I work at a Brand Consultancy in UK and have been looking at how the brand
can be used as a vehicle for organisational design and business
philosophy. We think of the brand as a business system and see its
potential for operationalising an organisations core ideology
Currently the discipline of branding is seen as a product of the marketing
department. There is an emerging thought that it is infact becoming and
overarching business organising principle, especially as intangible
knowledge (brand equity) inside peoples minds is a critical in the future.
I am beginning to thing that marketing as a discipline is becoming a
subset of branding, and that branding can be shown to be a shared
responsibility inside organisations.
>Most organizations still organize themselves using bureaucratic design
>principles. That's not an accusation; rather it's my observation.
There is a growing school of thought and literature in branding that
argues that the corporate brand could be candidate for a new organising
principle. This view has been agrued by Chris Macrae in his book "Brand
Chartering" He too advocates that the key brand owner is the CEO.
However the CEO's responsibility is to provide the leadership to ensure
the brand's core essence is woven into everything the orgaisation does.
All the issues you raised in your post parallel the questions needing to
be answered about the corporate brand and its brand portfolio.
I would suggest that looking at the health of the brand and how well (and
how congruently) it is understood in a business and how well people in a
business understand their contribution to its success is a another good
vehicle for a conversation with CEO"s about vital signs.
Martin Silcock
Wagstaffs-Brand Partners
Crown Reach
147A Grosvenor Road
London
SW1V 3JY
Tel 0171 834 0534
"Our problems are not so much
in finding new ideas as in escaping
from old ones"
John Maynard Keynes
--Martin Silcock <msilcock@wagstaffs.com>
Learning-org -- Hosted by Rick Karash <rkarash@karash.com> Public Dialog on Learning Organizations -- <http://www.learning-org.com>