One of the issues that comes up over and over again is a failure to understand that the age of “brand = whatever you say in your ads and press releases” has been over for a long time.

The dirty little secret of branding is that a company doesn’t get to decide what their brand is – the market does. A brand is ultimately an abstraction that exists in the mind of the consumer (or B2B buyer). It is the “handle” that lets them access their thoughts and feelings about all of their interactions with a company or product.

Sure, companies can (and should) be relentlessly consistent in the story they tell. This means having a well developed and comprehensive marketing communications plan where each part amplifies the others. It also means ensuring that the customer’s actual experience lives up to the expectations created by communications. This is where many fall down.

To pick on a few examples…

Watch the TV ads for Target and you would think its the coolest, most hip store going. Walk into a Target store – well, you get K-Mart with red paint.

Home Depot’s ads would have you believe that their stores are filled with experts just bursting with enthusiasm to help you. Ever been in a Home Deopot and try to ask a question? Those stores in the ads must have been in some parallel universe somewhere.

The bottom line?

The brand is about ALL of the market’s experiences. Nothing destroys a company’s credibility (and brand) faster than a customer experience that doesn’t live up to the hype.

What does that mean for a business? Pay at least as much attention (ideally more) to making sure that every person in the business is living the brand. The word-of-mouth that generates will be worth more than any advertising you could ever buy.

Does that work? Until recently, about the only advertising Starbucks ever did was the logo on their cups.

Every organisation is a marketing organisation. Every function in every department of every organisation has a marketing role to play and successful organisations are built around brands and have marketing firmly in the driving seat. Those are the facts!

One of the topics I cover in my Full Effect Marketing seminars is the “Iceberg Imperative”. Its self explanatory really, but in a nutshell the imperative says that ninety per-cent of your communications go on below the surface in the un-paid-for and often unplanned areas of your communications repertoire.

You can’t switch them off so you need to manage them and few companies do. The end result is that to some extent (different in each case) the effect of these unmanaged communications is neutralising some of your paid-for efforts. The bottom line – inefficiency, which we know no company can afford in this day and age.

Consistency is a pre-requisite of a successful brand and therefore a successful organisation. That’s consistency with your brand model, but between communications too. Of course, few organisations realise where and how they are communicating, which is another chapter in my seminars, but many of these touch-points are “invisible” until you look for them. Delegates regularly list fifty or more in my workshops.

The kick-off for all of this though, as you allude to, is the Brand Model. Those that I produce in the first stage of my Brand Discpvery programme identify nine elements of the brand. I don’t see how you can reduce this to fewer and you have to establish them all in order to address all the issues of brand development that arise later. Once you have them though, and not before, you can start.

As for the difference between consumer and business to business marketing – there is none. Same principles apply, they are just different stages in a single process. The only reason that I can fathom for BtoB organisations continuing to raise this issue is that there are still a lot of rubbish marketers in the BtoB sector.