Want to be your own brand? Too late. [Archive]

October 30, 2006 | Tate Linden

Ever hear of personal branding? We’ve spoken a little bit about it here, but at nowhere near the depth that it is covered in this week’s Time Magazine.

I’ve held the belief that everyone has a brand and can’t avoid sharing it with the world. Think you don’t?

Ask yourself a few of these questions:

1. Do you have kids?
2. Are you energetic?
3. Do you eat everything on your plate?
4. Did you study in school?
5. Do you have an iPod?
6. Do you dress comfortably when traveling?
7. Are you the life of the party?
8. Do you like playing videogames?
9. Do you have a blog?
10. Do you own a pet?

Did you answer any of them?

If you answered “yes” to any of the questions you’ve branded yourself. If you answered “no” to any of the questions you’ve also branded yourself. Heck… if you saw the list and thought “I don’t have time for this” or “this is stupid” or “I want to see where he’s going with this before I answer anything” then… yes… you’ve branded yourself.

Oh, and for you wiseacres that think by shutting yourself in a room and never talking to anyone you’ll avoid branding yourself… Hope that you enjoy being branded as a recluse.

You see, anything about you that you communicate to other people becomes part of your brand. Even if you don’t say a word or move a muscle you can still establish your brand solidly. As soon as you walk into a crowded room you are immediately checked for your brand by everyone that sees you. They see if you’re stylish, confident, good looking, healthy, happy, and just about anything else that you might be showing. They’re even potentially filing away bits of data about you like, “You’re that guy who wore stripes and paisleys together” or “the woman that fell into the cocktail sauce.”

Why are people looking for shorthand? Because we can’t handle the complexity presented by human beings. We need a mental shorthand to help with recall. (Suddenly all those high-school nicknames like “Shorty”, “Freckles”, and “Pig Pen” begin to make sense…) We find one or two things that are distinctive about a person and we use them as the tabs on our mental folders so we can always find who we’re looking for.

So - even before you spend a dime you probably already have a brand. It may not be good, but it is certainly there.

The idea presented by Time (that companies can help you with your personal brand) is pretty interesting to me. People often see themselves as so multi-faceted that they couldn’t possibly simplify themselves down to the one or two things that will lead them to success in life. In job interviews we often throw dozens of great things about ourselves at the interviewer - hoping that at least a couple of ‘em hit the right spot and get us hired. So we say we’re confident, we’re organized, our only flaw is that we don’t know when to call it a day, we get along well with everyone, we’re a natural leader who knows how to be a team member, we’re looking for a job that helps us grow but we have all the skills we need to do it perfectly today.

Not only do most of us not say anything that will help to create a compelling shorthand in an interviewer’s mind, we often contradict ourselves in the hopes that one of the two things we say will match with what the hiring manager is looking for.

So - the idea than an industry would spring up to help people land jobs, write personals, and basically be ourselves(only in higher concentrations) actually seems useful. It helps us carve out mental space in the minds of the people we interact with. If you carve out the right mental space with the right person you can end up with your dream job, the perfect spouse, or the best friend you’ve always wanted. Isn’t that worth a couple thousand dollar investment?

But there are downsides. Once you’ve branded yourself to get that dream job you must find ways to live within that brand. If you’ve misstated yourself at all it can come back to bite you. Did you say that you were “detail oriented” when you should have said “aware that there are details?” When your copy isn’t flawless it isn’t going to go over well with the boss.

Even if you nail your brand perfectly it may lock you into a role that doesn’t allow you to grow in ways that you want to. Branding is usually about finding the compelling differences between you and everyone else - and the desire to do a little bit of everything doesn’t help you stand out. Everyone says (or thinks) it - and most also say they’re interested in personal growth. Once you pin your brand to your chest you’re going to have to live with (and as) it for a while. Are you comfortable with that? Does your life-history tell the same story?

