Your Brand is You
Who are we? We’re OMFGCO. Who are you? Someone with a company, a vision, a brand or an audience that is trying to marry these things. This is the second installment in our series “Every Decision is a Brand Decision.” You can find the first here.
The gap between ‘company’ and ‘brand’ is disappearing. It used to be that people operated private companies and projected a public brand to the world. This is no longer the case. Your brand is now represented by all of your company’s actions. The reality is that all of our actions are impacting the world, and it’s almost inevitable that people will find out about them.
The game of hide-and-seek that used to be played between Company (that does one thing) and Brand (what the company would like you to think they do) is mostly over. The people in your audience are human beings first, and customers second—and they know (or can uncover) more than you might like them to.
As the saying goes: people don’t buy a brand, they join it. Sure, they may be buying inclusion into a group, but they are also aligning with your view on the environment, supporting the places where you base your manufacturing, endorsing the way you treat your people, and even your approach to the work itself. It’s brand, all the way down.
What’s the practical reality of this? Basically that a brand encompasses much more than it may seem. It may sound far too simple or far too complex, but your brand is you.
Who are the real Stakeholders?
As the gap between Company and Brand disappears, new levels of disclosure trigger new levels of vulnerability and transparency. However, the shrinking gap really means that company owners need to reconsider who they consider to be the stakeholders in the company.
This is an evolution in the world of business: everyone is now a stakeholder.
Historically, stakeholders of a company were comprised of the leadership team, the board, and the major shareholders. These groups were the stakeholders because it was they who assumed that only they really knew what was going on. They were the ones who understood the typical strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats involved. They were also the only ones who really knew the company secrets. Others could speculate, but simply didn’t have the information they needed to feel confident they knew the real truth.
Once in a blue moon, an insider (or the occasional outsider) was able to form a seemingly complete view of the company and create an exposé. But most of the time, the number of people who were able to do that was so small that companies could respond to their feelings, insights, and demands on a one-off basis. The monetary benefits far outweighed the risks of being exposed.
Times have changed. Detailed info about your business is instantly available to everyone, insiders and outsiders alike. Previously sensitive information about your company — public opinion of your products from review sites, detailed information about salaries and interview questions/process, direct contact information for executives, information on suppliers, and environmental footprint—is all available to the public at little to no cost.
There is Nowhere to Hide, So Don’t
Your customers are now recording customer service calls and uploading the audio on the web! Customers are sharing your pricing information with each other! Employees are reviewing the CEO’s performance as a leader and ranking it among the competition!
Even if you’ve done a great job protecting all of your trade secrets and employee information, the market is now filled with experts from your industry who have the power to speak so persuasively about your performance that most people will simply believe it’s the truth. These “new experts” have such wide informational reach and so many readers in your stakeholder base that they can single-handedly change public opinion overnight.
Whether these are media, analysts, or rival executives, their opinions can be loud enough that they can influence how the world sees you. The old version of the expert — one who had access to proprietary information — was killed by the internet, which subsequently created an environment wherein anyone with a wifi connection and a smartphone can be perceived as an expert. In many cases, the line between a source of real, fact-based information and one of baseless, inflammatory propaganda has been tragically blurred beyond recognition.
So much information is available that these three groups — customers, employees, and experts — must now be considered stakeholders right alongside the traditional stakeholders. And now that they’re “stakeholders,” they get to weigh in on what your brand really is, and more importantly, what it will become. That is, of course, unless you’ve made it absolutely clear what defines your brand.
If you don’t define your brand, someone else will do it for you.
So, why should this matter to you? The way you take care of these new groups of stakeholders needs to be just as truthful, candid, frequent, and detailed as it would be for your legacy stakeholders.
Everyone now has (or can easily form) an opinion about your brand, so you should sure as hell be the leading voice in that discussion. In future posts, we’ll show you how.
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Original illustration © 2018 OMFGCO
