Short-term performance and Long-term health

There's a lot of pressure on marketers these days to have their brand "doing stuff". It's all about the customer experience, the here and now. Real time. Being "out there". Acts not ads. Agility. Brand as verb. Participating.

I've written enough about it in this blog.

And it's true that there are lot more possibilities open to brands to communicate with their users and potential users than there were even 10 years ago.

But it's a mistake to be doing stuff just because we can, in the same way that it's a mistake to lose track of why we're doing it. While I'm not a fan of spending months sitting pontificating about what is an emotional benefit or what is a physical attribute in some complex brand model that bears little relation to reality, I do believe that senior marketers have a responsibility to take a long-term view - maybe not quite as long-term as the Long Now foundation (!) - but certainly beyond the latest app and viral campaign. What is my brand's purpose? Where is it heading? What is our vision - and how does all the "stuff" we're going to be doing fit with that?

That is certainly the thinking behind P&G's recent re-organisation of their Marketing Division into Brand Management, with former Marketing Directors becoming Brand Directors.

If you pump an athlete full of drugs, they might be able to attain short-term success in one performance. But where is their health going long-term?

I am what I do?

In these days, when brands need agility above all else in order to succeed, I often wonder about the wisdom of spending hours, days or months defining a Position. And then sticking there.

The very word Position suggests something static, set in stone - maybe in pyramidal form - and not really agile at all. By the time you have defined it, the world has moved on and you are left rather like Ozymandias.

Some sort of statement of what your brand is and what it stands for in people's hearts and minds is important. But the next step is to work out what that means for how your brand behaves - what it does. What is your brand's role in people's lives?

There's a useful presentation, Brand as Verb by Ben Grossman, in which he gives 5 principles for a brand as more than a noun - "Brands must see themselves as verbs."

Just do it!