing mistakes or overcoming crises.
I cant tell you how many marketing departments rush into projects with-
out an understanding of their purpose. They do things a certain way
because thats how theyve always done them, or because thats what
everyone else is doing, without asking whether their projects commu-
nicate and extend their brand. For example, a company might roll out
what seems like a kickass marketing campaign without understanding
the cultural nuances of their market segments. Thats what happened
with Tourism Australias Where the bloody hell are you? campaign
in the British and American markets.
Pharmaceutical companies are very good at brand strategy. They
take great care when naming their drugs, not only to test for distinc-
tiveness and likeability, but to research if the name has any meaning in
other languages. They continually promote and protect their brands,
researching the competition, looking out for knockoffs and counterfeits.
They send sales reps into doctors offices, and when the internet began
empowering patients with access to information, they began to directly
market with major media ads. When a spate of Tylenol poisonings made
headlines in America in 1982, Johnson & Johnson had a critical branding
decision to make. Tylenol had gone overnight from the American brand
name for acetaminophen to a poison. They could have claimed it was

37
a matter for law enforcement and not their responsibility. They could have
changed the colours of their bottles, or renamed it to avoid the sudden
negative connotations. But instead they spent millions on a nationwide
recall, even though the poisoned capsules were found only in Chicago.
They innovated tamperproof seals for their bottles. As a result Tyle-
nol is still the bestselling acetaminophen in the US, even though there
are cheaper generics.

*
Ive had clients who hire me to do one project. They want a poster
or a brochure or a presentation. I ask them why. They say because their
old one is out of date. Well, I ask, what do they need it for? Is this the best
way to spend your resources?
CEOs and marketing departments dont always ask that question
because its a hard question to answer. It requires a broad understanding
of the brand, and who in the organisation has that deep understanding?
A brand strategist doesnt have to be someone within the organisa-
tion with that title. It can be a marketing person, or a communications
person, or even the CEO if the organisation is small. Or the role can be
outsourced to a brand consultant like me. But someone, or some group,
has to take responsibility for gaining a deep understanding of the brand.

38
 6

M
arketing is the brightest star in the constellation of com-
munications disciplines. But then why wouldnt it be its
marketing! Universities dont offer degrees in branding.
If you want a degree you have to go into marketing or communications.
My own background is in marketing. There werent any branding degrees
or even certificates when I went to uni. At best you might find a branding
class offered as part of a marketing course, taught, naturally, by a mar-
keting person. And that professor would preach the marketing gospel
that branding is a part of marketing.
Id like to challenge that by offering the opposite paradigm: mar-
keting is a part of branding. And to keep with the cosmic metaphor
of stars and constellations, Id like to posit that branding is the Higgs
particle of commerce.
The Higgs boson is the sub-atomic particle first theorised by Oxford
physicist Peter Higgs and recently discovered with the large hadron col-
lider at CERN. It was the first branded sub-atomic particle, or in any
case the best branded, for the media called it the God particle, because
our universe wouldnt exist without it.
Of course, like many brands it was misunderstood, and I dont under-

40
stand it either. But a physicist friend once enlightened me by explaining
that its more useful to think of the Higgs as a field rather than a particle
bosons can be either particles or waves. If you imagine the Higgs as
waves, then it creates a field, like light waves or gravity waves. In that
explanation the Higgs field exists everywhere and gives mass to the par-
ticles that make up all matter. An electron gets its mass by interacting
with the Higgs field. No Higgs, everything disappears. Yet the Higgs itself
is so subtle it took physicists decades and a multi-billion dollar machine
to detect it.
Atoms and molecules, planets and stars get all our attention. So it
is with Marketing. Branding is the Higgs, quietly making waves in the
background that allow Marketing to exist in the first place. Because you
cant have Marketing without a brand to sell.

*
Many companies dont know their brand, but that doesnt mean their
brand doesnt exist. The generic corner Restaurant in Seinfeld doesnt
make any effort to brand, but that only means their customers will brand
them. The most famous soup vendor in the world is a fictional char-
acter, also from Seinfeld, called the Soup Nazi. This vendor didnt try
to brand himself, so his customers did. The brand field can be strong
or weak, influenced by companies or customers, but like the Higgs,
it is always there.

*
You will note I havent included case studies about consumer com-
panies, like the products from branding giants Procter & Gamble
or General Mills. Thats not because I dont find them interesting. I could
write a whole book on consumer brands, and maybe one day I will. But
I deliberately used Australia and the European Union as my case studies
to underscore that brand is everywhere; it gives rise to mass media and
mass culture just as the Higgs gives our universe mass.

41
 Scientists are smart. They know that if they want to understand
the universe they must pay attention to the Higgs. But it took a long
time for marketers to get the message that if they want to do successful
marketing they need to understand the brands they are marketing. Some
organisations still dont get that. Those are the ones who come to people
like me at the eleventh hour.

*
So brand comes first. But many organisations develop marketing
strategies without having a branding strategy. I ask, how do they know
what theyre marketing? They dont. They think just because they have
a blog or buy a full-page colour ad or post 100 tweets a day people are
going to buy their product.
Look at blogging. Everyone is blogging these days. One of the most
oversaturated fields is travel blogging. People think, wouldnt it be cool
to get paid for traveling? Ill just start a blog. The barrier to entry is low
and lots of people are making money, why cant I? And they post franti-
cally, because everyone tells them you have to post every week, or every
other day, or twice a day. Content is king. And then you get your friends
to subscribe and then beg for likes, for shares. You promote influen-
tial bloggers and guest post when you can in exchange for plugging
your own blog. And you spend months churning out worthless content
to subscribers who have stopped reading. Then you think, maybe I should
start a food blog instead. But the truth is youre a pin next to a jackham-
mer and youd be better off asking yourself what is special about you and
then trying to brand that, because its better to be a big fish in a small
pond than plankton in the ocean.
Marketing seduces consumers, but marketing itself is seductive.
It holds out the promise of easy success. How many times have I heard
clients say they would have done better if only they had more money for
marketing? They think marketing is the solution to all their problems.

