When a Change to Your Business Means ‘Brand’ Takes Centre Stage

Brand is all about influencing how people think, feel and behave. But there are plenty of businesses where brands simply don’t matter. And where money spent on branding is unnecessary, even wasteful.

This might seem odd, given that we are surrounded by brands competing for our attention. So today, my newsfeed includes not just the kind of ads I’d expect about products like whisky and running shoes but ads from a ‘sustainable mobility player’ and an ‘institutional investment manager’ (whatever they are).

I have no idea why these companies want to talk to me. 

But imagine this scene: you are a firm which doesn't need to persuade customers to choose your product, or recruits to choose your job offer, or investors to choose your stock. 

This might sound like heaven. And in a way it is. But such companies tend to be of two types. 

The first type has most of its facilities in one market with few competitors and little or no regulatory pressure, or perhaps even government protection. The second type operates in sectors where success is all about a small number of long-term relationships or proprietary technologies that are hard to replicate. 

Now imagine a sudden change. And branding becomes important. What do you do?

For the first type of locally dominant company, the trigger is usually a decision to expand international reach, whether in sales, production, or partnerships. A global brand is required. Expansion requires shaping perceptions among an unfamiliar set of potential customers or recruits. And also among their wider community if expansion requires significant acquisitions or new plants. 

We’ve helped American companies move outside the US and European and Asian companies reach beyond their home markets. In each case, creating a global brand means introducing not just the company itself but addressing issues related to the country of origin. Such issues could require addressing foreign misperceptions or adapting cultural norms which are taken for granted at home. (So, for example, we once ran workshops in India to help Japanese engineers work effectively with their Indian counterparts in a joint venture.)  

The second type of situation - where a company is focused on serving long-term customers with its proprietary tech - is different. The trigger is usually external whereas the first type is internal, a company consciously deciding to expand. But in addressing the external change, the company must build new muscles in brand and marketing.

Take investment management as an example. Until recently, success was about long term, face to face, relationships. But within the last decade, technology has changed how business is conducted and so every asset and wealth manager now has a brand department with sizeable budgets. Something similar has happened in mining and electricity generation, except that the external trigger for change was environmental not just technological.

Both types of trigger result in the need to tell your story to a wider, perhaps global, audience. Because if you don’t tell your story, someone else will do it for you (which can have unpredictable results, as TikTok and Huawei have discovered.) 

Storytelling is an essential start but it’s not enough to build a global brand. 

What you do next depends on the trigger to your need to think about branding. 

Type one, moving beyond domestic dominance, often requires adapting legacy cultural norms that are taken for granted in order to address differences overseas. 

Type two, the external trigger, requires building new muscles. And maybe you have both going on at the same time.

You may be excited about the story you want to tell. But, as Jeff Bezos put it, your brand is what other people say about you when you’re not in the room. 

So, if you’re new to branding and you really want to change how people think, feel and behave about you, what you do matters more than what you say.