Scott Stratten - Unbranding: 100 Branding Lessons for the Age of Disruption

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Copyright 2018 by Scott Stratten & Alison Stratten. All rights reserved.

Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.

Published simultaneously in Canada.

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We've received some flack over the years for our often random and rambling intros on the UnPodcast. It seems as though some people would like us to just get to the point.

Well, a few months ago Scott had a weekend gig in the Bahamas, a keynote for a great crowd of franchisees. While Alison usually can't travel with Scott (someone has to keep the children and pets alive), she's no fooland so she flew out for a couple days to join him in the sunshine. The hotel was glorious, right on the ocean, and as a treat we booked moonlight oceanside massages. It should have been everythingbut it was terrible. We each spent the entire time waiting for it to be over so as not to ruin it for the other. The wind was cold, people were walking by, and the massage itself could only be described as irritating. When it was over we just looked at one another and then spent the next two hours laughing about how we are the only two people on the planet who could hate a Bahamian oceanside massage.

We swore never to tell anyone. What kind of horrible people would?

Now we could talk about branding here, find the symbolic nature of the story: everything to make a great brand experience ruined by a number of controllable factors. We could teach a branding lesson. But instead we're just going to leave this here as a confession and an homage to our intro haters.

UnBranding has been in the works for a while now. When you've written UnMarketing and UnSelling, it seems like the next logical step. But we've always fought against content for content's sake, and we waited until we had something to say. We could tell you how to be a brand in one sentencebe good to your customers, employees, and vendors and have a great product and/or service. But we can't sell that for $20. The message of UnBranding isn't new for us. Branding is in every part of your businesshow and whom you hire is branding, your front line is branding, what your CEO likes on Facebook is branding. Branding isn't a department or a campaign; in fact, branding isn't in your hands at all. Your brand belongs to your customersit's what they think of when they hear your name and how they tell your story.

Today, technological innovations and increased access to information have transformed that story. They have disrupted all our traditional relationships: how we hire, market, and even date as well as how we find our favorite foods, watch our favorite movies and television shows, and learn about the world around us. They have changed the dynamic between brands and their markets and between students and their teachers. Our digital age has put a world of information and connection in our hands, and the way we market and are marketed to has changed forever.

The concept of disruption isn't new. It was introduced in 1942 by Joseph Schumpeter, when he wrote about creative destruction, a concept that described how new technologies, products, and processes make their predecessors obsolete and reinvent businesses, industries, and the economy. While the economic process of the new taking the place of the old may not be revolutionary, the pace at which innovation happens today is. This is the age of disruption.

To be in business today means that one interaction at a local restaurant can change the face of a global brand. Customer service, once an exercise done one-on-one, now happens in public. The online world has blurred with real life, making them one and the same. Today, we learn the truth about unethical businesses practices with ease, while at the same time those seeking to deceive continually have new tools for doing so. It's enough to make your head spin.

Now before you throw away your phone and run off to book your own oceanside massage, we're here to tell you the truth. The age of disruption means nothing at all. Good business is still good business. While news of your ethical practices or lack thereof may travel further and faster today, what makes them good has never changed. We've always put forward only what we feel is the best version of ourselves; Facebook didn't invent that. Disruption means no more and no less than any other buzzword, and even the newest, flashiest technologies, those that change our lives from morning until night, won't change why we love the things we do.

In the following pages we're going to look at 100 brand lessons in the age of disruption, taken from thousands of brand case studies we've researched and studied. We'll talk about everything from changes in the workplace to the value of emerging tools and how change, especially fast-paced change, can be daunting. There can be an instinct to protect ourselves, to attempt to lock down content, to blame technology rather than embrace it, to focus on the overall change rather than making real improvements to our core values and practices. We're going to fight that instinct together and see innovation as an opportunity. We're going to look at companies, big and small, that have navigated innovation and change both successfully and not so successfully, to find actionable lessons we can apply to our own branding.

If you want to dig deeper and don't feel like copying out an 85-character URL from the footnotes, visit www.UnBookLinks.com for all the sources included in the book, listed by chapter.