42
They think, We have to get the word out. But what is that word, exactly?
It amazes me how entitled some organisations feel. This is especially
true of not-for-profits. They think Jane is going to donate money just
because they have a good cause, because they deserve to reach their cam-
paign goals. But how many good causes do you think there are out there?
How many cancer charities, NGOs, educational foundations? Marketing
gets the message out, marketing seduces. But brand differentiates.
And what about organisations that rely on government funding
for their survival? These are the most entitled organisations of all.
They make the critical mistake of equating their history with their brand.
But Im telling you, if your brand is not more than your history, you
may be history!
I had a client, a government-funded not-for-profit, that had been
very successful. Every couple of years they went back to Canberra
for another round of funding. And this went on for many years until
one day the government said we dont need you anymore. You do research
in an industrial sector that no longer exists in Australia.
So what did the organisation do? They asked me to change their
name. Now sure, they needed to change their name, because their name
reflected the sector that no longer existed. But what were they going
to do? What were they qualified to do? They were facing an existential
crisis. An earthquake had just hit and they wanted to paint their awning.
The problem was they had been marketing themselves to the gov-
ernment, not branding themselves. So the government branded them
for them. The government branded them as experts in a single, disrupt-
ed sector rather than as researchers who could do useful work across
several industries.
Returning to our stellar metaphor, imagine if NASA had made that
mistake. Theyd be out of business. Because what they first went into
business to do send a man to the moon isnt something they can

43
get funding for anymore. All the marketing in the world isnt going
to result in another taxpayer-funded manned mission to the moon. But
they didnt brand themselves as a manned spaceflight agency but as
a space agency. And because they branded wisely were seeing images of
Jupiter and Pluto that marketers like Elon Musk and Richard Branson can
use to promote inexpensive manned spaceflight that relies on private,
not public, funding.

*
So branding comes before marketing. A marketing strategy should
be based on a brand strategy. Whether you are a person, a company,
a corporation, or a country whether you are Taylor Swift or the
Soup Nazi, you have something to offer others. Take that something
and build your brand around it. Then take that brand and build your
marketing around it.
But branding also comes after marketing. Imagine youre a company
thats just concluded a successful marketing campaign. You have loads
of money under your mattress. What are you going to do with it?
How you answer that question depends a lot on how you see your
brand. If youre a boutique beer brand, beloved in your city, family-owned
for generations, you may want to modernise your brewery. If youre a
national beer brand you may want to buy up a rival beer company. If
youre a global beverage company, with a beer brand, you might expand
to bottled water.
Google has made almost a googles worth of dollars. Well, not quite,
but theyve had quite a bit of cash lying about. Their mission statement
is to: Organise the worlds information. This is one of the best mis-
sion statements Ive ever read because its clear without being limiting.
It doesnt say, Were a search engine company. Their founders under-
stood search engines might be supplanted by new technologies, and in
any case they were more ambitious than just telling us what the best

44
cat videos are.
Yet what does organising the worlds information have to do with
robotic cars? I dont know, but for years Google has been allocating vast
resources to develop and test self-driving cars. This wasnt a public-
ity stunt and they may never sell a self-driving car. Google Glass has
been another major project that, to date, has not paid off commercially.
But Googles founders believe in scientific creativity. They famously
encouraged their engineers to spend 20 per cent of their time on their
own projects. So no one, except perhaps their shareholders, are asking
what Google is doing behind the wheel of the self-driving car.
Branding helps make companies money, but also guides them
on how to spend it.

*
So we need to rebrand branding to differentiate ourselves from mar-
keting, to show that, like the Higgs, our influence is felt everywhere,
even if the only thing you see is the shiny star of a logo.

45
 7

O
n 23 June 2016 the United Kingdom, itself a union of England,
Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, voted to leave the
European Union. This was a powerful blow to an organi-
sation that even vocal opponent Boris Johnson admitted was a noble
idea for its time.
Not even Greece, where approval of the EU stood at just 27 per cent
(in a Pew poll done the same month as Brexit), had voted to leave the
Union. The UK could not claim the euro as a reason for their dissatisfac-
tion, as the Greeks could, for the British had never adopted the common
currency. Nor could one say the reason was simply anger over how the EU
was handling the migrant crisis from the Syrian War. Britain certainly
wasnt alone in their concerns over the refugees. The effects were much
greater in the Mediterranean members of the Union. The Greeks unfa-
vourable rating on the EUs migrant policy was 94 per cent.
So where did the EU fail? Specifically, where did it fail in the UK?
Im not an economist or political scientist. What I want to know
is whether the EU could have done anything in its brand strategy if it
even had a brand strategy to avoid this result? Were the British voting
rationally, with a clear understanding of what the European Union does,

47
or had the EU failed to communicate what it does?

*
All governments have communications departments, and the EU is
no exception. But you can put out press releases and policy papers react-
ing to current events with no relation to brand. You can even create logos,
flags and marketing materials without first developing a brand strategy.
Weve already talked about the EUs 12-star flag that, unlike the hast-
ily designed 13-star flag of the United States, was the result of years
of committees and compromises. Its a nicely designed flag, but all the
meaning was compromised out of it. The dark blue background was
chosen because it was a politically neutral colour red symbolised
Communism and green was associated with the Green Party. And the
stars didnt represent member countries because there was debate about
whether some territories were countries or not.
Maybe the problem started right there. Europeans couldnt look
at the EU flag and feel it represented them. They might have bought
them at souvenir stands but they didnt feel any emotional connection,
as they did to their own national flags.
Still, I visited Europe after the European Union was founded, in 1993,
and recall seeing the flag proudly waving in Belgium, Holland, Germany,
even France. I dont remember seeing it in England, though. Im sure it
was there, but I wonder if even then the Brits had the same enthusiasm
for the new organisation that the other member countries had. Euro-
peanism as an idea had been around for a long time as a counterweight
to nationalism, but this was more of a Continental ethos. The British,
as an island nation, with their close alliance with the United States and
as the head of the Commonwealth, had conflicting identities. The EU was
pushed through by Kohl of Germany and Mitterand of France. Thatchers
Britain joined, but only putting one foot in the water, keeping the pound.
This should have been a warning to Brussels that of the three great

