Living Our Brand: Fulfilling The Promise Our Stakeholders Perceive We Make

I was looking through some of my older presentations before and had come across one slide that said,

“Living Our Brand: Fulfilling The Promise Our Stakeholders Perceive We Make” – Leigh Wong

Allow me to unpack that a little for you:

1. It is not enough to have a great brand strategy – one must live it out too!
2. Living out our brand happens in two parts: first, it’s about fulfilling a promise to our stakeholders. I know there are many, many, many ways of understanding what a brand ultimately is – but suffice to say, one of the better ways of understanding what a brand is, is that it is a promise made between our stakeholders and our brand. So, living our brand means keeping and fulfilling that every promise.
3. Second, living out our brand must also be understood in the context of our audience/stakeholder/customer/end-user. The promise we are making is not necessarily the one that we think we are making, rather it is the promise that our stakeholders perceive we are making!

So, when you want to think about living out your brand, you’ll really need to think about it in at least these terms described here.

Imagination Will Take You Everywhere – Albert Einstein (Quote)

I don’t know why I never came across this quote until now – it’s wonderful (especially for those like me who straddle the need for logic mixed with imagination! *Ahem* Branding, marketing, communications… etc.):

“Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere.” – Albert Einstein

What Is The Hub Of Social Media Marketing? (Seth Godin’s Answer)

I was reading this free e-book, Why Your Blog Is Your Social Media Hub, by Debbie Weil, the author of The Corporate Blogging Book. The e-book contains the responses of 32 experts to the question of whether one’s blog was truly the hub of one’s social media initiatives.

Out of the many the many answers that I read (which included everything from “yes”, to “no”, and everything else in the middle), my favourite was by my all-time marketing guru hero, Seth Godin, who said:

The hub of social media marketing is products and services worth talking about.

Yes, yes, and amen!

Creativity Is Connecting Things (Steve Jobs)

Steve Jobs muses on Creativity – via CreativeBits (link here).

When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people.

Unfortunately, that’s too rare a commodity. A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences. So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem.

The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.

- Steve Jobs

Seth Godin On Defining Brands

Seth Godin offers one of the best definitions of brands and brand values that I’ve come across to date:

A brand is the set of expectations, memories, stories and relationships that, taken together, account for a consumer’s decision to choose one product or service over another.

A brand’s value is merely the sum total of how much extra people will pay, or how often they choose, the expectations, memories, stories and relationships of one brand over the alternatives.

Original post link here.

Michael Eisner, Disney CEO, on "Brand"

“A brand is a living entity – and it is enriched or undermined cumulatively over time, the product of a thousand small gestures” - Michael Eisner, CEO Disney

Premier Private Colleges?

So here I was sitting at lunch, reading Bill Gates’ “My Advice To Students: Education Counts,” when I came across this line:

“If you don’t get reasonably good [high school] grades, it’s hard to get into a college that has the highly motivated, capable students who can really help you learn about the world.”

Basically, what Mr. Gates is driving at is this: Good high school grades get you into a good college.

It got me thinking about the state of tertiary education here in Malaysia. Specifically: Private tertiary education institutions (Institut Pengajian Tinggi Swasta – IPTS). Even more specifically: What makes a “good” IPTS?

A typical Malaysian student finishing high school makes his first choice for tertiary education by choosing between enrolling in a public university or seeking private tertiary education.

Now, there are many challenges to enrolling in public universities – namely lack of places, infrastructure, financial aid and various other social factors (such as the Bumiputra affirmative action, etc.). The lack of places in public institutions is exacerbated with the increasing number of students who realize the importance of having “academic qualifications.” All this has basically caused many Malaysian students to turn to IPTS’s. There are also perception issues involved, namely: First, the negative perception of local graduates (that they are quite unemployable) reducing the prestige of our local public institutions. Second, Malaysian students – if they can afford it – prefer to pursue an education overseas (typically to the US, UK, Australia, New Zealand or even Canada). Some go for the opportunity to expand their worldviews (exposure) while others attach a vague sense of “being better” as an overseas graduate with international experience. Perhaps this is a holdover from our colonial heritage – intelligent and privileged Malaysian children were (and still are!) sent overseas for boarding school and university, whether privately or publicly funded. This has lead students to turn to private institutions that offer “twinning programmes” – which allow students to begin his or her education locally before transferring to a college/university overseas to finish up and graduate.

