The 5 principles of a healthy brand

Healthy brands are brands that are high performing. I’ll share five principles that I’ve seen that when followed, drives performance amidst external forces.

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The purpose of a brand is to achieve the highest perceived value possible and a healthy brand is able to sustain this kind of performance amidst external forces. In this blog post, I’ll share the five principles of healthy brands, after helping build brands in healthcare for almost a decade.

A healthy brand may or may not be in the health & wellbeing industry, but the health & wellbeing of a brand is key to be continuously high performing.

Principle 1: Stability

Everything begins with a strong foundation of the brand. From positioning to personality and purpose, the core of the brand needs to be an unwavering north star so decisions can be made consistently in service of building brand equity. The market and the competition is going to fluctuate and change, but without a stable core, your brand is going to go where the wind blows–average, bland, uninspiring… Consider iconic brands you know (the Nikes of the world), they are unwavering, and because they lean into a human truth, they are timeless.

Principle 2: Congruency

Brands are like people. If you are incongruent where your actions don’t match your desires, you feel uneasy, your gut tells you something is off, you are unhappy. Brands are the same way. If its actions don’t match its promise, if its expression doesn’t match its personality, your audience and your customers can sniff it out immediately. Congruency is also where a brands memorability and power comes from. Patagonia is congruent–from its backstory to how it communicates, to its CSR programs, it seeks to match its outside with its inside as much as possible, as often as it can.

Principle 3: Tenacity

For a brand to be healthy, it needs to be comfortable with being uncomfortable. Why? Because standing apart from the competition means you need to zag when others zig. It’s uncomfortable to stand out from the crowd. And if god forbid you need to do something different in order to stay relevant with the prevailing culture, that’s really painful. But no brands can be loved if it doesn’t do something true to their purpose even if it’s uncomfortable, even if it means sticking to your guns. When CVS renamed to CVS Health in 2014, they pulled tobacco products from their shelves, the investor and business community called it suicide, immediately losing billions of dollars in revenue. It was uncomfortable, but guess what? It was on brand and it delivered real impact.

Image from: https://causemarketing.com/case-study/cvs-health-last-pack-case-study/

Principle 4: Adaptability

In order for the brand to stay relevant, it needs to be constantly listening and adapting. The why remains constant, but the how can change. When a brand is so full of itself, drinking its own “Kool-aid” and blaming its customers for not doing what they are “supposed to do”, it’s in trouble, the ego of the brand is taking over. Much like people, when ego drives decisions, disaster awaits. Brands like Toys’R’Us, Blackberry, Kodak… the list goes on where the lack of adaptability dooms the brand. When you are not willing to change with your customers, you will be left behind. It’s that simple.

Principle 5: Grow-ability

Ok, I made this word up, but it doesn’t mean it’s any less important! A healthy brand is constantly seeking improvement, serving more people and serving them better. Tony Robbins says it best “If you are not growing, you are dying” and this applies to brands so well. Even if a brand seeks to maintain its brand equity, it has to grow, because nothing around it stays the same.

Conclusion

By putting together the right people and leaders, the right processes and governance, the right technologies and competencies, these five principles can be used to build a healthy brand that will drive peak performance even in the worst of times.

Ways I can help you

Download free guides (Healthy Brand Blueprint & Branding 101) to help you build healthy brands
Work with me as a fractional CMO/CBO or through Healthy Brand Consulting (Schedule a 15 min intro call)

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Why branding fails

You try and try and try to build a brand that’s loved, but sometimes branding does fail, and here are the top 10 reasons why.

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A brand is the feeling and perception somebody has about your product, your company, and your service. Branding is an intentional and consistent process of imprinting your brand story into the marketplace. And it's using every single touch point, but branding cannot solve everything. Sometimes branding does fail, and here are the top 10 reasons why.

Full transcript:

#10: NO BRANDING INSIGHTS

Your branding fails because there is no substantial insight to stand on. If you do not understand the audience you're trying to serve, and there's no core insight to make the decisions that you need to make, I can't help you.

#9: SALES, MARKETING AND COMMS ARE MISALIGNED

When these important channels of your company are frankly not connected and going in all different directions. It is very difficult to have the audience come back with one message. It is very tough for you to push a message through that helps everybody understand what you're trying to be known for. So fix the organization, make sure they're all aligned. Processes matter, people matter, organization matters.

#8: BRAND ONLY SEEN AS A LOGO, FONT, OR COLOR

Now, when brand is diminished to that level where it's only just about design, you really take away the potential and the ability of the company, product or service to be loved because brand strategy is the face of business strategy. So when it's pushed down to that level of just design, you're taking away its ability to be steering the company at that highest level.

#7: HR IS NOT SEEN AS A STRATEGIC PART OF THE ORGANIZATION

A large part of your brand strategy is getting your employees to be brand ambassador. They're the first group of people that really needs to love your brand. If they don't love your brand, how are your customers gonna love your brand? And so HR is such a strong component of the branding process and the branding activities, because they're the ones that help attract the best, retain the best, but also, enact your brand strategy internally, so you can turn everyone into a true brand ambassador.

#6: ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE IS NOT ALIGNED WITH CUSTOMERS

This is a huge issue where you're trying to have a persona and personality towards your customers that is absolutely different from what your culture is in the company. That disconnect and that gap can cause your brand to fail. Think about this. If you are a very highly technical scientific company and that's the culture, but you're really trying to help moms or help caregivers care for their children, or you're entering a pediatric space. That disconnect is something that can be very hard to overcome.

#5: FOCUSED ON TACTICS, NOT STRATEGY

Now we all know that we have to execute the strategy, but if all of the focus is on creating tactics, that's really just throwing spaghetti on the wall. When you don't have an insight, when you don't have a strategy, and you're not spending time to decide what you're going to do and what you're not gonna do, it's wasting resources and it's creating spin. That can be a reason why branding can fail

#4: SHORT TERM OVER LONG TERM

Now, if everything that you're trying to do is short term, and you're looking at metrics at the short term, it can cause your branding efforts to fail. It can sabotage it because branding takes a long time. Creating that perception, owning that position in the consumer's mind or in the audience's mind takes time, give it time to win, give it time to be successful.

#3: ROI IS EVERYTHING

When every activity is measured based on the revenue it's supposed to bring in, you're really limiting the channels. You're really limiting that to a marketing function because everything else is trying to improve the reputation, trying to inject that feeling into the marketplace. And frankly it takes the air out of all your branding efforts–knowing that brand is a feeling, and branding is not a rational process.

#2: CEO DOESN’T UNDERSTAND OR CARE ABOUT BRAND

We can help make your brand matter, but if the top of the organization doesn't believe in building brands, it is an absolute uphill battle. Branding requires alignment. Branding requires leadership and branding requires bold moves. If leadership is not all in about zigging while everybody's zagging, taking this strategic directions that can take your brand to a different level to really make it loved. It's difficult.

#1: THE PRODUCT OR SERVICE SUCKS

It's hard to hear, but no matter how good your brand efforts are, no matter how good you're aligning all your channels, you're telling that one story, it, you can't deliver the value. If you can't have people fall in love with using the product, the service, all hope is lost. Your branding will fail.

Now that you understand what the top 10 reasons why branding can fail, you can put a plan together, address them, address them so you can really build the brand that is loved and truly capture the hearts and minds of your audiences.