As I traveled the U.S. giving talks to economic development professionals on how their community brand could uniquely deliver the American Dream, I had the opportunity to listen to stories of many failed community branding efforts. I found the stories unfortunate because for the most part the failures were avoidable. The typical root cause of the failures tended to be one of three things.
In 1986 Jan Carlzon, the former President of Scandinavian Airlines, wrote a book titled Moments of Truth. The core principle presented in the book was that every decision is a process.
This is a challenging subject. Many people believe the only measure of success is the final results. For example, if you are selling a product did you sell more because of the investment in your communication campaign? If yes, then it is judged a success. If no, it is judged a failure.
Doing the wrong thing can be worse than doing nothing. I have often been asked to review RFPs to contract for a branding initiative. Most are jargon filled documents even the author has a hard time explaining. These poorly written RFPs are an open invitation for an agency to strike gold. Confused clients are the easiest to please and to generate revenue from.
Image and identity are not the same and require different strategies to address problems.
