Towards Brandurability
I’ve been working for over 40 years. The thought appals me - I don’t feel very different from the 21 year old that first set foot in the Sydney Unilever office on my first day. And yet… I know I’ve accumulated so much experience and knowledge. I’ve seen recessions come and go, boom times, interest rates of 17+%. The great thing about ageing is that you can breathe deep and say “this too shall pass”, knowing that it probably will.
My first passionate interest was in marketing, product development and brands. Unilever was the perfect place to learn in the 1980s. We were taught basic principles, not just the fundamentals of marketing, but how to balance a P&L, manage budgets, how to steer a complex product launch project, how to manage people - the list is endless. Some of it was learned on the job, but much was taught in formal training programs. By the time I left my last role there as Marketing Director, I had responsibility for revenue of over $100 million, a marketing budget of several million and a team of 14 marketers. Over my years there and later as a consultant back to Unilever — I taught marketing, brand strategy and advertising courses for young generations of Unilever marketers — I got to see first-hand the power of a well-crafted and nurtured brand. I was privileged to work with iconic product brands like Omo, Rexona, Flora, Ponds and Vaseline. I launched several new products, some of which still sit on the shelves today.
Some years later, I started a brand strategy consultancy and helped dozens of companies with their company brands. At the time, there was no understanding that a so-called ‘brand promise’ made to customers has to reflect the truth of how a company operates. Much of my work was in helping company executives understand the essence of the brand they had inherited and align that with company processes and policies. I also worked on projects where companies had been acquired, their brands folded in to a new parent, and a new brand architecture for the group was required. One such example was written up as a Harvard Business School case study.
Whilst doing my brand work, what began as a community project spawned a new career direction for me. I had established a mentoring program for young female marketing practitioners. Over time, the women in that program began asking me to set up a program for them, inside their companies. That was the source of my second passionate career interest — mentoring. My small consulting practice turned into a bigger business when one of my sons joined me. Together we turned the mentoring expertise I had gained into digital products, all available online in a mentoring program management platform. Suddenly I was back into managing people, budgets and building a new brand, this time for myself and my family. By the time I handed over the CEO role to my son in 2022, we had grown to employ over 20 people across Australia, the US and New Zealand, and had sold the business to a listed company. We’d run the company entirely virtually, so, no problem when COVID began, it was business as usual for us. Flexible work and an attractive company culture meant we were starting to be approached by some very talented people wanting to work for us. Our brand had a strong reputation and was becoming well known.
Recently, I’ve taken time to reflect on what made the business and our brand so successful.
That’s when I hit on the idea of ‘brandurability’. I couldn‘t find an existing term that fully captured the concept, so I coined my own term. Funnily enough, most people seem to get what is meant by brandurability, without explanation. It’s about the magic that happens when the organisation’s vision and purpose are reflected and embodied in the brand as a means to communicate the customer and employee promise, coupled with strong business principles and values. This is how a brand can endure and thrive.
We had put in place a clear brand purpose and some strong disciplines that meant the brand should thrive and outlast me. The brand was enduring because the culture we’d created was the glue that held it together, and this was perfectly aligned with our promise to customers of mentoring effectiveness and service. We walked our talk.
If you are a business founder or senior leader, ask yourself these questions:
Is your business brand dependent on you?
Is your brand purpose and promise embedded in every business process and customer experience? Is your employer brand the same as your customer brand?
Do your employees love working for your company and are they are inspired to serve customers?
Are your customers loyal brand advocates?
As business leader, do you live the brand values and walk the talk?
Is your brand underpinned by a solid financial plan and cash? Do you manage this with intentionality?
If the answer to any of these questions is ‘no’, then your business may not be ‘brandurable’ and could become one of the thousands of failed new or established businesses each year.
There are already quite a few books on building an enduring business. Jim Collins’ Built to Last is a classic and many of the principles I followed over the years were based on his book. But researchers do not seem to have focused on marrying the built-to-last principles with brand strategy. This is what I have attempted to do.
I look forward to your feedback and talking to you about brandurability, my third business passion.
© Melissa Richardson, 2023