Branded!

Citation

(2003), "Branded!", Measuring Business Excellence, Vol. 7 No. 4. https://doi.org/10.1108/mbe.2003.26707dab.005

Branded!

Branded!

John Peters

Who steals my purse steals trash;Tis something, nothing;Twas mine, tis his, and has been slave to thousands.But he that filches from me my good nameRobs me of that which not enriches himAnd makes me poor indeed

(Othello, 3:3, William Shakespeare).

"I never take account of any success we might have in my financial projections. The better the team does, the more merchandbehavior we sell. But the side could go for three to five years without winning anything and we would still sustain our business. Why? Because we've built a brand. I'm constantly amazed by the fact that nobody in football has woken up to just how important brand names are – they are the No. 1 asset in the business. Manchester United's logo is incredibly valuable. We have to protect it from being exploited."

(Edward Freedman, merchandising director of Manchester United Football Club, after a European Champions League game defeat).

If Shakespeare were hired to address a business conference today he might re-phrase Othello's famously agonized speech to say "He that filches from me my brand name…" For brands, as Manchester United's Edward Freedman reminds us, are not just for the folks in fast-moving consumer goods. They are an asset which defines who and what we are, in markets where technological differentiation can be aped and exceeded in a few days or weeks.

A brand is a signifier, a shorthand explanation of what we are and do, how we do business, and what benefits will accrue to a consumer. It is an instant, word/picture summary of what a skilled copywriter might be able to deliver in a page or two of text. And the funny thing is – we all have them. While Coke, Marlboro and Microsoft are big brands with universal messages, every organization, whether a commercial organization, a consultancy, a university or a government department, an individual micro-business practitioner – even an individual employee – works under a brand umbrella which says something to his or her customers and potential customers.

Whether those messages are favorable, unfavorable, mixed or consistent, is up to who? Well, it is up to you, and your colleagues. If you are Coca Cola you might work that through with $50 million a year and your advertising agency. If you are a university library, or a sole trader, or indeed just you, it is highly dependent on how you perform your service and make your product; how you talk to your customers, how you react when they talk to you, what you put out that is new, how happy you help make people feel when they interact with you, how much that interaction is a pleasing experience, how important you help to make people feel for recommending this great person, firm or service to their friends with the confidence that their friends will be happy too.

In the end, that is why Edward Freedman has got it right. Othello is manipulated and used by Iago, but his paranoia and low self-esteem allow him to be. It becomes "someone else's fault", that rather feeble retort of the weak-willed. The message from Manchester United, the world's most successful sports brand, and the statement that the loss of a crucial game or a barren season or two would not ruin the business because "we've built a brand", should be both heartening and frightening to everyone. It is heartening because in a highly volatile business arena, brands can transcend the "only as good as your last show" syndrome. It is heartening because any and all of us can do it too. It is frightening because building a brand involves taking personal responsibility for how others perceive you. There is no hiding place except for a kind of Bart Simpson reaction; "it wasn't my fault, I wasn't there, we were unlucky, it was someone else's fault".

So how about you stop right here and note down, honestly, what brand image you think you have. What does your name mean to those who deal with it? (be honest). What would you, realistically, like it to mean? Now, what can you do, realistically, to move that meaning from where it is to where it might be? How can you improve the consistency of the meaning? How can you improve the meaning itself?

These are questions, not answers, for the answers lie with us and our specific challenge, just like Othello, and just like Manchester United. But once you have started work on them, setting specification targets, managing conformance to specification targets, taking out some of the variability and unpredictability from the operation, modeling likely outputs and outcomes, and documenting system performance, outputs and outcomes to create data to send back through the cycle, you are moving towards quality assuring your brand name. And that, I think, is time well spent.

John Peters is Director of Academic Relations with Emerald, publishers of Quality Focus.