Who Owns Your Brand?
by KMF Kamal
It is a story you may have heard before. A company hires a brand consultant for a large sum of money, reassured that they will get returns in spades because of the copious amounts of research and insight they will receive from the exercise they have commissioned.
However, throughout the exercise, the client company gets increasingly worried. Information appears to be nothing more than a mere trickle. The client does not know if commissioned reports are, in fact, complete or whether the consultant is hiding something. Due to this, the thought process that should be proprietary to the company appears to belong to the consultant.
To top it off, when, in frustration, the client company sacks the consultant due to ineffectiveness, they realize they have exposed their competitive practices, culture, and customers to consultants who will doubtlessly repeat the process at another company elsewhere – and have added a treasure trove of information to their library to boot.
This story is common, not only in the world of branding but the world of business itself. There are oftentimes stories told of disgruntled employees who have worked on integral parts of a system leaving abruptly, resulting in the ex-company realizing the employee was the only one who truly knew how those parts worked.
The moral to the story is that every company should be very careful about how and under what terms they allow access to their processes, information, and strategies for their brand. When you hire a brand consultant, you are essentially hiring someone to be the custodian for your brand. Sure enough, at the end of the process, you may actually find that the hired gun knows more about your brand than you do, which causes no end of difficulties. Similarly, if you hire a specialist employee to oversee your brand management department, you may suddenly find they have jumped ship with all the knowledge they have accumulated.
It is, perhaps, an inevitable consequence of the branding process that incidents like this should occur. Branding, being an all-encompassing activity, is bound to the planners and not, as it inevitably turns out, the executors. Therefore, before embarking on any form of identification or strategy, it is pertinent for any company to take the few precautions listed on the next page.