Remember in today’s world we now leave a trail of bits and bytes behind us and Google is there to sweep them into little organized bins. In looking for my name you’ll find hundreds of hits, including articles I’ve written, my own blog posts, memberships in online forums, and even stuff that other bloggers and thought leaders have said about me. If I were to suddenly decide that I wanted to spend the rest of my life as an accountant I might find that my online identity would prevent any reputable accounting firm from hiring me. Anyone with knowledge of computers and the Internet would know in an instant that I had no experience. (You can read numerous stories about bad stuff happening and being found online if you look for ‘em. You can’t outrun your online identity.)

Is personal branding worth it? Actually I think it is - if you aren’t doing as well in life as you think you could be. If you’re happy then why bother? Same goes for big business - if you’re happy with where you are (and where you’re going) then why would you ever invest money in changing that?

(This is actually a pretty big problem for companies that are about to encounter bad times - they don’t see that they need to change and are caught flatfooted when times change and being the best record-player manufacturer goes from being something to boast about to something worthy of shame.)

Here’s the real key, though. Investing in your brand won’t do a darn thing for you if you don’t know who you are or what you genuinely want to do with your life. If you don’t know what direction you want to go then chances are good that improving your directionless brand will improve your chances of landing a job (or mate) that you probably don’t want or can’t support for the long term.

How do you figure out who you are and where you want to go? You could hire an expert. Or if you’re saving your money you could just take a look at your own life. Just by walking around your house you can learn a lot. Are all your cosmetics lined up on the counter? Do you move your furniture when you vacuum? Do you have a piano? Do you use it? How many dirty dishes are in your sink? Do you have art on the walls? Is it original or reproduction? Each one of these questions points to something that you are or believe in. Even seeing where you put your money (electronics, politics, baby-food, your church) could help you figure out who you are.

It’s what you do with the things that matter to you that probably define you best of all. So - you’ve got time, money, and effort. Where have you been investing them? Once you figure that out then you may be in a better position to develop a brand that can support your real goals.

In closing this exceedingly long ramble, you should consider how effective companies have been in trying to rebrand themselves as something that they are not.

  •  

NWSDLA [Archive]

September 4, 2007 | Tate Linden

Why do we not like them? Because except in rare instances they’re forgettable, confusing, costly, and time intensive. …among other things, of course.

Forgettable because most acronyms (and initialisms) have no connection to the idea behind the letters.

Confusing because if someone wants to get to know the organization or product behind the letters they’ve got to learn two different names - the abbreviated one and the long, drawn-out one. Additionally, the pronunciation of an acronym or an initialism is often not intuitive.

Consider:

• ICQ = “I Seek You” (instead of “Ick!”)
• IEEE = “I triple E”
• IALA = “Eye Allah”
• LED = “Ell Eee Dee”
• IUPAC = “Eye You Pack”
• SQL = “Ess Cue Ell” or “Sequel”
• FNMA = “Fannie Mae”

Each of these examples follows a different rule for pronunciation. And this list covers less than half of the potential pronunciation issues. It seems to me that taking the extra effort to say your name, then spell your name, then explain that the letter sounds are actually letter sounds and not full words (as in “ICQ”) is more trouble than it is worth. Which leads me to…

Costliness… Supporting two unique identities - the short and long version - takes money. It appears in the use of different names for internal and external documentation, or in different logo presentations, or in linear inches when writing job descriptions for publication in the paper, or - relating to the last issue listed - in time spent explaining what the acronym means.

Time is a significant disincentive for the use of acronyms. If the goal is to do something productive with the hours in your day and your staff is forced to expalin the acronym every time they say it to someone new… aren’t you losing a bit of money every time conversation is side-tracked? Yes, you could argue that the additional conversation is about your company so it’s “all good” but wouldn’t you rather have a conversation better targeted to what you want from the person you’re talking to? If it takes 15 seconds to clarify your name each time you say it and you say your name to ten new people a day… that’s 2.5 minutes a day or 12.5 minutes per week per staff member. Almost an hour a month of lost time multiplied across your entire sales staff.

