Brand man: the role of communications in our survival.

We wouldn’t be here today but for our extraordinary ability to communicate. Me, you, the kids next door.  None of us.

You see you don’t have to travel back very far to the days when we (Homo Sapiens) were not in the comfort of a monopoly that we are today. We had competition at the top of the food chain. And it wasn’t just from sabre toothed tigers and woolly mammoths. There were other species of humans built much like us, doing much the same things as us, with the same needs & intentions. We were in a competitive market.
 

In the excellent 'Sapiens' Yuval Noah Harari suggests that a mere 170,000 years ago we (Sapiens) lived concurrently no fewer than three other 'Homo' species. Yet 100,000 years later only one had survived. Why?
 

Harari concludes that our dominance as a species was not due, as is commonly suggested, to superior brain size (all boasted brains of similar size). The difference between winning and losing was down to our ability to communicate.

Us Homo Sapiens used our resources (our similar sized brains) in a different way to the competition. We developed more sophisticated ways to communicate, and in so doing managed to engage, direct and mobilise people on a much larger scale than the others.

A critical element of this was our ability to use language to create stories above and beyond  "Watch out, there's a tiger behind you".  Uniquely, Sapiens created fiction, we could talk about things that we hadn’t seen, smelled or run away from. This was immensely powerful.  It was the start of myths, legends, gods and religion, which enabled us to imagine things collectively.  It was this that enabled us to co-operate flexibly in large numbers, and thus take over the world.

All this may sound a familiar pattern to brand people. At its core, branding unleashes the power of storytelling to galvanise large groups of people. Brands aren’t ‘real’: the AA, Downton Abbey and Moo.com are businesses, experiences and feelings, but you can’t touch them any more than you can touch religion, laws or limited companies. At one level, brands don’t exist.

Yet brands create imagined realities out of words and symbols, and thus offer powerful ways to engage the masses around commonly held beliefs and values.

So, the moral of this story is simple: when you don’t enjoy a relevant competitive product advantage, you best invest your time creating and communicating a story and set of beliefs (branding) that can engage and galvanise large groups of people. It’s worked for us for 170,000 years.

What is a brand? And building brand value.

Your definition of a brand will be different to mine. The Intellectual Property Office says this about a brand

A brand can be a trade name, a sign, symbol, slogan or anything that is used to identify and distinguish a specific product, service or business. But a brand is much more than this; it can also be a ‘promise of an experience’ and conveys to consumers a certain assurance as to the nature of the product or service they will receive and also the standards the supplier or manufacturer seeks to maintain.

A brand is an intangible asset of your business and is often the most valuable part. So how much is a brand worth?

Brand Value

A brand is really only worth what somebody is prepared to pay for it. If you were to try and calculate what a brand was worth on a business already for sale then in theory you could take the amount the business is to be sold for, deduct its fixed assets and the remainder, often referred to, as "Goodwill" is essentially the value of that businesses brand.

Calculating the value of your brand is a far greater task and there are many methods that we will discuss another day.

Building Value in Your Brand

If you are looking to sell your business then developing your brand is going to be key. Here are a few areas we suggest you focus to add value to your brand and increase its value.

• Develop Brand Guidelines and stick to them. Deliver what you promise, and don't promise more than you can deliver.
• Use Brand Targeting to find the people who will drive revenue and profits into your business.
• Engage your employees and bring them into the brand, they will probably be around for the new owners of your business and they are what makes the machine work.
• Clearly define your brand in a document that allows anybody to continue your work. This reduces the work involved in taking over a business and allows the new owners to focus on other areas.

A fun graphic