The Making - Episode 4

You can change your logo, your name, your colours, and still keep every reason people stopped buying from you.

In Episode 4 of The Making, Abeiku takes on Part Five of Rules for the Marketing Communication Executive by Prof. Robert Ebo Hinson & Joel Nettey: Branding Strategy, Positioning and Identity Systems.

If you've ever sat in a meeting where "rebrand" was pitched as the fix for a service problem, this one will sting a little.

Get the book: Rules for the Marketing Communications Executive by Prof. Robert Ebo Hinson & Joel Nettey - 0591343421

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Chapters

00:00 Intro
 01:23 Rule 41
 08:25 Why Rebrands Don't Fix Broken Experiences
 09:43 Rule 43
 14:28 The Negotiation Consumers Always Win
 18:22 Rule 49
 21:29 Conglomerates vs. Dilution
 23:15 The Cost of Trying to Be Everything
 26:04 Rule 50
 28:22 Twitter vs. X
 31:10 Recap

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

How many brands can you recognize without seeing their logo? Think about it. If I stripped every logo of every product in the supermarkets and you walked in right now, how many could you still identify just by their colour or their tone? It is more the way it speaks to you, right? The ones you can, if those are the real brands, and the ones that you can't, they are just logos with products behind them. Well, welcome to the making right here on Mark Conversations. And this is where I accept with the book, The Rules for the Marketing Communications Executive by Professor Henson and uh Joel Nete. I pick the rules that hit the hardest, and I tell you what the what they look like in real life. And if you're joining us today, I recommend that you start from episode one and then be playing with us since day one. And you haven't got the book yet. You know, I've been advocating for you to get it. So do get it. And like I say, it's so much more fun when we do it together, when we read along. So go get it after this episode. Today we are in part five, and we're talking branding, strategy, positioning, and identity systems. Uh, there are 12 rules in this part, and I'm covering four of them: rules 41, 43, 49, and 50. And these four build on each other. Rule 41 tells you what a brand actually is, and it's not what most of us think it is. Uh, 43 tells you something quite humbly that you don't own your brand, but the consumer does. And 49 says if your brand tries to mean everything, it means nothing. And rule 50 shows you the discipline that holds it all together, which is consistency. Definition, ownership focus, discipline. Let's get into it. A brand is not a logo, it is a system of meaning in the consumer's mind. The logo is the most visible element of the brand and therefore the most commonly mistaken for the brand itself. Organizations invest in logo redesigns and call it rebranding. They create new visual guidelines and announce a new brand identity. They change the color palette and expect the market to perceive something different. The logo has changed. The meaning the consumer holds in their mind has not. And it is the meaning in the consumer's mind, not the symbol on the packaging that constitutes the brand. The brand exists in the consumer's memory as an associative network, a web of connections between the brand, the brand symbols, and the meanings, feelings, memories, and expectations that have been built up through every interaction the consumer has had with the brand, every piece of communication they have encountered from it, every story they have heard from it, from others, and every experience they have had of what the brand promises and whether it delivered. This associative network is the brand. The logo is just the key that unlocks it. Then understanding this changes how the executive approaches every brand to decision. A campaign is not just a communication activity, it is an intervention in the consumer's associative network. Either reinforcing existing connections or attempting to build new ones. A service experience is not just an operational matter. It is a brand experience that either confirms or contradicts what's the communication promised. A distribution decision is not just a commercial consideration, it is a statement about the kind of brand this is embedded in the context and company the brand chooses to be found in. You know, I remember the very first time I heard the word brand. It was in my agriculture class. And for those of you who don't know, my first degree is actually in animal science from the best investing aquarium common investor science and technology. But I didn't first encounter the word in university. I encountered it in primary school when we're being taught livestock farming. The teacher explained that farmers used to brand their animals with burning a mark into their height so you can tell whose is whose, right? And that's where the word comes from, actually. So brand comes from the old Norse word, branda. And old Norse was the language of the Vikings in Scandinavia, and it literally means to burn. Brand was a burn mark, it identifies and it's differentiates. That's what I learned in primary school. And honestly, I believe that's still how most of us understand branding today. A name, a logo, and a visual mark that tells you whose product this is. And it's not entirely wrong. Even the definitions we've imported from the West actually reinforced this. So the American Marketing Association defines a brand as a distinctive feature, like a name, term, design, or symbol that identifies goods or services. And for a very long time that was enough. But we need to dig deeper because remember what we said about digging deeper in the previous episode. The book is saying a brand is deeper than just a mark. It