Brand Manners
Brand Manners
Reviewed by G.A. “Andy” Marken, Marken Communications Inc., andy@markencom.com
With corporate public relations and communications budgets under increasing scrutiny, management is asking what the budgets are doing to drive sales. Whether we’re in tough times – which we are – or good times – which we will be – how you answer the question determines whether you’re part of the problem or part of the solution.
Of the more than two dozen new books that have emerged over the past six months on branding, Pringle’s and Gordon’s Brand Manners is one of the few we’ve added to our library because it covers all the bases.
Why must public relations play an increasingly important role in branding? Back in the mass-marketing era the goal of communications – advertising and public relations – was to build an image. Today we have rapidly evolved to a mass-customization and one-to-one relationship age. In this new environment the company’s reputation becomes the brand and no communications tool available can project and explain this brand reputation more efficiently or more effectively than public relations.
This is because today a brand is more than a logo. It’s more than a name. It’s more than an ad or ad campaign. Instead, good branding public relations efforts can build stronger relationships with the company’s many audiences. As management becomes more communications savvy they realize that they can’t build a brand by the sheer force of advertising but they can build it through PR efforts and third-party endorsements. Or as Al Ries, chairman of Ries & Ries Inc. (an Atlanta-based branding consultancy) noted, “PR people build brands and advertising people follow-up and capitalize on the brand.”
It logically follows that if branding is becoming an increasingly important part of your strategic and tactical work; original business literature like Brand Manners will become valuable guidebooks for you.
The authors point out that customers closely examine the four dimensions of a brand – rational, emotional, political and spiritual – to evaluate how a brand’s promise is created, conveyed and kept. To help you understand the dimensions, Pringle and Gordon include a healthy dose of case studies and practitioner briefs.
We found the book to be both enlightening and inspiring. We came away with a number of excellent ideas on how to help clients reinvent and bring their corporate “brand” alive and relevant to the consumer. In our increasingly depersonalized world, the organization's brand can be an effective means of bonding employees, strategic partners and customers to the company.
Unlike HP’s and Compaq’s CEOs that talked in antiseptic terms when discussing how they would save $2.5 billion by elimination 15,000+ employees, brand conscious management and PR people understand that they aren’t dealing with lemming-like employees who will run along sublimely happy until the ground disappears under their feet.
Unlike other branding books you may have read, Brand Manners doesn’t treat brand as a subset of marketing or product positioning. Instead, it takes a wider view where brand and culture/identity meet. It is at this intersection that public relations can make its greatest contribution to the organization’s long term success and relationship with the customer.
If you’re interested in many of the best-practice essentials will help you keep your brand contemporary, relevant and ahead of the pack.
#######
Brand Manners - To learn more about this author, visit Andy Marken's Website.
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Brand Manners: How to Create the Self Confident Organization to Live the Brand By Harris Pringle, William Gordon, John Wiley & Sons, NY, 300 pages, March, 2001.
Reviewed by G.A. “Andy” Marken, Marken Communications Inc., andy@markencom.com
With corporate public relations and communications budgets under increasing scrutiny, management is asking what the budgets are doing to drive sales. Whether we’re in tough times – which we are – or good times – which we will be – how you answer the question determines whether you’re part of the problem or part of the solution.
Of the more than two dozen new books that have emerged over the past six months on branding, Pringle’s and Gordon’s Brand Manners is one of the few we’ve added to our library because it covers all the bases.
Why must public relations play an increasingly important role in branding? Back in the mass-marketing era the goal of communications – advertising and public relations – was to build an image. Today we have rapidly evolved to a mass-customization and one-to-one relationship age. In this new environment the company’s reputation becomes the brand and no communications tool available can project and explain this brand reputation more efficiently or more effectively than public relations.
This is because today a brand is more than a logo. It’s more than a name. It’s more than an ad or ad campaign. Instead, good branding public relations efforts can build stronger relationships with the company’s many audiences. As management becomes more communications savvy they realize that they can’t build a brand by the sheer force of advertising but they can build it through PR efforts and third-party endorsements. Or as Al Ries, chairman of Ries & Ries Inc. (an Atlanta-based branding consultancy) noted, “PR people build brands and advertising people follow-up and capitalize on the brand.”
It logically follows that if branding is becoming an increasingly important part of your strategic and tactical work; original business literature like Brand Manners will become valuable guidebooks for you.
The authors point out that customers closely examine the four dimensions of a brand – rational, emotional, political and spiritual – to evaluate how a brand’s promise is created, conveyed and kept. To help you understand the dimensions, Pringle and Gordon include a healthy dose of case studies and practitioner briefs.
We found the book to be both enlightening and inspiring. We came away with a number of excellent ideas on how to help clients reinvent and bring their corporate “brand” alive and relevant to the consumer. In our increasingly depersonalized world, the organization's brand can be an effective means of bonding employees, strategic partners and customers to the company.
Unlike HP’s and Compaq’s CEOs that talked in antiseptic terms when discussing how they would save $2.5 billion by elimination 15,000+ employees, brand conscious management and PR people understand that they aren’t dealing with lemming-like employees who will run along sublimely happy until the ground disappears under their feet.
Unlike other branding books you may have read, Brand Manners doesn’t treat brand as a subset of marketing or product positioning. Instead, it takes a wider view where brand and culture/identity meet. It is at this intersection that public relations can make its greatest contribution to the organization’s long term success and relationship with the customer.
If you’re interested in many of the best-practice essentials will help you keep your brand contemporary, relevant and ahead of the pack.
#######
Brand Manners - To learn more about this author, visit Andy Marken's Website.
Like this article? Share it with your friends
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Kim CastleWith nearly two decades in the advertising and design business, with clients like Domino's Pizza, General Motors, Direct TV, Pedigree, Wolfgang Puck, Higher Octave Music, Hollywood Celebrity Products, Disney, and Paramount, as well as thousands of entrepreneurs around the world define, structure, communicate, and position their business for greater profits, BrandU(R) co-creators Kim Castle and W. Vito Montone discovered that entrepreneurs could experience the same power that big brands command for a fraction of the cost with the world's only process-based results-drive Integral approach to business creation. BrandU(R) is helping entrepreneurs grow with the power of extreme clarity from idea...to brand...to market(TM) and helping one million entrepreneurs become successful and whole so that they can make a difference in the world. Are you one of them? If you want to experience clarity all the way to the bank(TM), get started now at http://www.brandu.com. - Visit Kim Castle's Website |
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