Do you suffer from “brand mushiness”? It’s a common malady with clear symptoms.
1. Audiences can’t articulate your clear position
Poll 10 or 12 random constituents. Ask them to describe you in a sentence. If you discover wide disparity in their answers, you might be ridden with brand mushiness.
2. Audiences can’t distinguish you from competitors
Ask the same 10 people (or find 10 others for that matter) and ask them what makes you different from “XUniversity.” If it’s not clear to them (or their answers aren’t clear to you), you may be a victim of mushiness.
3. Proliferation of silos and marketing efforts developed in a vacuum
Check around your campus. Are all the marketers across campus on the same page? Are all the delivery methods describing the same university to different audiences? Or does each audience hear of a different institution?
4. Lack of enthusiasm and collegiality internally
Take the internal temperature. Are faculty, staff and students eager to tell your great story? Do they know your story? When you celebrate together, what’s the mood?
5. The internal audience is not convinced of your value
Do insiders scoff at your marketing messages? Do they poke fun at your best efforts? Are the cynics a vocal majority?
Knowing that your brand is mushy may be a bitter pill. But left unchecked, brand mushiness can lead to further illness and even death for your institution.
If these symptoms sound familiar, we recommend that you seek help immediately for your brand.
There’s no question: you have a brand. You may not like the one you have, but nonetheless, you have one. As Marty Neumeier keeps reminding us, brands are “what they say you are, not what you say you are.”
Taking a step beyond branding, coherence is the practice of sharing a true and authentic story with audiences to make meaningful connections and exchanges. Coherence is marked by honesty and integrity. It is based on careful listening to one another. It seeks to understand. And it yields positive engagement between you and your customers.
The symptoms of coherence are brand clarity, internal audience enthusiasm, marketing continuity, customer satisfaction, integrated efforts and achievement of marketing goals.
Don’t fear: brand mushiness is not terminal. Coherence is the cure.
-Rick Bailey is the principal and founder of Richard Harrison Bailey/The Agency and author of Coherence: How Telling the Truth Will Advance Your Cause (and Save the World). Follow him on Twitter @RichardHBailey.
