Branding Begins at Home: Weaving a Metaphorical Marketing Tale of Fundamental Branding
Back in November, while in a car driving through Chinatown on the way to the airport, I saw four men on the sidewalk. They were busy trying to pull something (my guess is something very heavy) out of the basement of a brownstone building and onto the sidewalk with a rope.
At the end of the rope farthest from the building, standing just off the curb was the youngest of the men – a man we will call The Dreamer. His place in the pecking order symbolically represented by his position at the end of the rope — he was completely disengaged from both the task at hand and the rest of the people trying to accomplish it. He was not pulling on the rope at all.
Standing approximately six feet apart from each other on the sidewalk, each holding on to the mid-section of the rope, were two men we will call The Confused. These two men were half-heartedly pulling on the rope but actively engaged in disagreement about a topic I could not identify from my car.
The fourth man was only visible from behind, as he stood hunched over the opening of the basement pulling vigorously on the rope. We will call him The Busy. While I cannot be sure, I am willing to bet that he was tugging away under the impression his co-workers were tugging on the rope as hard as he was — which, of course, they were not.
Into this scene walked a fifth character we will call The Salesman. In a familiar New York City scenario, this man was walking down the sidewalk trying to sell something in a medium sized brown cardboard box. He didn’t bother trying to sell it to The Busy. He tried, instead, to engage The Confused, but they were too involved in their debate to pay any attention to his offer. He soon gave up, ducked under the rope and continued to walk down the sidewalk.
Around this time our traffic light changed and the driver began to pull away and head for the airport. As we pulled away, I began to think about this scene and how it related to the topic of the speech on Internal Branding and Engagement I was to give in San Francisco the following morning.
Of course, companies that spend millions of dollars and countless valuable resources marketing their goods and services to consumers often devote few if any resources to inspiring employees or educating them about where the company is going, why it is going there and how it will get there. When we consider that employees, in a certain way, actually are the brand, it would seem that clueless employees would almost certainly lead to clueless customers and wasted marketing, R&D, capital and other resources.
Reader Comments.
What is the purpose of this lengthy and trivial nonsense?
We need to get our heads out of the basement…[and]… communicate the brand vision…{and] empower… [ourselves]?
“…[B]randng begins at home??
Indeed! I assume this author took his own advise in writing this puff piece.
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