Confluence

For some brands, it's about trusting the tale, not the teller

If you’re interested in how certain brands take on personalities of their own beyond their framers’ intent--or in the self-conscious denial of any intent at all--a recently published book deserves your attention. Buying In: the Secret Dialogue between What We Buy and Who We Are, by Rob Walker, examines how certain brands come to embody what we say to ourselves about ourselves, but with no apparent acknowledgement of a surrounding brand community of any sort. In other words, individuals embrace many of these brands with no conscious pretension to belonging, seemingly because the brand has individual meaning for them alone. Or so they think.

 All this may seem to run counter to the proposition that brand contagion is fueled by social networks. But the examples Walker cites don’t diverge all that much from this model. And while he’s a little snarky about notions like co-creation, that turns out to be pretty much the phenomenon he’s examining. Many of his keystone cases--Converse sneakers, Pabst Blue Ribbon beer, and Timberland boots among hip-hop devotees—are brands that have prospered through diffusion force fields that are, at least initially, invisible to the “commercial persuaders” behind the brand.

And all of them, paradoxically, seem to emerge from a distinctive peer-to-peer energy that is militantly brand-averse, a kind of anti-matter in the branding universe detectable only through its effects. Clearly we’re not in the realm of mass market brands here. Still, Walker’s take on brand contagion--not to mention his vivid coverage of the individual entrepreneurs and early adopters behind the brands—make this a most valuable read for anyone, and especially for “commercial persuaders.”

Vinjamuri's People

If, like me, you’re a fan of good business writing and you’re interested in entrepreneurial brands, I can recommend a book that you will almost certainly like.

In Accidental Branding: How Ordinary People Build Extraordinary Brands, David Vinjamuri profiles eight entrepreneurs—some you may have heard of, others not. The business owners that Vinjamuri covers all share one dominant attribute: a passion for the quality and customer ‘fit’ of their products.

Most worked for years to refine their small business brands before they hit it big or, in the case of J. Peterman, hit it big, lost it big, and then slowly rebuilt it. It’s refreshing, by the way, to meet seasoned entrepreneurs in their seventies and eighties, like Peterman, Gert Boyle (Columbia Sportswear), and Roxanne Quimby (Burt’s Bees). No sleek airbrushed cover-girl CEOs a la Fast Company magazine here.

Happily for the book, Vinjamuri doesn’t just sit back and analyze the elements that make for business and branding success. He injects himself, and his voice, into the narratives, recounting his visits to the subjects and allowing them, at critical moments, to tell parts of their creation tales in their own voices. Throughout he exhibits the born writer’s eye for revealing detail. We experience not just how these not-so-ordinary entrepreneurs think, but how and where they live and work.

Ultimately, Accidental Branding is all about story elements, both in the brands themselves and in Vinjamuri’s approach to his topic. Every brand needs a story, and Vinjamuri gives us some superb examples to ponder and retell.

Why ‘employer branding’ falls short

If you’ve been reading my commentary, you know that I stand for branding that authentically maps the cultures of organizations to their engagement strategies. This applies in both marketplace and human capital arenas, and it’s a key reason why we summarize our work in the latter realm as talent branding. We focus first on the native culture of a workforce as its most authentic and compelling basis for attracting and cultivating talent. Call it an inside-out approach.

Is it also important to discover how potential recruits and other stakeholders view a company from the outside in? Of course it is, but in our view refining a talent brand has to start with discovering the authentic points of value that inspire members of the existing workforce, the factors that keep them on the job, whatever their tenure and degree of experience.

This underscores what we see as a game-changing flaw in ‘employer branding’ formulas that home in on direct recruiting as the primary expression of the brand. An exclusive preoccupation with reaching out to recruits here can unfairly skew what should be a thorough and empathetic discovery initiative in all segments of the culture.

Talent brands should be inclusive of all workplace values through all stages of the employee life cycle. They should certainly inspire creative recruiting, but still supply the theme and creative energy for all human capital initiatives, from retention to staff development to inclusive leadership and so on.

This focus on culture as brand driver is not a perspective unique to Brand Vistas. Several commentators and consultants, notably Nicolas Ind and Mary Jo Hatch, have embraced this view for years, and made it the touchstone for a wider-gauge emphasis on corporate branding. It’s interesting that most of their case work is European.

Are practitioners of ‘employer branding’ in this country too enamored of the market-centered metrics of packaged goods branding to see the strategic role that human capital branding can play in the cultural health and talent environment of an organization?