All this focus on the day of exercises to explore the company's brand and how I integrate it into my life and work has gotten me thinking, a lot, about brands. When I look at an ad or a product, I look for its brand. How is the brand expressed?
And I've been doing some reading on branding to discover just what it includes.
Here's what I think so far: branding can be the logo, a phrase, or even a look that conveys some ideal that the company uses to identify itself and its products in the marketplace. With this definition, the company is attempting to connect to the consumer, to have the consumer identify with the company. There is, for example, only one brand of swimsuit I'd consider wearing. The brand is forever associated with my father, with excellence, with the push to do better each time you swim. No other brand says that to me even if the suits are otherwise indistinguishable. I can recognize the suits on swimmers. The brand is seared into my brain on more levels than I can begin to fully enumerate.
That, clearly, is what a company wants to do with a brand.
It can go against them as well; a brand can become synonymous with an event or experience that results in an intense, and equally irrational, feeling of repulsion.
It makes sense, then, that the company would want its employees to relate to the brand when the brand identifies the company. Loyalty to the company as a facet of the agreement between you and the corporation. Loyalty is an idea that has been treated, in recent times, as something quaint and antiquated; loyalty to an employer is something that went out of fashion with my father's generation. My generation is smart, mobile, and dedicated to self-promotion, self-satisfaction, and self-realization. Loyalty to the corporate employer sometimes requires actions that do nothing for me, the individual.
Corporations are having to convince employees that they belong to a community managed by mysterious powers in some remote location. Corporations are, like some countries, a collection of territories taken in acquisitions that are decided not by the employees but by the leaders. Some leaders have made their territories ripe for acquisition; others have struggled mightily, with few resources, to protect their territories. Now, the larger collective has to be converted from a disparate collection of identities into one, monolithic culture. The great melting pot theory.
How reciprocal is this loyalty? My citizenship grants me certain responsibilities and benefits. Will pledging my allegiance to the corporation bring me benefits? I wonder what they are. I get a paycheck without pledging my allegiance. I get a paycheck by doing my job. So, what will the corporation give me in return for integrating myself and pledging allegiance?
What if I branded myself? What if I had a statement that identified me? What would I want it to be? Clearly, I have a new project.