It seems to me that it is better to have the listener ask a question about what you can do for them or the value of your offerings intead of asking the most basic question (i.e. “Umm… what’s that mean?”) Acronyms have a way of making people feel stupid - they’re the professional version of “AMonkeySaysWhat?” - forcing us to stop the speaker to clarify an issue that the speaker should’ve addressed or let the speaker go on as we focus on the fact that we have no clue what was just said. There’s an old military prank that guys pull on new recruits - commenting that the hardest part of the job is cleaning up after all of the spent B-1RD (pronounced “Bee One Arr Dee”) fuel in the hangar. It’s a rare recruit that figures it out in the first couple days.

Want a few more reasons?

How about these:

1. We did fine for centuries without even having a word to describe what an acronym was. It wasn’t until the 1940s (shortly after The New Deal) that the mess of long-winded government programs likely forced us to come up with a way to describe the alphabet soup. Do you really want to be associated with annonymous government programs?
2. Typically you can’t trademark your acronym by itself. And you can’t prevent others from using the same one that you do. There aren’t enough letters in our alphabet to allow every company and association to get their own short acronym reserved all for themselves. So…
3. You end up sharing your acronym with hundreds our thousands of other entities and no one can ever find you.

Think the big guys are immune? Think again. ABC - an acronym “owned” by the American Broadcasting Company - seems to have a bit of trouble keeping others off of their letters. On the first page of an ABC Google search we find:

• ” yet Another Bittorent Client”
• Australia’s public broadcasting network
• The national trade association representing merit shop contractors
• The audit bureau of circulations
• …and references to three different branches of the American Broadcasting Company.

If we’re generous and we allow a contextualizing term like “towing” to be added to ABC we should be able to find our local tow shop, right?

Nope.

Unless you’re fortunate enough to be in Hammond, Indiana. Those guys are easy to find. Most of the other 1.8 million “ABC Towing” hits are for other companies in other cities and states - and are entirely unrelated to the guys in Hammond.

Acronyms, plainly stated, are perhaps the fastest way to become permanently anonymous in business.

That said, there are exceptions. One quick look at FCUK and you’ll see there are ways to get attention. But (thankfully?) there can really be only one FCUK. However, I know without even looking that even this name has been copied. I’ll give ten to one odds that FUKC and FCKU are both being marketed as copycat brands… (But that is a rant for another day.)

  •  

A Few Words On Coolness [Archive]

July 27, 2006 | Tate Linden

“Give us something cool.”

This is a mantra we hear from almost all of our clients. They want cool names. They want to be hip. They want to be the “it” company - as shown by their sexy/funky/cool name.

Here’s the problem - coolness doesn’t age well.

Things that used to be cool include:

• Michael Jackson
• Hula Hoops
• Smoking
• Pet Rocks
• Tickle-Me Elmo
• Cabbage Patch Kids
• Britney Spears
• Reality TV
• Fondue Parties
• Black & White TV
• Talkies
• The Brat Pack
• Plaid
• Paisley

While I am not prepared to define coolness for you, I can at least inform you of one of its qualities… Coolness is fickle. As soon as enough people think that something is cool it instantly becomes uncool. Do all your friends think that owning a Chihuahua is the height of coolness? Too late! Chihuahuas are yesterday. Is everyone at your school wearing all black? Wrong! Now it’s time for pastels.

Coolness moves on.

Trying to give your company a name that defines coolness is a lot like wearing a nametag that says “Hi, I’m Tate - I was born in the 70s.” Cool names tend to date themselves.

A few naming trends that were cool but aren’t anymore:

• Long Descriptive Names: “International Business Machines”
• E- or I- names: “e-business”
• Dotcom names: “Amazon.com”
• Unpronounceable Names: “Mxlpltz”
• Jarring Names: “FatBrain”

In my view, you can make just about any name cool if you have the brand strategy to make your own brand cool. Thus far Google has kept its company and name cool by staying on the edge of technology. Google itself actually sounds kind of uncool. Sort of like a kid with big eyes… but we think of it as cool because of the associations. Google (the company) works hard to keep moving forward so that the cool doesn’t get stale.

Keeping coolness around is a lot of work. Make sure that you are ready for it before you commit to the genre. When a cool name fails it often brings the company along with it.

  •  

The 400 Flavors of Eskimo Snow [Archive]

March 7, 2007 | Tate Linden

You’ve all heard about this, right? Eskimos (okay, actually the Inuit) are so intimately familiar with snow that they have up to 400 different words to describe it. 