is the meaning. And it's not what you quit from the animal, going back to the example, it is the reputation the animal carries. The mark tells you whose cattle these are, the whether those cattle are healthy, whether the farmer is trustworthy, whether you buy from them again, that meaning lives in the buyer's mind, not the height. The mark just triggers it, right? And that distinction changes everything. Because if a brand is just a mark, a logo, a name, a visual identity, then changing the mark should change the brand, right? A new logo, new perception, fresh start. But that's not what happens. And we've all watched it happen in this market, actually. Think about a telco in this market, for instance. It has huge reputation problems, service issues, network complaints, customer frustration, and the solution, a new name. A shorter, cleaner brand identity. I don't want to mention any names. You see a new logo, new color, fresh campaign. The mark has changed, but the experience didn't. The network didn't improve. The customer service is still trash. And what happened? People just transferred their old reputation to the new name. They didn't get a fresh start. They got a new label for the same experience. The rebrand didn't reset anything at all. It just gave people a new name to attach to their old frustrations. Forget the telco. Think about a legacy band. Again, I don't want to mention any name. Right here in Ghana. They modernized the name, updated the visual identity, signaled a new era, and today, if you walk into the branch, you can tell me the experience has not really changed the cues, the wait time, the attitude behind the counter. You still visit for a transaction and they still tell you the service is down. The book references this a bank that invested in a visual redesign without addressing the underlying customer experience. If you think about it quietly, I'm sure you'd hear the name of the bank. The consumer doesn't evaluate your logo as nice as it may be. They evaluate what happens after they walk through the door. And this is what the book means when it says that the brand lives in their minds or the heads as an associative network. So every interaction, every feeling, every memory, every story they've heard from someone else, every story they've experienced themselves, that's what fires when they see your name. And a new logo doesn't rewrite any of that. It just gives the same network a new trigger. And every experience the consumer has had with you has been average or worse. Then redesigning the visual network is just giving them a nicer looking reason to remember why they stopped caring. You haven't changed the meaning, you have changed the surface. The surface is bleak. We spoke about it. And consumers are not stupid. They know the difference. The brands that actually shift perception don't start with design. They start with experience, they fix the product, they fix the service, they fix how people feel when they interact with the brand. And only then does a visual refresh make sense. Because now there's actually something they signal as new, and their logo is just the key. What really matters is what's behind the door. If you haven't changed the rule, don't really bother changing the key. So let's see what the next rule talks about. Before I get into 43, I need to let you understand something. Rule 43 might sound similar to what we just discussed in Rule 41, right? Rule 41 told us what a brand actually is, that it's not the logo, it's the meaning in the customer's mind. Rule 43 is asking a different question, right? That if the brand is the meaning, who decides what that meaning is? You or the consumer? I think we might have given a hint at that a few minutes ago, but when we read it, it will take us further, a bit deeper, for us to have a better understanding and why the consumer is the person who confirms it, right? So let's get into it. Rule 43 brand meaning is proposed by the organization but confirmed by the consumer. One of the most important and most humbling truths in branding is that organizations do not own their brand meaning. They propose it, they invest in shaping it through communication, through design, through product experience, and through every other touch point they control. But the meaning that actually resides in the consumer's mind, the meaning that governs their perception, shapes their preference, and drives their behavior, is the meaning that the consumer has constructed through their direct and indirect experience of the brand. It may align closely with what the organization intended. It may diverge from it significantly. In either case, the consumer's version is the one that matters. The practical implication is that the executive must manage both sides of the negotiation. The outbound signals that the organization controls and the inbound feedback that reveals how those signals are landed. Research into brand perception is not a nice to have. It is a governance mechanism for the most strategically significant assets the organization possesses. The brand that is not monitoring how its meaning is evolving in the consumer's mind is managing its most valuable assets blindly. Propose meaning with ambition, monitor how it is being received with rigor, and close the gap between proposal and confirmation through operational alignment, not just communication intensity. Now the declaration. Manage both sides of the negotiation, or the consumer will manage it for you. What are we learning here? There's something they say about negotiation, which is the person with the most power at the table is the one who can walk away. So keep that in mind. But because branding, according to this book, is a negotiation, and most managers uh don't realize they are in