Branding requires several steps to be done right. Start with your purpose, then on to the USP, build your branding, yadda, yadda, yadda. But all along, I still have to make a living. As do those I employ.

The real world rarely offers you the chance to put the steps all in place properly. Then what?

You shut up and deal with it. So many times I see what is wrong with a brand an am tempted to change it immediately. The first problem is that it isn’t my problem. No matter how it is build, a brand reflects the environment that grew it. Before you can change a brand’s aspects, you have to change what has built the brand as it is, and change the surroundings that came up with the reality we have to deal with.

You don’t really rebuild an existing brand, you end up changing the thinking and giving a good brand a more fertile environment. Just as you can’t plant tomatoes in the middle of a bed of weeds, you can’t plant a brand in the middle of its own misunderstanding.

If you try to impose a new brand in an unprepared environment, you will be seen as a failure because the new brand doesn’t show immediate results. When you change the thinking within the brand, you can plant one in that more fertile ground. If you do that, you can begin to see results as the new thinking grabs the environment. It will seem as if the brand and the internal thinking are taking hold together.