Right.

Having talked to parents of infant twins and to those that have had little tykes in the house for over ten years I think I can safely call this one a myth. They’ve seen more different kinds of poop than most Inuit see different kinds of snow in a lifetime and yet they’re able to classify it with at most a couple dozen terms - including the profane ones. (This is not, mind you, a challenge for you to list all the four letter words that you can think of.) 

Dave Mendosa has a short piece about this on his website and he covers how the myth got started - when an explorer visited the area and claimed that the tribe had four names for snow. 

Four?

Stephen Pinker - a prominent linguist - suggests that today the Inuit have only a dozen words for snow, and that is if you count generously. And here you can find a list of snow morphemes (note that there aren’t many more in Inuit than there are in English.)

Most on the Internet seem to conclude this is a case of gradual exaggeration - each person repeating the story adds a percentage or two as they retell it. 

So why am I (as a Thingnamer) bringing up this linguistic fallacy? Because in a few ways it parallels issues we face in naming things. But I’ve only got time to address one today, so here it goes…

Let’s address the possibility that we could build 400 words meaning essentially the same thing. Oddly this doesn’t get my hackles raised. When we develop new names for products or companies we may consider thousands of potential names on our team before weeding them down to a select group to pass on to the client. In effect, before we deliver our prime candidates we live through the hell of trying to identify the same individual thing with a virtual Babel of morphemes and other lexical bits. 

How do I know that there can’t be 400 terms for “snow?” Because early on in my Thingnaming life I used to deliver all of the naming candidates to the client to sift through. They’d be given hundreds or thousands of candidates to consider instead of dozens. 

Know what happened? Almost nothing. With so many options to choose from my clients were unable to even begin to evaluate the terms for fit. They were overwhelmed. When trying to compare one candidate to the mass of others there was too much to evaluate. Discussion was perpetually focused on how the client could possibly know if a name were better than every other candidate - even when we tried to narrow things down to an either-or decision.

I think this parallels what would happen in real life. Imagine if you had to go through this process just to describe what was falling from the sky. Was it snow54 that was falling around you, or perhaps snow323? Does snow313’s aspect of supreme fluffiness better fit the situation than does snow299’s reference to the slowness with which it falls? 

A quick side note: My personal feeling is that inventing so many words for snow is impractical if we can take existing terms (adjectives, mostly) and connect them with the core term. Consider “driven snow,” “wet snow,” and “dense snow.” If we make every single possible quality of snow into its own unique term then we lose the ability to compare the particular quality of that snow to other items without relying on metaphor. 

Second side note: There are some things that have 400 different words to describe them, but they’re not used in conversation by laypeople. Consider the color green - when you look through paint chips you’ll find hundreds of different words to describe slight variations in the presentation of color. Is it “Pinesage” or “Forest Growth?” The names, however, aren’t meant to be used in every day life. They’re mostly just to give people a way to refer to the color while holding it in their hand and comparing it to another color. It’s just easier to understand than “this green” or “that green.” (Yes, I know that the greens in question are actually different greens - but I’d assume that this argument holds for snow as well - the hypothetical different words for snow are pointing out that the snow itself is not the same in each case.)

I guess that technically speaking those previous two paragraphs weren’t side notes since they were actually at the end of my meandering post. Perhaps we can come up with 399 terms that better fit their true purpose?

  •  

No, *I* Am The Greatest [Archive]

June 9, 2006 | Tate Linden

Like Beer? Looking for the best beer? Good news! There are apparently many companies making exactly the product that you’re looking for!

Here’s what they say about themselves:

• The King of Beers
• Lager Beer at its Best
• The Beer so Good it’s Bad
• The Champagne of Bottled Beers
• It Doesn’t Get Any Better than This
• Taste as great as it’s name
• Probably the best beer in the world
• The One and Only
• Reach for Greatness
• Spot the Difference
• Miles from Ordinary
• It’s a bit gorgeous
• Spot On
• America’s World Class Beer

Notice a trend? If you want good, great, world class, different, or beautiful beer then we’ve got you covered. 

