Rewiring your brand
In the early 2000s, while working in my first brand strategy role, I heard it said that “a brand is like electricity”.
It’s always there, buzzing in the background, ready to be switched on.
It’s a mental model that I often found useful as brands moved through the postmodern era and beyond – beyond brand expressed as an identity, towards brand as a system built on utility. In my mind, it was easy to conceive of an organisation as a series of electrical circuits, transmitting the brand to the various teams. Those teams then had the choice of whether or not to flick the switch and use the brand as part of their own efforts to deliver products and/or services in order to acquire and/or retain customers.
Now twenty years later, while sitting in the boardroom of an ASX 50 company recently, I was equally intrigued to hear this said to introduce a current brand strategy project and articulate its significance for the organisation:
“Nobody sees the wires in the roof, but they keep the lights on.”
Sometimes, a brand evolution might call for a simple refresh.
At other times, a brand revolution might require a complete rebrand.
But there’s a third state that means you shouldn’t automatically hit the reset button: if your brand doesn’t switch on, it might have become disconnected from your business.
Before you rebrand or refresh, you’ll probably need to rewire.
How do you trust?
Over more than a decade, the FutureBrand Index has helped us track and understand what makes brands tick.
Having empirical data to shape our approach to building brands is imperative when it comes to giving business leaders the confidence they need to make good decisions, whether that’s our own FutureBrand Index or indeed our clients’ own data sources.
Amidst increasingly volatile and uncertain times, it’s been particularly interesting to track the evolution of trust as a pivotal dynamic. Specifically, our analysis of the latest data associated with brands perceived to be moving ahead in three years’ time has led us to identify the emergence of the ‘trust stack’.
Brands that rise (and stay risen) make their direction feel tangible as a result of their ‘mission’; they prove they can be believed through their ‘authenticity’; they spark belief and ‘inspiration’; they show real ‘innovation’ customers can see and feel; and, they demonstrate ‘thought leadership’ to guide the conversation, not just follow it.
This pattern emerges clearly across the highest-performing brands in the FutureBrand Index. Whether they’re decade-long leaders or breakthrough performers, they demonstrate the same fundamental discipline: they make their purpose tangible through their actions.
Ultimately, a brand is what a brand does.
So – to build trust – how does your brand stack up?
From A to B Corp – and beyond
For long time readers of this newsletter, you may recall my mantra ‘to make the business better than it was before’ – it was that mantra that informed our own business strategy after the acquisition in 2020, and it subsequently led us to achieving B Corp Certification in 2023.
As I wrote at the time, it’s not a one-off process.
It’s a framework for continuous improvement and, in order to maintain B Corp Certification, companies must undertake the assessment and verification process every three years, demonstrating they are still meeting rising standards for social and environmental performance.
3 years on, we’ve done exactly that.
By achieving B Corp Re-Certification.
Over that time, making our business ‘better’ has evolved into exploring all the ways in which we might make it all the more ‘impactful’.
For example, our concerted efforts to offer our brand transformation services to Not-For-Profit organisations on a ‘pro bono’ basis (to the tune of $550,000 over 5 years); to evolve and strengthen our service blueprint to enable ever greater collaboration and productivity for colleagues and clients alike; and, to extend the pathways and remove the hurdles so that more diverse talent can find real opportunities to enter the creative sector through our Regional Internship program.
All in all, by balancing purpose and profit, we are committed to making a positive impact, and our B Corp Recertification shows that we mean what we say and we continue to put our money where our mouth is.
It’s bird! It’s a plane! No, it’s a super brand!
When your brand is built on fun and its identity takes inspiration from the world of comics, it’s no wonder that you would create your own comic books featuring your employees as superheroes.
That’s Funlab for you!
Always taking the fun to the extreme in each and every experience, and using their brand to tell stories in and around those experiences in ways that are distinctively, unmistakably, Funlab.
It’s a full-circle moment – an expression of the brand that took its original inspiration from the typography of the comic books of yesteryear – and, of course, the perfect genre for sharing those hero moments.
Next time you want to fire up your brand, just ask yourself this: what would Inferno do? 🔥
That’s it for this month of news, views and insights.
For me, the best thing about this email newsletter format is that you can simply reply if you have questions or comments. Please feel free to do so, I’m always happy to follow-up with more detail on any of the stories I share, especially if that can help you build your own brand and business. Hit ‘Reply’, speak soon.
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