one. They spend months on brand strategy, define the positioning. In fact, they approve the visual identity, sign off on the campaign, and in their minds, the work is done. They've told the market who they are. Now the market knows. But the market didn't agree to anything. The market is there living its own life. And every time the market interacts with their brand, not the campaign, but the brand, it forms its own opinion. And that opinion is based on experiences, like we mentioned earlier, not on the messaging. Let me make this real. The campaign says we put customers first, right? Beautiful line, great creative, it runs everywhere. But a customer calls to a service line and has to wait 45 minutes. Another customer walks in your store, and your staff acts like they are doing them a favor. You know, in Ghana, you can walk into a store to buy something, and the the I was listening to um uh one guy speak, uh, I think Derek Abbaite was talking about how uh in Ghana you walk into a shop, the storekeeper is asleep, and you wake them up and it's like you've interrupted their sleep. You know, it's it's quite unfortunate, but that's what happens, right? You you walk in there, you wake them up, they act like they are doing you a favor by serving you. So someone buys your product and it doesn't work as promised. They walk into your store, they don't get the promise that your communication gave them. Each one of these moments is the consumer sitting across the table from you in that negotiation. And each time they are deciding, do I believe this brand, or do I believe what this brand is telling me, or do I believe what I just experienced? And every single time the experience wins. Every single time. That's what the book means by proposed by the organization, but confirmed by the consumer. You are proposing the meaning, you put it out there through your communication, your design, your campaigns, but the consumer is the one who is deciding whether to accept it or not. And they they decide based on what they've lived through with you. Imagine all that we've said, and not what they've really seen on your billboard. Again, think about a brand you've stopped using, not because the advertising got worse, but because something in the experience broke. It broke their promise. Maybe it was one big moment, maybe it was a hundred small ones. You know, some people actually give many chances. But at some point, you sat at that negotiation table and you walked away as a consumer, and no amount of advertising brought you back because the proposal and the confirmation stopped matching. I feel like I'm saying six, seven. Now think about a brand you trust deeply. One where every interaction confirms what they they told you they would be. The product works, the the service is consistent. Think about it, the experience matches the promise essentially. You didn't start trusting them because one of them, because of one great campaign. You started trusting them because every time you showed up, they showed up too. The proposal and the confirmation kept matching over and over and over. And that repetition built something no campaign alone can build. Most brand managers only build one side of this negotiation. They spend all their energy on the proposal, the campaigns, the messaging, the beautiful creative, and they spend almost no energy monitoring the confirmation. What the consumer is actually experiencing, what they are actually saying, what meaning they've actually constructed in their heads. So that's like negotiating with your eyes closed. You're talking but not listening. And eventually the other side stops showing up. The brand is not a declaration, it is a negotiation. And the consumer has more power in it than you do. Because they are the ones who can walk away. You have to stay, you have to keep proving the point. So you need to manage both sides well, or the consumer will manage it for you. Rule number 49: a brand that means everything means nothing. Brand extension is among the most commercially tempting and strategically dangerous activities available to the marketing communications executive. The brand that has been successfully built around a specific and clearly owned meaning, generates the perception of permission. Consumers trust it, their organization has invested significantly in building its equity, and the argument for extending that equity into adjacent categories feels compelling. The brand is trusted, but why not leverage that trust more broadly? The reason is that brand meaning, like any form of meaning, derives its power from specificity. The brand that stands for one thing specifically, a precise emotional benefits, a defined quality position, and an ambiguous identity. Its meaning is stable because it is clear that brand that has been extended across multiple categories, multiple consumer segments, and multiple positioning territories in pursuit of revenue growth from accumulated equity has in many cases diluted the very specificity that made the equity worth extending. A brand that means one thing precisely is worth more than a brand that means many things vaguely. Protect the one thing. The declaration statement here says brand extension without strategic discipline is brand dilution. The more a brand tries to mean, the less it means to anyone. Protect the specificity, it is where the value lives. Wow. Let me paint a picture to you. And gentlemen, you you'll understand this one. You've you're somewhere at an event, a gathering, wherever, and you see a lady, and something about her catches your attention. You can't even explain it immediately, but it's it sounds like the way, it looks like the way she carries herself. Maybe it's her style, not loud, not trying too hard, but just distinctly her. Maybe