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:
- It is not enough to have a great brand strategy – one must live it out too!
- 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.
- 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.