48
European powers, the UK was the least committed and therefore would
need the most persuasion to stay in the event of a crisis.
So the flag didnt really catch on. You still see it a lot in Brussels, Lux-
embourg and Strasbourg, the EU capitals, but not much anywhere else.
What became the real symbol of the European Union was the euro,
introduced in 2002. Elegantly designed colourful banknotes with small
numbers like 5 and 50 clearly printed in large type, as if to reproach the
100,000 Italian lira notes and the 10,000 Greek drachma. Tourists like
me rejoiced at the new currency, even if it drove prices slightly higher,
because we no longer had to change money every time we crossed a
border. We no longer had to calculate exchange rates, except for the euro
itself. And for member nations the euro was a strong currency, outcom-
peting the US dollar for most of the first decade of the new millennium.
But the real value of the euro was in labour and trade among
the member countries. If you owned a factory that sold products across
Europe, or a student wishing to study in another member country,
the Union functioned with the efficiency of a single country.
When people want to complain about the EU they talk about the
bureaucrats in Brussels, but the EUs purpose was to reduce bureau-
cracy, and people forgot how much bureaucracy existed before, when
each country had to print its own currency, establish tariffs, and calculate
conversion rates. Or maybe people were more accepting of their own
bureaucracy rather than one imposed from abroad, even if the imposed
one was less, pardon the pun, taxing.

*
The financial crisis wasnt the EUs making, but they were respon-
sible for bailing out the banks and imposing austerity measures on
member countries. Even the best-loved brand would suffer under such
circumstances. But there were problems with Britain before these events.
In 2006, a year before the global financial crisis, the approval rate of

49
the EU was only 34 per cent. If I was writing this as one of my own case
studies I would format it like this:

CHALLENGE
A vocal lobby of Eurosceptics in the UK wants to leave the EU.

SOLUTION
Prime Minister Cameron, whose Tories support remaining in the Union,
calls a referendum, expecting that Remain will win, thus silencing the
Leave critics.

RESULTS
The vote itself gets branded as Brexit and Leave wins in a narrow,
but shocking outcome. Cameron resigns. What is the EU? comes
up as the most Googled search term.

*
Fortunately I dont have any case studies like this for my own clients
or Id be out of business. The results are pretty much the worst-case sce-
nario for the EU. They lost their second-richest member, they lost their
British champion in Cameron, and the courage or folly of the British
voter motivated workers and nationalist parties in other member coun-
tries to push for their own referendums.
But what troubles me as a brand strategist is the Google search.
Because it turns out many people were voting on emotion, riled up by
the opposition, glad for a chance to stick it to the Establishment. They
associated the EU with immigration, which had doubled since 1993, and
the more recent refugee crisis. Or, if they were on the Left, they asso-
ciated the EU with globalism, Toryism and federalism. And then after
their votes were counted they realised they didnt really know what they
had voted against.
Of course the searches also came from people who had voted Remain.
But either way, the fact that so many people were unsure what was

50
at issue speaks to a branding failure by the European Union.
I say branding rather than communications failure because the
EU doesnt lack for communications. All their agencies have Comms
people. They issue press releases by the bucketful. And it cant be put
down to being in the Dark Ages, not using social media, not reaching
out to youth. In fact the EU is most popular with the youth demographic.
Go to europa.eu and scroll down and you will find a plethora of Facebook,
Twitter, LinkedIn, and other social media sites. The European Parliament
Facebook page has over 2 million likes and features posts on subjects
such as human trafficking, travellers rights, and emergency phone num-
bers. Not the stuff youd expect from a faceless bureaucracy.
Nevertheless the EU is faceless. I cant tell you how many times
Ive heard people refer to it as bureaucrats in Brussels. Thats
a branding problem.

*
So what would I have done differently had they knocked on my door
and asked for a brand strategy?
First, I would have started in 1993 by recognising Britain was not
all-in, like Germany and France. Brand strategy is about aligning your
stakeholders, and the Brits were a special case from the beginning. That
may have been okay on the periphery, with a country like Norway, which
also kept its own currency, but not with a major player. That 34 per cent
approval rate in 2006 would have kept me awake at night. But I doubt
it kept anyone in Brussels awake. And thats the problem with organisa-
tions that dont live and breathe their brand.
I would have engaged more with the working class. I would have rec-
ognised their concerns over immigration, and that we were being held
accountable for that. I would have enlisted the educated classes on both
sides of the aisle. Oxford and Cambridge both voted over 70 per cent for
Remain. But they werent evangelising.

51
 A brand is only good if it can survive a crisis, and the financial melt-
down almost wrecked the Union. The EU bailed out the banks and
at the same time imposed austerity measures on ordinary people. Their
brand shifted from the 2 euro coin used to buy an espresso to the billion
euro cheque written to save bankers. Since that moment the EU ceased
to be seen as Boris Johnsons noble idea, and was viewed as an instru-
ment of German bankers and hedge fund managers.
I would have done more to reach out, to listen, to engage the pop-
ulations the EU was supposed to be serving. Too often organisations,
whether corporate giants or governments, circle the wagons during
a crisis when they need to be reaching out.
The core of the European Union brand is the euro. In a BBC docu-
mentary from 2012 Michael Portillo asks Greeks about the EU. His own
position is that Greece should return to the drachma, but when he offers
up a drachma note or a euro note to the Greeks he interviews, almost
all of them chose to keep the common currency.