Let’s do a quick reversal on the taglines to see if any of them speak to a specialty rather than an empty boast.

• The Pawn of Beers / The Queen of Beers
• Lager Beer at its Worst
• The Beer so Bad it’s Good
• The Thunderbird of Bottled Beers
• It Doesn’t Get Any Worse than This
• Taste as bad as it’s name
• Probably the Worst beer in the world
• The Entirely Average
• Reach for Mediocrity
• Spot the Sameness
• Miles from Different
• It’s a bit ugly
• Misses the Mark
• America’s Unremarkable Beer

I’m not seeing anything here that would still appeal to me - meaning that the original taglines are probably viewed as empty boasts.

There are many many many more beer taglines out there - I’ve just chosen a few that focus on quality to prove a point. If you focus on quality in your tagline you’re going to have a very hard time standing out from the competition. Budweiser found a unique way to show quality by associating itself with royalty. They own “King” the way Volvo owns the idea of safe cars. People may try to copy the strategy, but they’ll inevitably get knocked back to some other message.

Here’s the list of brand names and taglines combined - How many did you get right?

• The King of Beers - Budweiser
• Lager Beer at its Best - Heineken
• The Beer so Good it’s Bad - Bad Frog
• The Champagne of Bottled Beers - Miller
• It Doesn’t Get Any Better than This - Old Milwaukee
• Taste as great as it’s name - Old Milwaukee
• Probably the best beer in the world - Carlsberg
• The One and Only - Newcastle Brown
• Reach for Greatness - Bass
• Spot the Difference - Sagres (Portugal)
• Miles from Ordinary - Corona (Mexico)
• It’s a bit gorgeous - Boddingtons
• Spot On - Carling
• America’s World Class Beer - Samuel Adams

I can proudly claim Bud, Miller, and almost Old Milwaukee (I thought it was Milwaukee’s Best.) Note that Bud and Miller at least tried to claim quality in a way that wasn’t ordinary - establishing rank or associating it with another product. Most of the rest make the empty and completely subjective claim of greatness without giving you any real identity to latch on to.

Today’s lesson in a nutshell: If you’re not Tony the Tiger or the the fighter Ali, then discussing the greatness of your product is likely to get you nowhere. Find a new way to show why you’re worth a try.

  •  

Who Is Your Brand Ambassador? [Archive]

August 4, 2006 | Tate Linden

Ever wonder who really sets up your brand for success or failure? Most folks think it is the CEO, or perhaps the spokesperson for your brand. 

My opinion? Neither.

Your brand ambassador is the first person to answer the phone when someone wants to make a reservation or purchase. Your brand ambassador says “thanks for visiting” when you walk in the door or maybe even offers to help you…

All this money is spent on finding the right messaging - and then we rarely tell our front line people what the message is. If customers are drawn into a store by the promise of a particular experience and that experience isn’t taught to the staff it’ll likely end badly. 

I had this lesson reaffirmed yesterday at a client site. Everyone from the valet to the president knew what the existing brand was - and they enthusiastically reinforced it with every word. It’s refreshing and incredibly pleasing to see in action. 

“So that is why people come here” ran through my head about a dozen times.

Good team and good times. Looking forward to continuing work on their new project.

  •  

Uusing Doouble Voowels Too Maake Aa Poiint OR STOP THIS CRAZY THING!  [Archive]

September 25, 2006 | Tate Linden

How much power is there in the letter patterns you use to make your company or product name?

We believe that there’s a huge amount - but the problem is that as soon as a pattern is established in the marketplace the power quickly turns to the dark side. (Remember when everything ended in “.com?” Other than Amazon.com - The first major company to name itself thusly - how many of those guys are still around?)

Nancy Friedman over at Away With Words got us thinking about this one today. In her post about Web 2.0 Naming she points out that “The names of most Web 2.0 companies are derivative, poorly constructed, and just plain silly”

Thank you Nancy. We agree.

Specifically she blows the whistle on “oo”, “ee”, baby-talk, and name truncation.