ll of this has resulted in a booming private education industry. At last count, according to the Malaysian Ministry of Higher Education, there were 322 private education institutions – not counting their various branches all over the country. It is a very aggressive market with more and more institutions mushrooming all over the country.

Now, I don’t know about other countries, but in Malaysia many of these institutions are not blooming for humanitarian or societal reasons. Most of these are started up by businesses and organizations who are capitalizing on the current market trend: Education is great business! They are here for the money (but if they get to positively affect the country along the way and educate a few students too – great)!

As a result, you can pretty much enroll in most private institutions with lousy high school grades. Students skim through high school and now, with money, students think they can buy themselves a college degree (Which they can, I believe. Of course, they didn’t check out the fine print which said, “Education – the ability to think and learn independently – not included”). All this is because (more and more) private institutions are scrambling for (less and less) market share.

My friend – a lecturer with one of the leading private colleges here in Malaysia – believes that “providing education” and “making money” are two highly divergent and incompatible goals. So, with a mass market model in mind (i.e. get as many customers as we can), is it any wonder that there aren’t too many “good” private colleges around?

What if (let’s say) Inti College Malaysia decided to “brand up” and go “premium,” to admit only students with top-tier grades?

Would Malaysians end up with our very own “Harvard University?”

Would our students then, as Bill Gates says, “Get the best education you can… Learn how to learn”?

The Difference "Wow!" Makes

Here’s an example of the difference “Wow!” makes to any brand or product.

Typical Tactic:

A team asked for sponsorship for their drive in a brand new Toyota Land Cruiser from Kuala Lumpur to China on normal roads.

New Straits Times Cars Bikes Trucks editor, Yamin A. Vong declared, “It was daft. What was the challenge? Trying to get people to contribute to their holiday?” (“Pave the way for leading edge technology,” New Straits Times Cars Bikes Trucks Quarterly Review, Wednesday, p.2, 29 March 2006.)

“Wow!” Tactic:

A couple from England is trying to drive around the world – 29,000km by the standards of the Guiness Book of World Records – on less than 50 tanks of petrol in a standard car. If they can achieve it in 40 tank-loads, this will mean about 700km on a 45-litre tank. The car is a Volkswagen Golf FSI 1.6 and the petrol is a prototype Shell formulation that is scheduled to be launched worldwide over the next two years.

See how the typical tactic is so… typical? Didn’t your eyebrows rise when you read what a challenge and clever marketing idea Volkwagen and Shell embarked on?

Not only that, the tactic also sends a great, clear and compelling message: Rising fuel prices mean nothing to the highly fuel-efficient Volkswagen and the dollar-stretching Shell petrol.

The message is so compelling it almost demands action: buy Volkswagen and Shell petrol. It’s not just “Wow!” for Wow’s sake (which is where I feel many great advertising efforts tend to strive for). There’s no compelling message – nothing that moves me to action.

It’s like that Greek saying David Ogilvy made famous (and is my motto as a IncSights):

When Aeschines spoke, they said, “How well he speaks.” But when Demosthenes spoke, they said, “Let us march against Philip.”

Catching your attention and compelling you to action… now that’s the difference “Wow!” should make.

Seth Godin – "Remarkable"

I (along with many other people, I’m sure) really like Seth Godin‘s Purple Cow concept. Essentially, it’s about companies transforming themselves by becoming remarkable. Sounds straight forward enough, right?

However, where I think he really gets me is his definition of “remarkable”:

Remarkable: Worth making a remark about.

It’s so straightforward and simple that many companies still find it difficult to grasp or achieve.