it's one thing her confidence, her laugh, her composure, something very specific. And that specificity is what draws you in. You're not attracted to everything about every woman in the room. You are attracted to something particular about this one. Imagine she noticed you notice it, and instead of being herself, she starts trying to be everything. She changes how she talks depending on who she's around. She's loud with one group, quiet with another. She's corporate here, she's street there. She's trying to appeal to everyone in the room. And what happens? The one thing that made her attractive, that specificity, that distinctiveness disappears. She becomes forgettable. Not because she's less beautiful now, but because you can no longer tell what she actually is. The attraction dies when distinctiveness appears. Brands work the same way. We talked about this in episode two. If you're speaking to everyone, you're not speaking to anyone. That was about communication. This rule is saying the same thing about brand meaning. If your brand tries to mean everything, it means nothing. And this is one of the hardest disciplines in business because brand extension is tempting. It makes commercial sense on paper. You've built a brand that people trust. People know your name, you have equity, and then someone in the boardroom says, Hey, we should leverage this equity into a new category. And it sounds smart, it's it sounds like growth. But every time you extend into a new category, you are asking the consumer to update what your brand means in their mind. And every update dilutes the original meaning of your brand. You started with something specific, something people could uh point to and say that's what they are. Now, with every extension, clarity fades. Until one day you ask five people what your brand means, and you get five different answers. And when five people can't agree on what you stand for, you don't stand for anything. Now, let me be clear about something. I'm not talking about conglomerates. A conglomerate is like a parent company that owns multiple businesses, right? Think JOSPO. Each with their own brand, their own identity, their own meaning. That's portfolio management, that's strategy. What this rule is talking about is one brand, one name, one identity stretching itself across too many categories until the consumer can no longer. Tell you what it actually stands for. That's dilution. And those are two very different things. When I read this rule, a particular indigenous Ghanaian brand came to mind immediately. But I'll not name it. Because where I come from, you don't point to your father's house with your left hand, with your left finger. But if you are in this market, and for those of you who know me personally, you know the brand I'm talking about. I'm sure a name would come to mind. So hold on to it and ask yourself: can you describe what that brand means in one sentence? Not what it does, what it means. If you can't, then you understand why this rule, you understand exactly what this rule is saying. The book says a brand that means one thing precisely is worth more than a brand that means many things vaguely. Worth more. Not just strategically, but commercially. Because specificity is what drives preference, right? Specificity is what builds the kind of trust that makes someone choose you without thinking about it. Like the lady at the event, you didn't choose her because she was trying to be everything. You chose her because she was unapologetically something. The moment you dilute that, the moment you start meaning a little bit of everything, you start losing the thing that made you valuable in the first place. And this requires courage because the pressure to extend is constant. The revenue opportunity looks real, the boardroom wants growth. And saying no, we should protect what we mean rather than chasing what we could sell is one of the most difficult things a marketing executive can do. That discipline, the discipline of protecting specificity, is where the long-term value lives. So protect the specificity, it is where the value actually lives. Now, let's see what the last rule is saying, and then we can conclude the episode. Rule 50 consistency is not rigidity, it is a discipline that builds trust. There is a tension in brand management between consistency and freshness, between the discipline of expressing the same meaning across every touch point over time, and the creative and commercial instincts to evolve, adapt, and respond to the constantly changing context the brand operates in. The tension is real and it is managed badly in both directions by organizations that are so rigid in their identity application that they produce communication that is recognizable but stale. And by organizations that are so hungry for novelty that they change the brand's voice, visual conventions, and positioning signals so frequently that no coherent meaning ever accumulates. The test of genuine consistency is not whether the campaign looks like the last one, it is whether a consumer who has been following the brand for five years would recognize the new campaign as the brand's work. Not because it is visually identical, but because it sounds and feels like the same brand with the same values, the same character, and the same relationship with the audience. Trust is built through this kind of consistency. The brand that behaves predictably across time and context, that is recognizably itself, without whether it is speaking in a television commercial, a social media post, a customer service interaction, or a product packaging claim is a brand that consumers can form stable expectations about. And stable expectations are the foundations of the trust that makes brand equity commercially