Let’s get personal

I love them!

They’re witty, playful, smart and good looking, too. They don’t leave me hanging. On that rare occasion when they’re running late or have messed things up, they let me know early so I don’t get upset. I appreciate them.

I’m talking about Southwest Airlines here, but I could be talking about my college soccer team or my brother. I love them all. If I have a choice, I’m hanging with them before I’m hanging with anybody else. All of them are brands in their own right; a company, an organization, a person.

Let’s talk branding. The academics of branding get complicated; all the terminology, analytics, best practices and so on.  But, I have good news for you. Branding at its core is something we all know well because branding is personal.

Brands go bad by not seeing themselves in this way. They miss this one simple thing -They become impersonal. They do what their competitors do. They get stuck in sameness. I don’t want my wife or friends to be impersonal and stamped out in sameness. That’s boring and none of us want to be around boring people. We don’t care much about boring brands either. We tend to overlook them or forget about them entirely. (Why retail brands fail).

NK&A believes you have to look at brands like you look at people. The following quote by Oscar Wilde explains it well:

Be yourself, everyone else is already taken.

Exactly! Brand yourself carefully and thoughtfully. Don’t make claims you can’t keep or boast about things that aren’t true. You don’t gravitate to people like that, why would you want to do business with a company like that either?

If you now believe you’re ready to commit to making your company look and feel better, then give us a call. We’ll do an NK&A Brand Fitness Assessment.

And maybe the next thing you know, somebody will be blogging about you, like I did with Southwest, my soccer team or my super fun brother.