*
Yanis Varoufakis, the beleaguered former Greek Finance Minister,
argued in a piece for the Guardian that, despite his liberal ideology,
he thinks Greece should remain in the Union. He makes the distinction
between power and sovereignty, and is willing to cede power to Brus-
sels, but not sovereignty. Scotland shares this sentiment, having voted
68 per cent to 32 per cent to remain in the EU. But the Scottish votes were
not enough to overcome the anxieties of their neighbours to the south
over what the Eurosceptics perceived as a loss of sovereignty.

*
But my biggest plea would have been not to let David Cameron
be the face of Remain. For an organisation of such ambition, the
European Union is surprisingly discreet. Rather than courting Britain to
stay, rather than reaching out, they respected sovereignty at exactly the

52
wrong time and observed from a distance. They presented themselves
as an organisation that was abstract, that didnt care. EU Commission
President, Jean-Claude Junker, told Germanys BILD after the vote that
he was deeply saddened, but then went on to say, out is out.
He said he spent countless days and nights negotiating an agree-
ment that was fair toward the United Kingdom. Id wager the days and
nights he spent could, indeed, be counted, but Ill take his point that he
tried hard in the way he knew to keep the UK on board. The problem
was the way he knew was not the way that was needed. There was no
emotion on the Remain side, which only reinforced the image of the EU
as a faceless bureaucracy.
I would have given it face. How many Brits would recognise Jean-
Claude Junker if he walked down Oxford Street? Theyd recognise Boris
Johnson, and thats always a problem for branding, when people know
your competition but they dont know you.
As I said, Cameron was a poor champion. The EU needed its own
face, or faces. Junker should have been pounding the pavement, listening
to the views of ordinary Brits. Cynics would say this tactic would be just
for show. But it depends on the leadership and whether they authentical-
ly care about their constituency or not. The New Deal was made possible
because Franklin Roosevelt, who had lived a privileged, sheltered life,
visited Warm Springs, Georgia to treat his polio and there saw for the
first time the blight the depression had caused American farmers.
If it were up to me I would have sent Chunnel loads of EU bureaucrats
to places like the Midlands, which voted 59 per cent to leave. So that they
could see first hand the effects of their policies. And so the voters could
at least have a face to put to the Union they wanted to quit.

*
The EUs official symbol is its blue flag with 12 anonymous stars.
It might do better with a few human faces.

53
 8

I
like to start a brand strategy with a brand model. A brand models
aim is to divine your unique value proposition, what has intrinsic
value to the customer.
Most agencies do this, but in different ways. There is no accepted
practice or template. Ive worked up my model over ten years and I do
it all on one page. It starts with the question, What information do most
companies need to equip them to energise and strengthen their brand?
Most agencies dont present their models on one page. But my feeling
is that if it doesnt fit on a single page you havent gotten to the essence
of the brand. Thats where the art is, the practical blueprint that informs
the brand activation and engagement to get leaders and employees
to understand this is what our brands about; this is what we stand for
and why we matter.
A brand model can touch on as many areas as the agency chooses.
Thats one of the advantages of not having a formalised model. But
I use the same template Ive developed for all clients and I find it works
very well. It includes categories like Purpose, Culture, Brand Heritage,
Desired Perceptual Shift, Innovation Strategy, and Differentiation.
There are some pragmatic business categories like Target Customer, and

55
Services, but there are also some impressionistic areas, such as Person-
ality Archetypes, and People Who Embody the Brand.
Among the most important categories, and often the hardest for
us to define, are Brand Essence, Value Proposition, and Values.
Your Brand Essence is the single most compelling thing you can say
about your brand that differentiates it from competitor brands, as per-
ceived by the consumer. The most powerful brand essences are rooted
in a fundamental consumer need.
Our Brand Essence is: Brands that create sustained value.
Your Value Proposition is a clear statement that describes the benefit
of your offer, how you solve your customers needs and what distin-
guishes you from the competition. It is also known as a unique selling
proposition.
Our Value Proposition is: We seek to improve your bottom line
by helping you align your brand with your business objectives, including
your customer needs and your competitive advantages, and helping you
communicate your brand powerfully and productively to your stakehold-
ers. We take the time to understand your business, give you the best
advice for your unique needs, and execute the resulting projects with
excellence and alacrity.
Values are four or five core organisational values, what you truly
stand for rather than what you do to win customers. In workshops
we often hear answers that reflect what the client wants us to believe
rather than what they really are. Competitiveness is a quality most
companies desire, and need, yet when we ask about values we rare-
ly hear that word in response. Everyone becomes soft and fuzzy at
this point and youd think corporate raiders like to read books to the
blind. Common answers we hear are authenticity, collaboration, and
ethics. It wouldnt surprise me if I were to get a magician for a client and
he answered, Transparency!

56
 Our own values include playfulness and non-conformity, quali-
ties that might make some potential clients think twice. But the point
of Values is to understand your DNA, not to sell.

*
My process for creating a brand model starts with workshops with
client leadership and staff. These workshops take vertical and horizontal
slices of the business to form a picture of how those in the organisation
define their brand. Often people have contrasting views, so we have to
challenge their assumptions and try to reach a consensus among the
different stakeholders: sales, legal, operations, marketing, and so on.
I usually do one to three workshops of several hours each, record
them and write a report. One of the desired effects is to raise awareness
and start a conversation within the company. By doing this the compa-
ny is telling its employees that brand is important and their feedback
is welcomed. Without good internal communication the brand model
cannot be successful.
After the workshops my team distils what weve learned and puts
together a draft report for the client, which generally means the CEO and
marketing team. Then after discussions with them we make refinements
and test it with current and prospective customers.

