Level 5 Blog

It’s not all Old Spice hunks and subservient chickens out there. Some social media campaigns—most social media campaigns—are lost to the ephemera of the digital atmosphere as soon as they’re released, drifting up in dissolved bits of electrified nothingness that attract precisely no attention whatsoever.

Indeed, a recent Keller Fay research report indicates that only a handful of global brands currently generate a meaningful word-of-mouth stir on the Internet, with a mere 7% occurring on line today. Almost 80%, meanwhile, continues to be spread the old-fashioned way: face to face.

Most of you are probably wondering, then, how much of your budget you should allocate to each piece of your marketing puzzle.  An important question to answer, but maybe the more important question relates to your organizational puzzle: have you done the tough brand strategy work necessary to identify the brand vision, mission and values, and the all-encompassing DNA – in other words, have you properly defined your brand?  And if so, have you moved beyond marcom and used your brand to align not just your marketing (be it social or otherwise) but all of your organizational silos and functions?

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If some numbers-driven brand skeptic asked about the tangible benefits of establishing a strong brand, could you answer him in terms that he could relate to?  Could you get beyond the fundamentals of “positioning” and “alignment” and really speak the language of numbers and metrics to get buy-in from him around making investments in your brand?  And can you express it in the 30 second elevator ride?

If not, here are four ways a strong brand (and all the benefits that go along with that) can benefit an organization using tangible metrics anyone can appreciate:

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Rob Ford, Toronto’s new mayor, was officially ushered into his inaugural council meeting Tuesday with the in-person blessing of hockey’s most colourful commentator, Don Cherry. It was a deliberate bit of stickhandling on Ford’s part, clearly, to align himself with the brash and blunt Hockey Night in Canada personality (who, clad in a neon pink blazer, introduced Ford in council chambers).

And it provides a slick example of the way a brand with all its blades on ice can pull off a win.

Just like a box of crackers or an automobile, a politician is a brand whose behaviour and communications require mindful, considered oversight and focus on central principles. Ford’s choice to feature so prominently a guy with a well-defined reputation for outspoken exposition—that’s sometimes as outrageously unresearched as it is politically incorrect—reveals his brand savvy.

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