No corporate brand? Sad you will miss these…

What happens when you give low priority to creating a corporate brand? Like you don’t give it the importance a corporate brand rightfully deserves? You don’t just miss out on some essentials, you actually miss out on a future that could be yours with just that bit of diligence and foresight.

Here are four of the many things you may be missing out on:
Don’t know your ‘interested publics’

You may not map all your ‘interested publics.’ All those segments who are stakeholders in your corporation’s journey. What they think about the business you are in, the larger business space, your organization, competitors and the various narratives around these all. These publics have the potential to play the roles of yea or naysayers. You need them. But have you got your teams and yourself to map all of them? Having done that, have you actually put down their current perceptions about your corporation and the expectations they have of the entity? Do you have a plan to purposively address them? If yes how and what will you tell them?

Don’t know the category pointers

This one is disarmingly simple. As much as knowing that if you are in the banking business your fundamental proposition is to safeguard your client’s monies and grow it. Trust is the bedrock. If you are in the hospitality business then your driver is the ability to anticipate the needs of guests and deliver the solutions. From the missing button on the shirt to the fresh and sweet smelling bathroom. The bedrock is service with elements of anticipation and personalization. If you are in the food business, then it is largely the question of purity and lineage, which delivers great tasting food, and a recall of all things joyous. The core is good taste and a great feeling. Now, if you don’t believe in a brand, chances are you may have never asked yourself what are the basics of your category- the pointers. Possibly a case of missing antes. Unaware of the stakes?

Don’t know if the publics understand your company’s overall purpose

Often companies go about their business without paying attention or credence to the need of communicating their purpose. What is the journey? Why are you there? How will you transform lives? What happens if your company was to disappear from the face of the earth? Will the publics really miss your company? To get the answers look around and you will discover there are many companies — small to big who will give you penetrating narratives on why they are there. Forget the better known ones like a Starbucks and an Apple. Say how about imagining a life without a Greyhound service? Or a world without 7-Eleven? Now look at your corporation/entity and then ask if you have defined, communicated and conveyed the purpose or not?

Don’t know if your leadership knows the role of public opinion creation

Leaders are judged by what they do. More importantly what they stand for. How they conduct themselves in the public eye is a message to the world about their competence, relatability and top of the list is their ability to get noticed, comprehended and actually remembered in the right way. The more successful ones have discovered the need to create a public opinion and perhaps a story frame into which they keep feeding all the relevant messages. A frame, which consistently reinforces their foundational beliefs, achievements and aspirations. This helps them get identified in a particular manner and they actually create a sub brand out of themselves. A ‘person brand’ as an additional layer over the corporate brand. Lee Iacocca for Chrysler Corporation in the past, Jeff Bezos for Amazon, Elon Musk for Tesla. See how they use the public opinion platform and keep creating narratives to a well-designed and manufactured frame…

There are many more core aspects you will miss out if you do not have a purposively created corporate brand.

It is good to make a beginning.