*
A brand is not just defined by what the client wants it to be but ulti-
mately by what customers, prospective customers, and partners think
it is. So we like to do research before creating the brand model to deter-
mine these external perceptions. We also look at the competition.
We distil all these insights, overlay some changes, and provide some
recommendations for changing communications to align to opportuni-
ties to the position weve recommended.
At that point there are some interesting discussions based on evi-
dence that might challenge the brand owners vision and strategy.

57
For instance, one client was looking to diversify their offering because
they didnt want all their eggs in one basket. But our research exposed
that such attempts at diversification might threaten their core busi-
ness. In other cases weve learned through our brand model research
that a competitor offers something similar to our client when our client
assumed their service was unique.
So the brand model isnt simply putting what you already know
on paper. Its a process of discovery. Changes to the brand model may
challenge prevailing business strategy assumptions and directions that
the client needs to examine. This moment is a point of intersection
between brand strategy and business strategy. Big decisions need to
be made around fine-tuning what was originally proposed.
The brand model is usually part of a wider brand strategy, but for
some small businesses it may be all thats required. For others the brand
model lays the foundation for a brand portfolio and even a complete tran-
sition. If our client is rebranding they should carefully consider what to
leverage from their existing business and what to transform. This affects
corporate governance, trademarks, policies, procedures and culture
to make sure the brand is applied consistently and with integrity.

*
A brand model can cost as little as $10,000 without research and
up to $80,000 with research. It usually takes between three and eight
weeks to complete.
Id say 95 per cent of our clients are surprised by the results. Ive had
a CEO say: We have been in business for 20 years and weve never been
able to articulate our value so accurately and succinctly!
Another said: We refer to it almost daily as a constant reminder
of who we are and to shape our future business.

*
Key Messages is a 25 page document comprising key headline state-

58
ments that you make repeatedly across materials and communications
to reinforce your brand strategy. Brand strategy is used as a blueprint
for those key messages.
Unlike a brand model, the idea of key messages is widely under-
stood and used, particularly by organisations with a communications
department. But while many organisations have such a document,
or documents, they are usually restricted to one area or incident, such
as for crisis management or a particular campaign, rather than aligned
across the whole brand.
Key messages derive from the brand strategy and should be used
to express and reinforce the brand at every opportunity. But instead what
most organisations do is develop messages on the fly, reacting to events
rather than using events as an opportunity to get their message across.
We see this in politics all the time, where people in the same admin-
istration or department make contradictory statements and then have
to backtrack.
Many clients simply dont want to spend the money. They think
$10,00020,000 is too much for a couple of sheets of paper. But a Key
Messages document will not only help you communicate your brand
consistently, but will save you time and money. Brochures and other
collateral can be written in a fraction of the time if there are key messag-
es from which to pull relevant statements. And of course this minimises
the time required to communicate objectives and write briefs when cli-
ents have to outsource materials.

59
 9

I
n 1984 Nike signed Michael Jordan to an endorsement deal for
basketball shoes. This wasnt the first such deal. Larry Bird and
Magic Johnson had deals with Converse, and Stan Smith had
endorsed his enduring tennis shoe for Adidas way back in 1963. But an
interesting thing happened with the kids who wore the now iconic #23
brand. They called them Jordans. Whered you get those Jordans? When
are the new Jordans coming out?
Michael Jordans personal brand eclipsed the Nike brand. It stuck in
a way other endorsements didnt. While initially there was a single
style, there are now multiple releases of new Jordan models every year,
no matter that he retired 17 years ago.
The shoes now have a cult-like following. The new models are even
bought as investments by teens and 20-somethings who never wear
them. Sneakers have gone from a commodity to a collectible, thanks
to the power of personal branding.

*
Golfing legend Arnold Palmer died in 2016. He wasnt the best play-
er of all time, or the second best. Many dont even include him in their
top five, but his influence on golf, and on all sport for that matter, was

61
second to none. Michael Jordans Nike deal would not have been possible
without Palmers pioneering efforts in the field of personal brand.
At his death Palmer was worth almost a billion dollars, but he only
made US$1.78 million on the PGA tour. The rest was due to brand pio-
neer Mark McCormack, founder of International Management Group,
who had the vision to see star athletes could make far more off the field
than on. And Palmer, with his unique blend of charismatic charm, like-
ability and humility, embodied this development in modern marketing.
Palmers endorsements over five decades included Lincoln-Mercury,
Rolex, Pennzoil, Callaway, and many others. He hosted his own tourna-
ment in Florida and even invented a mixture of iced tea and lemonade
that bears his name, the rights of which were sold to AriZona Beverag-
es for an undisclosed sum and which earns the company nine figures
in annual sales.

*
Two qualities that perhaps most endeared Palmer to corporate spon-
sors were that he saw their arrangement not simply as easy money but
as a true partnership and that he led an irreproachable life, without
controversies or even enemies. Among his greatest admirers were his
competitors on the golf course. Tiger Woods called him a mentor and
played his tournament at Bay Hill every year, winning it eight times.
Unfortunately for Tiger, he failed to emulate Palmer off the course.
He signed a US$40 million, five-year contract with Nike at age 19, before
he had won a major tournament, and then negotiated extensions worth
US$20 million per year. But after his sex scandal Nike reduced that
amount by half, and AT&T and Accenture, among other partners, ended
their sponsorship agreements.

*
Clearly, personal brand is lucrative to both celebrities and the com-
panies who sign them. But what about the rest of us?

