4 Types of Brands
In the context of Brand Strategy and Reputation Management, there are essentially 4 types of Brands out there.
1. The Business-Minded Brand
The business-minded Brand prioritizes business over everything else. They are likely to view PR and Communications as a nice-to-have investment. They believe that their reputation is 100% connected to their business performance alone and they act accordingly. They are likely to spend the least on proactively managing their brand and reputation. Investment in communications is more likely to be driven by crisis, reactive response to issues or to strategic agendas that require a more purposeful approach to communication. But on a day to day basis, such organizations are more likely to treat communications as an afterthought. They are also more likely to have no full time Communications resource on payroll or have only just one person in role if at all.
Companies or organizations that fall into this category are those who do not have to deal with members of the public on a daily basis i.e. B2B companies, professional service firms, oil and gas producing companies in the upstream or midsteam sector. These companies are more vulnerable to having serious communications crisis simply because they are not prepared to handle such complexity.
2. The Relationship-minded Brand
This is the Brand that prioritizes relationship over everything else. They are likely to have a very high view of PR practises in particular and spend a lot of effort nurturing relationships with key stakeholders in media, government and other stakeholders. Brands like this are more likely to be in the financial sector, travel and hospitality/tourism. lifestyle, entertainment, clothing/fashion, cosmetics/personal products and luxury businesses. They invest a lot of time, resources and effort in maintaining the right relationships and on managing optics. They are also more likely to have a relatively large PR team with limited access to Communications resources as required.
The flip side of things is that such businesses are likely to portray an image of success that has little basis in reality. They are also more likely to fail because they pay excessive attention to relationship management – even at the expense of business and commerciality. PR professionals working in such spaces need to work hard to ensure that return on investment is visible and attainable for the Brand.
3. Marketing-minded Brands
These are brands that prioritize marketing over actual business performance and delivery. They are likely to start marketing products even before they are fully completed and are more likely to have their product or service delivery lagging behind the actual message they are communicating.
These brands are so reliant on marketing that there is no alignment between the product claims being made and the actual user experience for those patronizing the product. This is prevalent with many tech start-ups who are so eager to gather interest in their products that they over exaggerate the product value proposition or capabilities.
They invest in a lot of marketing from the onset but do not pay enough attention to the actual running of the business in terms of people, process, product quality and efficiency. They fail to recognize that the sustainability of their marketing communication rests on the ability of the product to deliver a user experience that matches the narrative in the communications about the product
4. The Balanced Brand
These are Brands who work very hard to ensure that their communications is at pace with business performance as well as stakeholder relationships. They give the right amount of time and resources to performance and business delivery as they do to managing relationships with customers, employees, regulators, media and society and also proactively communicating their messages and narratives in the public space. Such Brands are typically very high performing leading brands that are at the top of their sector and industry. They are likely to have strong governance and focus on meeting stakeholder and shareholder expectations. Their communications strategy is primarily driven by being accountable to key parties other than themselves.
PR and Communications professionals working in such environments are likely to have the opportunity to make significant impact in these spaces because there would be significant support from within the organization for the brand building and proactive reputation management activities.
Summary
There is no right or wrong approach but it is important for management to know when it needs to become more balanced in its approach towards reputation management. Being purely business-minded at all times is not necessarily a good thing unless there is significant data to back up such an approach on an ongoing basis. It is also important to note that this approach is not resilient for all scenarios so leaders must be quick to recognize when they need to take a more relationship-minded or balanced approach to brand building and reputation management.
Sola Abulu & Associates (SA&A) is a strategy and communications consulting and training firm focused on enabling businesses, brands and organizations to achieve their desired objectives through strategic communications, organizational effectiveness and reputation risk management.