Your Brand is everything related to delivering on your vision

What does “In all things Brand, in nothing brand” mean?  At its core it means you need to look at your vision and then define your Brand as everything related to delivering on that vision. This is the execution of your vision.  Vision and Brand work together to deliver an amazing customer experience based on what the customer is actually trying to accomplish.

Why the capital ‘B’ Brand and the small ‘b’ brand? Capital ‘B’ brand are all of those things that you do that are related to your vision, that is your real Brand, small ‘b’ encapsulates all of those hour long discussions you have over colors and photos and the perfect copy.  There are a lot of people who will tell you those are your brand, but they are just a small, small part(unless you are a creative agency).  If an hour discussing colors takes you away from an hour developing your real Brand, that is wrong.   Branding is a key concept to marketing and there have been many, many books written on branding.  Searching Amazon.com there are over 3000 books on branding.  Branding is crucial, but the most crucial aspect of branding is that everything related to delivering your vision is branding and more than that your employees, your customers, your management, your board must live your brand.
For example, say you followed the vision guidelines and decided you wanted to create an amazing experience for consumers to listen to music while on the go.  The brand around this is clearly a great portable music player, but what else is related to that experience?  A great way to buy your music.  A great way to find your music.  Great music.  Obviously Apple went out and did all of these things (they didn’t make great music, but they made deals to get great music).  You don’t have to produce all of things to create the vision yourself, but they need to be integrated and easily accessible.

A few points on why “In all things Brand, in nothing brand” is important:

• Your vision is meaningless unless it is reflected in your actions
• Every interaction is a reflection of your organization
• How you operate is your best marketing