October 22, 2003
Brand Sustainability
As promised yesterday a short review of Tim Kitchin's chapter in Beyond Branding, which is called, "Brand Sustainability: Its about Life... or Death" (click on the link and you can read a taster).
Tim's essential premise is that brands hold an important role in delivering sustainability, within its broadest sense, to the world. As he points out however they aren't the complete solution:
If achieving humand harmony and common purpose is a precondition for survival, then brands are going to have a very big part to play.
He goes on to note:
Brands frame our understanding of the world. They carry information and context and purpose from one person to the next. Within organisations, as in nations, brand-affinities condition the way humans relate to one another.
So brands are symbols which convey complex meaning within and amongst societies, organisations and people. And an even more important observation or should I say 'paradigm-shift' is:
'Stakeholders manage brands, not companies'
And that any organisation will need to manage multiple relationships in order to ensure that their brand will survive. Tim begins here to draw parallels with a myriad other thinkers by using the analogy of an organism to show how companies can survive and sustain their brand:
Deep sustainability seems to rely upon five core principles: adaptability, sensitivity, fit relevance and systemic collaboration.
It is these principles that form the main thrust of Tim's arguments and really started to get you as the reader fully engaged in the ideas he sets forth (that and the gratuitous Hitch-hikers' Guide to the Galaxy reference).
The remainder of the chapter centres around how these principles and further development into drivers, enablers and protectors, can be utilised by orgnisations to manage their 'intangible assets':
By understanding all stakeholder's perceptions of the attributesin the list... an organisation would achieve a firm understandingof the strategic risks and opportunities it faces in sustaining its brand over time.
Lastly Tim's sparing use of quotes helps put the whole piece into context. My favourite being the last words:
Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, things are never going to get better, they're not. (Dr Seuss, The Lorax)
Now the question remains, How do we get people, organisations caring enough to engage their stakeholders and start building sustainability in its truest sense.
Beyond Branding is published by Kogan-Page:
UK readers can order it here from the publisher at the discounted price of £20.
Alternatively you can buy it at Amazon UK or US