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                             7 Up by kevindooleyBy Larry Kilbourne

Brand identity is a powerful marketplace lever, which is why marketers and their organizations spend so much time and effort to develop, foster and promote a concept that consumers will associate with a product or service, along with its organization.

But as I learned on two separate occasions, successful branding can have a downside that is difficult to offset because of its very success.

Many years ago I worked for a new division of Dale Carnegie Training called Customized Corporate Solutions®. Unlike the ubiquitous public speaking courses Carnegie was universally known for, the corporate solutions division of Carnegie was created expressly for the purpose of providing training for organizations.

Customized Corporate Solutions® promoted leadership development training, team building, change management, customer service and a host of custom training courses to help organizations excel in a highly competitive business environment just as globalization in the marketplace was gaining a full head of steam.

My initial thought, and that of many of my colleagues, was that this should be a fairly easy sale to business executives. After all, Dale Carnegie Training was the best-established and well-known brand among training organizations (maybe exempting the military). And it was a hugely successful brand to boot, as evidenced by the testimony of business leaders over the (then) sixty-plus years attributing their personal success in part to the impact of the Dale Carnegie Course.

Imagine my surprise then, when I discovered that this well-known brand identity was making it difficult to gain audiences with these very executives. It was only after perhaps a year and a half that I realized that Carnegie's brand identity was very much at odds with the 'product' we were trying to sell.

We believed we could leverage the Carnegie brand to tout corporate leadership training and development. But to executives, Carnegie was about public speaking and individual development. So the refrain I heard over and over was, "Oh yes, Carnegie is a wonderful course, but I don't have any people who need public speaking skills or confidence building at present." End of discussion.

It was fruitless to argue against their perception, because, after all, Carnegie was about confidence building and effective communications. At least this was true of their public enrollment course. But unfortunately, that was where their brand identity lay, and I finally realized that I stood a better chance of a sale if I talked about Customized Corporate Solutions® without mentioning it as a division of Dale Carnegie Training.

The second occasion when brand came back to bite me was working with a small professional services company that specialized in custom web development, especially building web portals. The company had branded itself as a tenacious upstart:  smart, agile and able to craft unique solutions to business needs.

This worked well enough with certain audiences, but I found that time and again we lost bids with large, well-established organizations. I couldn't figure out why: we typically had better talent, better pricing, and were hungry to delight customers. So what wasn't working? The light didn't go on until at the end of a presentation one prospective customer said,

"Look, I know your company will do a better job than the others competing, and I know you'll do it at a bill-rate of nearly half of your Fortune 50 competitors. But if I hire you and anything goes wrong, I'm toast. My boss will say, "You hired who?! I've never even heard of them! Have you lost your mind!"

The bottom line is, your company has little name recognition, a short track record, and I can't risk my job on a bet. Sure, I'll end up paying ABC twice as much, and they'll overbill me for junior level programmers who'll screw things up. But at the end of the day, even if the project is over budget and poorly executed, I'll still have a job. Because no one's ever going to fire me for hiring ABC."

It was at this point I realized that the brand identity we had lovingly created: upstart, hungry and talented, was completely at odds with what the big organizations we were selling to wanted: known entity, reputable, long-lived.

Only much later did I realize that we would have been better off stressing the pedigree of the company's founders and principals, who all came from Fortune 50 companies, and thus could offer Fortune 50 experience without its associated overhead.

In both cases, the brand identity my respective companies created came back to bite us. Given the markets we looked to sell to, in each instance we misidentified our strengths relative to our customer's concerns and perceptions, while misunderstanding their buying criteria and how this either played into or clashed with the brand identity we'd created.

Brand identity is a powerful thing. But it can be a Frankenstein's monster.

Copyright © 2009 by Larry Kilbourne, Ph.D. Dr. Kilbourne is an independent marketing consultant. He may be reached at lkphd@yahoo.com