62
 In the past personal brand was limited to those who had access
to media, and that meant celebrities. But with the internet anyone can
have their own YouTube channel or fashion blog. Ordinary people have
become celebrities overnight by reviewing Disney products or cooking
while drunk. And the personal brand theyve created, whether deliber-
ately or organically, translates into income.
But what about those of us who dont want to review cosmetics
or make silly home videos for a living? Do we need a personal brand?
In a larger sense, according to my definition of a brand as the expres-
sion of an entity, person, product, or service, as designed by its creator
and perceived by the world, we all have a personal brand whether we
want one or not by virtue of our actions and how others perceive us.
But in reality this only surfaces when we try to sell ourselves or impress
someone, whether its the person we want to marry or the employer we
want to work for.
In the past a young man might brand himself to win a wife, and vice
versa. But once this was achieved he could watch footy all day and deve
lop a beer belly.
But todays world is more volatile. Divorce is common, and working
ones whole life for the same company has become increasingly rare.
The 1975 bestseller Dress for Success assumed that once you acquired
the right wardrobe it would serve you, with occasional updates, for your
whole career.
But change has become a constant. Branding yourself for IBM
wont cut it with Apple. And with the ubiquity of social media, whether
OkCupid or LinkedIn or Facebook, we are always on display.

*
So what do you do to brand yourself? Or to control your brand, to keep
others from defining you?
If you have the money and the need you can hire an agency to develop

63
a brand strategy for you. And in fact a lot of business coaches do some
degree of personal brand development, whether they call it that or not.
I dont have a personal brand model for myself, but you could certainly
work something up on your own, soliciting feedback from friends and
colleagues. And if youre looking for a job you can write down a page
or half a page of key messages. In rsums, for example, people list their
work history without weighing their experience according to its rele-
vance. Having personal key messages can help you communicate what
matters and not just say what you think others expect to hear.
If you look at team pages these days, including ours, you will often
find personal interests and achievements as well as professional ones.
This is something I think that was born in Silicon Valley, where many
founders were under 30 and didnt have a lot of work history to list, and
may not have even finished university. These were people driven by pas-
sion as much or more than by money, so they listed their passions.
I mention on my profile that I am an accomplished pianist and pipe
organist, not because I think this will attract clients but because music
is core to me.

*
Personal branding for all of us, not just for public figures, is an emerg-
ing field. I could write a whole book on this subject alone, and some have.
I cant go into great detail in just one chapter, but I will mention here
what I believe to be the main misconception of personal branding that
it is superficial and contrived, that branding yourself means pretending
to be something you are not for the sole object of personal gain.
Yet Ive just shown that by putting my love for piano and organ in my
profile I was motivated by expressing my personal brand, not by gaining
clients. If I were Machiavellian I might have invented a passion for col-
lecting soft drink bottles and soap advertisements. I would have started
by thinking what my potential clients want to hear, rather than reaching

64
inside for the things that really matter to me.

*
A successful personal brand starts from within. Arnold Palmer got
that. Tiger Woods didnt. If I were a terrible organist I might have used
struggling rather than accomplished because Im not looking to make
money or win prizes when I sit down at the keyboard. What matters in
that case is the passion I have for it, and communicating honestly.
Arnold Palmer didnt pose as an expert at creating beverages.
He could have said his drink was an Edison-like experiment to concoct
the perfect non-alcoholic drink. He could have tried to brand himself as
an entrepreneur who knew the value of the Arnold Palmer from day one,
rather than just a thirsty golfer with a taste for lemonade. But he didnt
even trademark it, and seemed almost apologetic that it became popular.

*
While branding has an aspirational component, it should also reflect
reality. And unless the reality is youre an asshole like Mel Gibson, people
will accept your faults, and may even admire you more for them. But if
you cant list authenticity among the core values of your own personal
brand, youre in trouble. You may climb the French Alps, but youll crash
in the end.
Just ask Lance Armstrong.

65
 10

B
rand culture exists when owners and employees as a whole
know what their brand is, why its important, and the role they
can play in strengthening and communicating it.
An organisational culture is not positive unless it is also a brand
culture. And to have a strong brand culture you have to have people who
understand and embrace your core values. People who dont embrace
the values dont stay long, with the exception of government, where it
is difficult to fire workers and they are incentivised to remain in jobs
they dont like or arent suited for.
A brand culture can literally mean the difference between survival
and extinction for a company. One of our clients, a small research con-
sultancy, was recently bought by a multinational corporation. But the
buyer kept the entire team, and didnt even relocate them, because our
client has such a strong sense of who they are. In a brand culture people
at all levels are trying to protect the business from making a decision
that is fundamentally wrong for the brand. One employee will pull
up the others for not espousing the brand values, and they will all be
natural evangelists of the brand.
The brand wont just be something written on a sheet of paper.

67
People will be living it. This is the difference between being tokenistic
and authentic. Owners and employees will feel a personal connection
to the brand. The people on our clients team had a strong sense of who
they are, what they stand for, and why it matters. And as a result they
all kept their jobs.
*
An example of a poor or even dangerous brand culture was Enron.
You might think Enron had a great brand culture. People loved to work
there and evangelised the company. Many of them lost all their savings
because they refused to buy any other companys shares. Isnt that what
leaders dream about?
But building a brand culture means building a culture, not a cult.
Sure, you want everyone to understand and communicate your core
values, and be on message, but you dont want mindless obedience.
You dont want arrogance. Enron fell, in part, because a lot of decent peo-
ple turned a blind eye to fraud, and let their blind faith in their leaders
sabotage the long-term health of the company. If your employees idolise
you rather than respectfully challenge you, youre halfway to bankruptcy.
Apple satirised this in their famous 1984 Super Bowl commercial.
The mindless workers in the audience listening to their leaders speech
was a jab at IBM. International Business Machines was one of the worlds
great brands, synonymous in pre-Silicon Valley days with computers.
But if you dont have Cassandras within your organisation, if you dont
foster a culture where your own people can warn and challenge you,
your competition will. IBMs brand culture was stifling and regimented
more cult than culture and no match for the visionary ambitions
of Jobs and Gates.
IBM lost US$5 billion in 1992, at the time more than any US company
had lost in a single year. By contrast, Hewlett Packard, another older
generation tech company, flourished.

