Wessling - The Powers: Ten Factors for Building an Exponentially More Powerful Brand

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Peter and Tony

Tony Wessling and Peter van Aartrijk

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Tony Wessling and Peter van Aartrijk are co-founders of Chromium, a brand+culture strategic management consultancy based in San Francisco with an office in Washington, D.C. and client representatives in New York and Los Angeles.

The firm delivers value to regional, national and global middle-market and enterprise clients in various sectors of the economy, including finance, insurance, real estate, technology, consumer packaged goods, and food and beverage.

As frequent contributors to global conversations on brand and corporate culture, Chromiums partners have been featured speakers at major events held by Academy of Art University, Agency Nation, American Fraternal Alliance, Assurex Global, Financial Communications Society of New York, Independent Insurance Agents & Brokers of America, Insurance Marketing Communications Association, Localization World (Seattle and Berlin), National Association of Mutual Insurance Companies, Property/Casualty Super-Regional Insurance Conference, San Francisco Chamber of Commerce, San Francisco State University, Swiss American Chamber of Commerce (in Zrich and San Francisco), and UC Berkeley Sudartja Center for Entrepreneurship.

Their thought leadership has been showcased in feature pieces in Brand Quarterly , Carrier Management , and National Underwriter.

More about Chromium can be found at www.chromium.group or on the Chromium Brand+Culture YouTube Channel. Follow Tony (@twessling) and Peter (@pvaartrijk) on Twitter.

Prepare for the long haul: It can take ten years or more to build a truly strong brand. And once established, brands should be refreshed approximately every decade to maintain relevance.

A great brand is a story that never stops unfolding.

Tony Hsieh , CEO of Zappos

T he Internet Era of the 1990s seemed to give rise to instantly famous brands, as if they were mixed up in a lab somewhere and poured over the globe, like the Sherwin-Williams logo showing paint covering the world. As we write this in 2017, Google is ubiquitous, Amazon is dominant, and Uber is ascendant. Nearly everyone in first-world countries has had some form of contact with these brands. But the reality is that they didnt quite become household names overnight. Google was founded in 1998, Amazon in 1994. Even superstar newcomer Uber turned eight this year.

The point here is that brands arent strong and valuable right out of the gate. They may attain some level of recognition fairly quickly, something accelerated by our mobile-connected world, and in this way a brand, even a young one, becomes one more buzzword flying around the media. Theres no denying that this recognition certainly helps the marketing effort and builds early sales. But the fact of the matter is that very new companies dont really deserve to be designated as true brands until theyve gained high levels of trust as well as high levels of awareness in the marketplace. This can often take up to ten years or more, and this is what we call the Power of Ten.

A true brand is much more than a name or a logo, and building a brand with real value takes years of diligence and hard work. Uber may have a great deal of recognition (or notoriety) at this point, for example, but its still working on building trust with consumers, employees, regulators, and investorsand it hasnt exactly been a walk in the park. The Uber brand, therefore, is not entirely mature and so lacks enduring value at this point. Were the company to fail (which is not completely unimaginable), the most valuable components would be the technology, the data, the user base, and the network of drivers. The brand would be an afterthought, much like PetSmart acquiring Pets.com after the dot com bust of the early 2000s, where the URL and the customer base were valuable but the brand in and of itself lacked the Power of Ten.

Its important to keep this in mind as you seek to build a brand for your organization. You have to be in it for the long haulsometimes even decades. Even if your organization has been around for some time, its not unusual for there to have been very little active, intentional branding apart from maybe a name and a that-will-do-for-now logo. Thus, in such a case youre essentially starting at square one when it comes to acquiring the Power of Ten.

Brands dont just appear overnight. Our experience has been that branding is a process that cant be accelerated too quickly without running the whole thing off the road. Its methodical, starting with the development of a clear strategy authored by key stakeholders of the organization and owned by the entire organization. Your strategy will act as a steady guide for your brand and culture over many years, much like the Constitution of the United States of America has guided this country throughout its history. Sure, amendments are made and courts interpret things differently as times change, but the underlying principles remain the same. So it should be with a brand and culture strategy, which should be considered a durable asset that is altered only under remarkable circumstances, or with the passage of time to keep relevant.

Its essential that an organizations key stakeholders be brought together to author a proprietary brand and culture strategy that will underpin the Power of Ten. The strategic framework we help clients produce is a document that codifies nine key components: Mission, Vision, Values, Brand Persona, Brand Narrative, Brand Evidence, Positioning, Targeting, and at the center of it all, the Brand Essence, sometimes referred to as the brands mantra, or its DNA.

The language in this framework should be concise. In fact, one of the hardest challenges weve found is editing the content of this framework down until it is in the most effective and efficient form possible. We actually insist that the strategy be a one-page documentnot an easy feat. But this is a vitally important step, as all expressions of the brand will be driven by these words (with only occasional minor updates) for the next ten years. There should be little room for ambiguity.

Implementation of the strategy is done through consistent and repetitive tactical expressionsday after day, week after week, year after yearfor about ten years. This focus on repetition doesnt mean the expressions should be boring; on the contrary, creativity is essential to customers developing emotional connections to the brand. But in the end, this creativity has to be driven by the strategynot the other way aroundbecause creativity is by its nature somewhat chaotic while brands require consistency in order to become powerful.

The strongest messaging is always developed with clear intentto resonate with the deep human needs of your target audienceand needs to be repeated in your marketing over and over and over again, ad nauseam, until it elicits instant recall. You say Volvo, I say Safety. You say Napa, I say Wine. You say Quaker, I say Wholesome. This is the Power of Ten; these strong associations did not happen overnight, but were decades in the making.