Elevate THINK BEYOND

No matter what your religion (or lack thereof), we can all agree that the sincerity of your belief in something is evidenced in your actions. We all have faith in something. We all believe certain things. It is our actions reveal that ‘faith.’

This is not a religious blog post, but as the passage from James came to mind, I realized how true this is in dealing with brands. We work long and hard to help brands capture their essence, put it to words, let it drive visuals and establish a foundation. In short, we help them verbalize what they ‘believe’ about their brand. This is their Brand Promise. We pay careful attention to get buy-in from all the key stakeholders in the company and are very hesitant to move on until there is a consensus. But, words can be fleeting.

The evidence of real buy-in is the actions that a company and it’s people are willing to take to honor their brand beliefs. We tell them ‘You must be courageous!’ and ‘You must be consistent!’ But, just like a preacher shouting from the front of the church, motivation only goes so far. That ‘faith’ has to manifest itself in each individual within an organization. This can only be measured by action. They have to believe their brand attributes and keep them at the forefront of their mind. They must dream dreams of their primary (Fred) and secondary (Nancy) target audiences. Fred and Nancy are their new ‘imaginary’ friends. They must know their key value propositions and passionately communicate them with consistency. These are the marks of a true brand believer.

On the other hand, there are the Brand Hypocrites.  Brands who say they’re one thing, but do very little to back that up. “The Customer Comes First Here!” they say, but the real experience screams of bottom-line only methods. “High Quality, Low Prices!” is a common theme, but what they really mean is “The same mediocre quality that everyone else is offering now with prices that look like everything is on sale when in fact it’s just normal pricing.” A company says their focused on customer care, yet ‘care’ for you by leaving you on hold for 30 minutes only to tell you that you “called the wrong division in the company and you’ll have to hang up and call a different number and probably sit on hold for another half hour because I can’t transfer you directly because I wasn’t trained that well and I don’t really know how to use this fancy phone system.” – fwhew! This is the hypocrisy that is rampant in our culture.

Sure, we all struggle to make our actions match our words at times. We can give each other some grace there. However, when you constantly tell me one thing and the experience with you is consistently contradictory, we’ve got a problem.

So, in short, don’t be a brand hypocrite. Know (or decide) who you are, who you’re going to be (we all have aspirational brand attributes), and take action. As long as you’re courageously striving to implement systems and procedures and creating a culture of action that matches your beliefs, then I’ll believe in you too.

Do your actions match your brand beliefs?