68
 HP was the original garage start-up, founded by William Hewlett and
David Packard in 1939 in Palo Alto, which would later be ground zero
for Silicon Valley. They had a brand culture second to none, with door-
less offices and management by wandering. It was so successful that
the brand culture itself became branded as the HP Way.
The two subsequent CEOs had risen through the ranks and respect-
ed this culture, keeping their doors open and even flying coach. But in
1999 an outside marketing star, Carly Fiorina, was brought in to lead HP
into the new millennium. It didnt work and she was very publicly fired,
a failure both on her part and the boards to follow the HP Way, its low-
key, collegial culture.
Although Fiorinas business decisions were criticised, particularly
the acquisition of Compaq, her main fault seemed to be her destruction
of the HP Way, and employee complaints to media focused not on her
business acumen but on her private jet, her mendacity in public rela-
tions, her closed door.

*
A strong brand culture is the result of an effective brand strategy.
But how do you measure it?
A good way to gauge your brand culture is to do regular employee
engagement surveys, supplemented by selected employee interviews.
What youre looking for foremost is engagement. The worst sign isnt
complaints; its when your employees dont even bother to fill out
the surveys!
You want feedback that shows they understand why they are coming
to work. But you dont want 100 per cent consensus either. That signals
your employees are either too frightened to complain or theyve drunk
the Kool-Aid.
We recently conducted three interviews with staff from the research
company I mentioned earlier to get their feedback about the buyout.

69
One of them spoke well past the allotted hour. There was so much he
wanted to communicate to his CEO and to his new bosses. He was clearly
proud of his team, but he also voiced concerns. He articulated their brand
culture and warned it was at risk. His passion registered in his voice.
Those are the kind of people who build and sustain a brand culture.

70
 11

T
wo of the most frequently asked questions I get from clients
are: How do you measure brand? and Whats the return
on investment?
I wish I could tell you I always impressed the bean counters with pro
ven methodologies, but the fact is measurement and ROI were not things
I learnt in school. There is a gap in the curriculum. People are more likely
to want to measure their marketing activities because they see it as being
more directly a lever of sales, whereas with brand it is less obvious.
For instance, you measure marketing by sales. Its pretty simple.
While there may not be a direct correlation, if you spend $1 million
on an advertising campaign and sales increase by $2 million you can
consider it a success.
But sales is a poor measure of brand. Even when it is used, it is a lag-
ging indicator, as branding activities may take a year or two to take hold
and show results in increased revenue.
But branding is more complicated than marketing. Companies mar-
ket for basically one reason: to make money. But branding can have
many motives, and they arent all directly related to sales. For instance,
brand strategy might relate to hiring great people, or retaining them,

72
or to handling a crisis, or to determining what business you want to
be in. A personal brand strategy may best be measured by quality of life
or personal fulfilment rather than by dollar value.
So when I started in branding there really wasnt any talk about brand
measurement. Only the big consumer companies had the resources
to do this. One of the first things I thought when I got into this business
was how little data was being captured. Most small businesses do not
capture data on their brand, on its health and value.
Over the last two years Ive made a great effort to focus on measure-
ment and persuade my clients, even small firms, that they should allocate
resources to this. Otherwise how do you understand the value of what
you have? But this has been an uphill battle. Most clients simply dont
want to spend the time or money on brand measurement. This is also
a mindset. People are too busy in small businesses to measure stuff. They
want their new logo or brochures or brand model and to be done with it.
One of my first brand repositioning experiences was for a client that
had already worked out their new name. The obvious question for me
to ask is what the risks are in transforming from one brand to the other
when theres 30 years of equity in the old name? How do you know what
youve got and what you can lose if you dont have a formal way of mea-
suring it? And Id say a lot of businesses at that crossroads have very little
evidence of or data about their brand equity. And in this case, despite my
remonstrations, they didnt care.

*
Start-ups and digital-savvy clients like to use Google Analytics
and other digital tools for measuring their brand. They are easy to use
and many of them are free. Clients may ask why they should spend
money on research when they can crowdsource feedback online and
send out Survey Monkey questionnaires. Some start-ups submit names
or logos to their friends for a vote.

73
 But, like sales, these methods will only tell you part of the picture and
may even mislead you, such as when you think you have a successful
brand because you have lots of likes or page views. How many trav-
el bloggers get thousands of subscribers and quit their day jobs, only
to have their numbers fall off a month later? How many food bloggers
or mummy bloggers go into those spaces simply because they see other
people making money, without realising that brand success is not
achieved by copying but by differentiating?
So if sales and digital analytics arent the best tools for brand mea-
surement, what are? What sources do you aggregate to get a good picture
of your brand health?
The bean counters love quantitative research because it seems more
grounded in fact and its easier to represent numerically. Insync is a
company that has pioneered quantitative consumer surveys for bran
ding. Quantitative brand research is good if you want to measure change
in brand awareness, or understand markets in broad terms.
But qualitative research is necessary for gaining insights. Ive had
the pleasure to partner for many years with Elinor Graham and Anne
Derham, who do focus groups and stakeholder interviews and then write
reports on their findings that we present to clients. The results of these
are often surprising to the client and may even impact fundamental busi-
ness decisions.
For example, we had a client who was considering offering consulting
services on top of their existing business, and branding this new service
separately. But our research revealed that their clients didnt associate
them as being experts in the new service. Thats the kind of insightful
measure of the reach of their brand you cant get with Google Analytics.
But I realise not every business can afford to engage in research.
So I would suggest as a minimum a simple but professionally designed
customer service survey done at least every 12 months to glean trend

74
data. And if you have a large staff, also do an employee survey supple-
mented by in-depth interviews with key partners.
If you want to understand prospective customers thats more difficult
because you dont know who they are. But there are omnibus companies
like Ipsos and YouGov that do monthly surveys where you can pay them
to insert a couple of questions.

