I've done a lot of 'brand' work over the last 15 years and what I love about it is it's about identity. I find organisations fascinating and often thought if I ever did formal study again I'd want to look at organisations - identity, culture, and how they are more than the sum of their parts. Organisations include businesses, ngos, nations, families and any place where people join together as an entity.
Many people are fascinated with personal identity - which explains the popularity of horoscopes, blogs, personality quizzes and so on. In organisations a lot of these quizzes about personal working styles (Jane is a harmonising finisher and Peter is a competitve explorer etc...) seem to be about working out who's the hands or fingers, who's the spleen, who's the brain and who's part of the digestive tract. In my experience in large organisations the digestive tracts are particularly large.
What is interesting is while I have spent a lot of time concerned with managing perceptions of brands it has become clear to me that no organisation I have worked for has ever owned their brand. Likewise with personal brands, you can choose how you want to be perceived and work toward it but really you never do own it.
I've not done any searches on this and I know it's not going to be a brand new (ho ho) observation, but it seems to me that the brand is owned by the audiences. I realised that because that's where I go to measure brand equity. In other words, in case this isn't clear, if I'm measuring perceptions of people who are customers, or staff to measure the brand the brand actually held by those customers or staff.
Same with personal brand I might think I'm a nice guy but if everyone says I'm an arse, what am I?
So brand managers are really stylists and the audiences are the judges.You can say something about your organisation over and over, but if the customer doesn't believe it it's not true.
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