The world needs your brand. Your brand is unique, dare I say, remarkable. So your brand needs to resonate strongly with its authentic identity. But we all know a lot of brands (especially B2B brands) that don’t feel remarkable. They don’t seem very unique. And that’s what I want to dig into today —  the dangers of doing branding wrong, especially accidental branding.

Last time we looked at the first two ways that companies can fall into accidental branding. Those two ways were:

Confusing their brand’s essence with their business goals.
And confusing their brand’s essence with their competition.

Now I want to look at the second set of ways companies can fall into accidental branding. This risks a lot of confusion with their customers, staff, partners and ultimately creates a short-lived B2B brand.

https://youtu.be/Tzsn0do7OD4
3. Leadership
A company’s leadership is the most prominent communicator of the heart of a company: its values, its mission, its purpose. The way leadership presents its values and purpose reverberates throughout the company at every level and resounds through its employees. Attempting to work out a company’s brand without the support of its leadership is almost always fails. Ultimately the leaders of a company are in the best position to recognize what does and does not fit with their company’s driving mission.
Leadership ≠ Brand
Having said that, an organization's leaders themselves are not its brand. Unless we’re talking about the founder of the company, anybody else in leadership, no matter how amazing or influential or publicly prominent, is merely accidental. The present CEO is not the company’s identity, and the CEO’s personal tastes should not drive brand decisions. “The boss likes this color” or “The boss loves this typeface” are not brand-based reasons to make any decisions. The same is true of any other outspoken or prominent person in a business who may want to influence the brand around pet projects. The brand is not about them.
Leadership Based Branding is a Rebrand Waiting to Happen
The leadership of an organization often drives its brand towards the leader’s fantasies rather than the organization’s real abilities! The leader badly wants something, and the organization must transform its identity to serve as a tool for the leader to get it. When rebranding accompanies a change of leadership, often it is a sign that the former “brand” looked too much like the personal seal of the former leader. Unfortunately, the “new” brand often seems uncannily shaped to fit the predispositions of the new leader. Customers and employees feel the dissonance as the brand shifts and look for excuses to leave the brand until a new leader re-invents the business yet again.
Divisional Distractions
Leadership structures, like departments, sub-businesses, regional offices, or teams of people, are equally bad drivers of the brand identity of a business. Your customers usually don’t care much about internal politics, and your org chart tells them nothing about who you are and what you’re here for. Authentic branding will instead help them have consistent and seamless experiences across different divisions, offices, or teams.
Exceptional Founders
The founder of a company is the one possible exception to this rule. The founder of a company is essential to the company: without the founder, it simply wouldn’t have existed. There is no Ford Motor Company without Henry Ford and no Apple without Steve Jobs. The values and vision of a founder are often identified with the values and vision of the company. Still, even the founder of a company is never the whole of its identity. The company aims to outlive its founder, just as Ford and Apple persist to this very day. A founder’s job is to create something larger than themselves. The brand will ultimately take on a life of its own. So, even a founder is not infallible when it comes to recognizing when choices fit or don’t fit with an organization’s ...

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