*
The second question, Whats the ROI? is still hard for me to answer,
because finding a direct line between investment in brand and return
on that money spent is difficult. Brand is not viewed as a discrete stream
of activity. It gets wrapped around so many things the budget is attached
to. For instance, is a brand awareness campaign brand investment
or marketing?
Most companies, unless theyre really large, dont have a separate
brand budget. Brand spend comes out of the marketing pot. What tends
to happen is sales activities get privileged, whereas with branding the
wisdom is that when you invest in brand you are creating awareness and
a perception of your brand in the marketplace. The focus is not neces-
sarily on getting the phone to ring or visits to your website but bringing
your brand to the fore.
So a medium business might have a $200,000 budget to achieve
brand/marketing/sales objectives for the year. And unless there is
a major brand event, such as a rebrand, very little of that money, and
perhaps none if it, will be allocated to brand-building activities.
I suggest to clients if they are serious about building the value of their
business through their brand, that they allocate a specific budget to it.

*
Fifteen years ago, I was engaged by a national homewares company.
They were losing traction in the marketplace. I remember saying to their
quite conservative management, Houston, we have a problem.

75
 They knew they had a problem, but theyd made a lot of money over
the years with bang-on products and thought they understood their cus-
tomers. I told them we needed to understand from the horses mouth why
sales were dropping. I believed the problem was systemic. They hadnt
invested in brand at all, but simply in catalogues and sales promotions.
Their strategy was price discounting, which was no longer sustainable.
I advised them to let us do focus groups to really get a handle on why
they were losing customers hand over fist. And their managing director
said, What happens if we find out things we dont want to hear?
This was a $50 million company fighting for its life.
So I said, Look, if you dont do this research you wont know what
options you have to save the brand.
They said, Whats our return on this brand research?
I said, The return is you wont have to wait tables next year after you
go bankrupt.
They agreed to the research but decided not to implement the recom-
mendations. They were the Titanic with the iceberg looming but it was
just too hard for them to change course. Which makes me wonder why
they hired us in the first place.
Not long after that they were bought out.

*
The question whether investing in brand strategy can make you
money can be difficult to answer. But just because you cant always draw
a straight line to ROI doesnt mean you shouldnt invest in brand. Our
brand insights and interventions could have saved that company if they
hadnt been so resistant to change.
But there is one tangible return. Ironically it shows up on bal-
ance sheets as an intangible asset. Companies use it for tax purposes,
to borrow capital, to sell shares, or to sell themselves. Its AASB 138 of the
Australian Accounting Standard or IAS 38 of the International Accou

76
nting Standards Board.
A lot of start-ups without tangible assets or even strong reve-
nue streams, like Instagram, can make a fortune for their founders
because of their brand valuation. As for established companies, such as
Coca-Cola, half their market cap might be ascribed to brand.
Now thats ROI!

*
I am envious of marketers because measurement is not discretionary
in their field but allocated in the marketing budget. Clients expect it.
Marketers dont have to plead for research and analysis.
It is my hope that we can eventually achieve this attitude
with branding.

77
 12

Branding is the mouth not the lipstick

Brand is not cosmetic. Brand is fundamental to practically every
business in the world today, and if you ignore it I can assure you your
competitors wont.

Branding is the heart not the valentine

I specialise in transforming companies through brand strategy. But I dont
say yes to every potential client. There has to be a product or service or
team already in place that I can believe in and build on. I cant stress this
enough. It has to have heart and soul. It cant just be stuck on. It has to
be authentic.

79
Branding is the engagement not the ring
Engagement is the touchpoint of branding. The ones who get it wrong
just slap a ring on it (or a logo) and hope for the best. The ones who
get it right extend. They extend their brand to everything within their
reach. Once upon a time an amusement park was just a roller coaster and
a few other rides. The brand ended there. Then someone came along and
said no, its not just the roller coaster. Its the ticket sellers, the refresh-
ment stands, the carpark, its even the shrubbery, even the rubbish bins.
And Disney transformed the amusement park into a world.

Branding is the marriage not the wedding

Branding needs to be a continuous process that ends only when your
business ends. Many clients think they can do a workshop or campaign
and then be done with it and get back to the serious end of their business
and spend their budget on the things that drive ROI. But brand is the
serious end. And brand does drive ROI.

80
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 has helped hundreds of organisations develop
and grow their brands to compete in a global
environment. He was educated at Swinburne
University of Technology and the Royal Melbourne
Institute of Technology. He worked at a number of
creative agencies before starting his own agency,
Taylor & Grace, which has just celebrated its 10th
anniversary. He is an accomplished pianist and pipe
organist and serves on the board of Musica Viva.

taylorandgrace.com.au
is an award-winning novelist. He graduated high
school three years early and has been writing
full-time ever since. His novel Princes in Exile was
published in 10 countries and made into a film.
For the last two years he has been a digital nomad,
living on four continents, publishing books,
creating apps and working with Taylor & Grace
as a writer and brand strategist.

markschreiberbooks.com
Darren is a truly divine, artistic and intuitive individual who inspires
those around him to think differently.
Margaret Jackson AC, former Chairman of Qantas and Spotless

Being genuine, clear and consistent is important to all brands, whether

you are a large corporation or a concert pianist. In this book, Darren
applies his passion, wit and deep experience as a brand consultant
to change the way we think about brand. He challenges us to think
differently about branding and the importance of it in achieving organ-
isational and human potential.
Julian Burnside, AO QC

Darren has a unique ability to get to the heart of an organisation and its
people, and find insight and value where others simply cannot. Never
short on intellect or wit, Darren inspires and energises the people around
him and this book embodies that spirit.
Adam Griffith, CEO, Get Started

Proudly printed and sponsored by Gunn & Taylor Printers, Melbourne

I founded Taylor & Grace in 2006 because I believed brand is

existentially important to all organisations. We offer a full suite of
services, from brand research, strategy and design to marketing
collateral and communications, for family-run businesses
here in Melbourne to international companies in Silicon
Valley and Shanghai. From our insightful team to our world-class
partners and advisors, we give our clients the expert, collaborative
attention they deserve.

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