viable. So the declaration statement says consistency is not the enemy of freshness, it is a frame within which freshness is recognizable as yours. Discipline the meaning, liberate the expression. Do not confuse the two. Professor Henson and Joel. You know, I believe that the biggest barrier to adoption in this African market is trust. And I keep saying it in this episode, in this series, because the books keep proof proving it. And if you think about it, this rule shows up, it shows you how trust is actually built and how easily it's destroyed. The book describes a tension that every brand manager lives with. You need to be consistent because consistency is what would build recognition, familiarity, and trust over time. But you also need to be fresh because the market changes, culture evolves, culture moves. And a brand that never evolves starts to feel still. And most brands get this tension wrong. They either hold on so tight that everything feels rigid and outdated, or they change so often that a consumer can't keep track of who they are anymore. Let me make this practical. Leads are coming in, the brand is connecting, people are responding, and someone in the room says, We need to refresh the creative. Maybe you update the visual style. Nothing too dramatic. You didn't change the strategy, you didn't change the products, you didn't, you, you, you didn't change anything, you just refreshed the expression, right? And the numbers drop. Not dramatically, but noticeably. And everyone in the room can can explain why. The media plan is the same, the budget is the same, the audience is the same. So what changed? What changed is you broke the consistency. When you shifted, when you shifted your tone or the look, even slightly, something in their brain flagged it. Not so consciously. They didn't sit down and say this brand feels different today. But they the recognition weakened, their familiarity dropped, and with it, the trust. That's how fragile this is. You don't have to change your logo to break consistency, you just have to stop sounding like yourself. Now, let me show you what happens when brands break consistency at their biggest level. Twitter. One of the most recognizable names in the history of the internet, right? A brand so embedded in global culture that a tweet became a verb. I mean, tweet, the word tweet became a verb. Elon Musk rebranded it to X. New name, new logo, new identity, and then what happened? Confusion, resistance. In fact, market value questions started coming up. Not because X is a bad name per se, but because you cannot erase a decade of associative meaning overnight and expect the consumer to just follow you. The consistency that made Twitter what it was, the bluebird, the word tweet, the cultural shorthand was not rigidity, it was equity. And it was abandoned in pursuit of freshness that nobody asked for. Now, don't get me wrong, there were several other factors that contributed to their woes, right? But the kicker, I believe, was a rebrand. I'm sure you are thinking, but uh MTN had rebranded. MTN was not MTN 20 years ago. You're right. But it's always been yellow. The energy, the tone, campaign after campaign, year after year, you always know it's MTN. Not because every ad looks the same, they don't. The expression keeps evolving. The creative keeps moving. But the underlying character is consistency. The meaning stays. You could you could see a new MTN campaign you've never seen before and know immediately it's theirs. Not because of the logo that is sitting somewhere in the corner, because of how it feels. Same value, same energy, same relationship with you. That's the discipline the book is describing. Consistency is not repetition. Consistency is not doing the same thing over and over and over. Consistency is being recognizable even when you're doing something new. It's the container within which creative freedom is possible. The frame within which you within which your freshness is recognizable as yours. Discipline is the meaning. Liberate the expression and don't confuse the two. So, what is part fight really telling us in this episode? A brand is not a logo, that is established. It is a system of meaning built slowly into your consumer's mind. Through every interaction, every communication, every experience. You can propose what that meaning should be, but the consumer would confirm it for you, or they don't. And if you try to make your brand mean everything to everyone, you dilute the very thing that makes it valuable. The discipline that protects brand meaning over time is consistency, not rigidity, not repetition, consistency, which is being recognizable even when you're doing the same thing. And in our markets, trust means everything. So let me leave you with this. Think about your brand or the one that you you work on. And whilst we think about it, can you describe what it means in one sentence? Not what it does, what it means. If you can't, everything we've discussed in this part in this episode just showed you why that's a problem. And so ask yourself: is the consumer's version of your brand the same as yours? You can run an audit. If you don't know the answer, you are already behind in that negotiation. Anyway, get the book, Rules for the Marketing Communications Executive by Professor Henson and John Netty. The details are in the description. There are 12 chapters in this book, but I covered only four. The other with eight are waiting for you. Share this episode with someone who needs to hear it. Drop a comment, let me know which rule challenged you the most. And please subscribe so you don't miss the next one that is coming. This has been the making, right? Here on Mad Conversations. I have been your mad friend, Abirku. See you in the next one.