What’s interesting to us is that folks like Seth Godin (a pretty smart guy in our opinion) are so much in favor of the types of names that Nancy - and Stokefire - oppose. Seth’s post about how he named Squidoo is quite illuminating. Note his use of the double-o.

In the post Seth talks of how Squidoo came to be and why he likes the name so much. He also points to Flickras an example of a good name.

Seth - a much read author and trend setter - may have done more to affect the process of naming-by-amateur than anyone since Bezos. Note that Seth’s article was written in 2005. Since that time Web 2.0 has flourished (or at least the idea of it has) and companies have done their best to look an awful lot like the pioneers of the concept.

We imagine the average company-namer thought something along these lines:

1. Seth thinks Squidoo and Flickr are cool?
2. …then using double vowels and truncating words must be the key to a good name!

What these namers missed was that it was the fact that the names were unique that made them good. People put a jumble of letters together and then check Google to be sure that there aren’t many hits (as suggested by Seth) and PRESTO! New Web 2.0 Compatibr Name! It is a template approach that leads to copy-cat names that are hard to tell apart.

Pop-Quiz time! Can you tell us what naming convention led to the creation of Frappr, Preloadr, Blogr, Weekendr, and Resizr.

We think your flickering imagination can answer that pretty easily.

We agree that Flickr and Squidoo are indeed cool - especially when you consider that they were on the leading edge of the naming trend. But we sincerely hope that Seth doesn’t think that the slew of e-less names (or double letter, or child-speak - each a derivation of a pattern he advocated) is helping anyone.

Seth - if you’re listening/reading… A follow-up to your original post about the new rules of naming would be helpful. We think that people are focusing on the wrong part of the lesson. Your readers are copying the form and not the intent of your words. It’s time for you to start taking some vowels from the double-letterers and give ‘em to the truncatrs.

As the probable father of Web 2.0 naming we feel it only appropriate that you be the one to end it. Faair is Fr.

  •  

My Social Media Prediction/Rant [Archive]

December 17, 2008 | Tate Linden

Here it is: Unless the signal-to-noise ratio improves dramatically (and soon) this period in marketing will be mocked for its complete lack of focus and ability to get any lasting results.

Of course, my only real experience thus far has been with blogging and Twitter. I do believe that Twitter is incredibly powerful, but to my thinking it seems to follow the same logic that does The Joker in the latest Batman film.  

The Joker: [to Dent/Two-Face] Do I really look like a guy with a plan? You know what I am? I’m a dog chasing cars. I wouldn’t know what to do with one if I caught it. You know, I just… do things. The mob has plans, the cops have plans, Gordon’s got plans. You know, they’re schemers. Schemers trying to control their little worlds. I’m not a schemer. I try to show the schemers how, pathetic, their attempts to control things really are.

Twitter has no plan when it comes to our brands.  There’s no guarantee how anything you present there will turn out.  It’s just a bunch of people doing things - like dogs chasing cars.  To be fair, it’s hugely powerful, but whose to say that any brand that attempts to capitalize on the dogs here won’t be bitten to death?  

I’m all for letting the brand message develop in the hands of the populace, but the Twitterverse isn’t the populace.  It’s people distilled into indistinguishable bits.  (Just check the last few brand-based Tweets you’ve received.  Take away the link, name, and photo - can you tell who sent them?)

And to close the loop on the quote above… Is the Joker powerful?  Absolutely!  But I wouldn’t trust him to develop my brand. (Unless my brand *was* social media - in which case it might make perfect sense to pay him big bucks.)

Just to show there’s no hard feelings, though…  You can follow me @Thingnamer. 

Addendum (after a good night’s sleep and a few confused responses via email):
I’m not suggesting that Twitter isn’t useful - I’m suggesting that Twitter can’t be responsible for building your brand for you.  If you take the time to develop your brand independently and then use Twitter as a channel with which to communicate that message it might work - we’ve seen Ford, Comcast, and Zappos do pretty well with this.  But note that all of them invested heavily in their brands before they ever attempted anything via social media.  

So I’m not comparing Twitter to other channels, I’m comparing it to other ways you can develop your brand.  I’m, of course, partial to hiring a pro to develop it and then choosing the channels for distribution.  I’m seeing a lot of people who are bypassing the brand development altogether and just taking their raw message to the universe in 120 character blocks.  It results in stuff like “Please check out my website” and “I just posted an awesome blog - go read it!” and “Vote for me in the #shortyawards! Now!”

No brand.  No strategy.  Just dogs chasing cars.

Just because a media channel is free doesn’t mean that you don’t need to invest before you use it.  

It’s just dogs chasing cars…

  •  

Branding - Not just for first-timers [Archive]

November 2, 2006 | Tate Linden

Even though we spend most of our time working with mid- to large-sized companies, we also work with many startups and small businesses. We’ve been asked a few times about whether or not the big-boys have to go through the same issues as the startups. Our answer: Yes. They go through all the hoops the startups do, and then they add more to address the existing brand identity, changes in the marketplace, changes in corporate policiy, and more.

This leads to two additional lines of questioning. First, why would a company ever need to go through branding after the first time? And second, does this mean that mycompany is going to have to do this whole thing again?

First part - Companies are rebranding every day, and most of ‘em do it unintentionally. The ones that rebrand with intent are responding to changes in the market (like how KFC has over the last decades gone from a company that focused on Fried as a key part of their brand to one that never really mentions that their chicken is boiled in oil - until recently when they mentioned that it is boiled in oil, but that the oil is healthy.) So a change in the marketplace - like the public awareness of the unhealthiness of partially hydrogenated oils - can result in two rebrands, not just one. (The first was the name change, the second is the recent change in oils.) One wonders if a third rebrand will occur if they find a way to make fried food healthier than baked. 

Companies intentionally rebrand to keep their brands current. This doesn’t mean they reinvent themselves completely - they usually just steer their brand to ensure that they still own the position in the market that was intended. An edgy brand must continually redefine what “edgy” is if they wish to be seen as on that edge. If they don’t then they’ll soon be seen as boring, staid, or dated. (On second thought, this might not be a great example - since staying on the edge may be a part of the original brand. Better, perhaps, would be a reevaluation of the effectiveness of staying on the edge.)

Unintentional rebranding is usually not good, but happens more often than intentional rebranding. Small companies often do this after they go through their initial branding process. They establish themselves as one thing when they launch, but don’t stay on message. Rather than being the best at what they do they lose control of their brand and become whatever will help them make the sale in the near term. This results in companies that start as vintage clothing stores specializing in 1960s apparel becoming generic used clothing stores, and then adding in a section of brand new mass-market imitation vintage clothes, and then a section with just regular new clothes. Even though it wasn’t a formal process the end result is a new brand… but one that doesn’t serve any real purpose. For an example, look at what Amazon.com has gone through in the last decade. They went from being the undisputed answer to the question “Where do I buy books online?” to being one of thousands of places that expect you to search for anything you could ever need. Along the way they went through selling just books, to books and music, to books, music, and retail items, to books, music, retail items, and used stuff, to books, music, retail items, used stuff, and services, to… well… everything. I certainly hope this wasn’t an intentional rebranding - because if it was it wasn’t very well thought out. Even Wal*Mart doesn’t sell everything (you can’t get industrial computer consultants from the big W.) How can you create a brand that encompasses every other brand on the planet? I suppose Amazon.com will let us know when they get there.

Enough companies rebrand every year to support a competition on the matter. Check out Rebrand - an organization that rewards the top 100 rebranding efforts of the year. You will note that Amazon isn’t on their lists.

As for the second line of questioning: Is your company going to have to rebrand? If you wish to survive you must adapt. If you want to excel rather than just survive you need to anticipate adaptation. You need to be ready for it. So we suggest that you always keep your brand in mind and measure the effectiveness of your core identity. Every three to six months you should revisit your core to ensure that not only are you still living by the standard, you’re also following a standard that is still relevant. 

When should you consider a rebrand? When your existing brand no longer has the impact or relevancy that it did when it was successful. That could be six months after you launch your company (if you didn’t correctly identify market trends) or fifty years later. The key is to be aware of the effectiveness of your brand and to be prepared to revisit it before your brand has lost its goodwill in the marketplace.

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