Branding. It’s the buzzword of business right now. There are even TV shows about it. HBO’s “Making It in America” is about two would-be New York entrepreneurs who seek fame and fortune by launching their own clothing line. If their brand “Crisp” hits, they’ll strike it rich.

Branding is becoming mainstream, and conversations that used to be about marketing a business have now shifted to conversations about how to brand it. Is there a difference? Is branding just the latest in a long line of lingo that, like words of the past, will fall out of fashion? The business landscape is littered with words like “synergy” and “paradigm shift,” and how can we forget that wonderful term “headcount” that was made so popular during the days of “rightsizing”? Those last two, combined, reduced employees to cattle and turned CEOs into modern-day Machiavellis.

Thankfully, the term “branding” doesn’t pack such ill will, but it does deliver plenty of confusion. A quick Google search returns utter chaos. Thousands of branding experts flinging branding tips, tricks and more. Countless articles promise to impart the de facto methods for branding your company but, instead, confuse you more than you were to begin with.

You’re not alone. Branding and how to make it work confound most people. In this article and the five others that will follow monthly in In Business Magazine, we’ll clear up the confusion once and for all. You’ll discover how branding can truly help your business and you’ll learn a proven method of shaping businesses into brands. But before we get ahead of ourselves, let’s answer an even more basic question: Why brand at all?

Why Bother with Branding?

The obvious reason to brand your business, your products and yourself is branding provides you with leverage. Too often, you fight too hard to win every sale. You fight to get noticed, to get in the door, to gain credibility, to win a bidding war. If you’re lucky, you might win the business. Wouldn’t it be great if, instead, the buyer sought you out without all the rigmarole?

That’s the difference between your business being a commodity and it being a brand. When you’re a commodity, you compete on price. When you’re a brand, price is seldom an issue. Which would you rather be?

Another reason to brand is brands deliver value, not only to your customers but also to your company. John Stuart, the former chief executive officer of Quaker Oats Company, said, “If this company were to split up, I would give you the property, plant and equipment and I would take the brands and the trademarks, and I would fare far better than you.” He said that in 1900. Brand value isn’t a new concept, but for many it is unknown or forgotten. Brand value may not matter now, but if you sell your company one day, it will matter then. Brands are worth more than commodities.

What Is a Brand, Anyway?

Accept that business leverage and asset value are two powerful reasons to brand, and the question becomes, “What is a brand and how do I get one?” Everyone has a different definition, and most of them are impossible to put any solid business action against — which can be frustrating. Another view, developed over fifteen-plus years’ experience, leads to a simple definition that is understandable, actionable and measurable.

A brand is two simple words: “promise” and “experience.” The promise is what most people think of as branding. It’s the communications, the images, the commercials, et cetera, that you telegraph to the world to gain awareness. But by our definition, it’s also you, your employees, your attitudes, your language, your website, your proposals, your product packaging, your store — anything that makes an impression. And let’s face it, that’s everything — good, bad or neutral; right or wrong.

The experience is the follow-through on your promise and it’s something few consider when developing and building a brand. It’s the product, the service customers receive, the way they interact with your packaging, the meal they have in your restaurant, the ease of navigating your website, your tweets and posts, their relationship with your employees — in essence, it’s the work and the business of your company. That’s why we deem building a business from the brand up a best practice. Too many companies build a business and add a brand, usually a logo, like they do frosting on a cake. Pretty, maybe, but that magic doesn’t go very deep.

The Promise + the Experience = the Brand

The best brands are ones in which the promise and the experience are equal, meaning customers get what they expect. This definition of branding goes beyond logos, graphic design and advertising. This brand of branding activates every aspect of your business and places as much of the brand-building responsibilities on operations as it does on marketing.

Isn’t the rule to under-promise and over-deliver? Yes, within limits. Succeeding articles will discuss appropriate ways to accomplish that. Mostly, what we see in our daily work is the wrong way to under-promise and over-deliver. We often hear from our branding clients that their customers have told them they were surprised at the quality of the work and products. Sometimes our clients want it that way, but when their customers’ verbatim quotes sound like these, they think again:

“I wish I would have known how good the company was. I would have hired them sooner.”

“They really need to present themselves more professionally because their service is ’way better than they look.”

“I’d seen the product posters and peeked inside the store, but the place just didn’t look appetizing. Then a friend dragged me in, and I found out what I’d been missing all these years.”

Years! Can a company afford to wait years for prospective customers to give it a chance? Of course not. That’s why aligning the promise and the experience is so important.

Sometimes we find a company that is over-promising and under-delivering. With them, we focus our branding effort on business operations, with the goal of bringing the experience into alignment with the promise.

By developing a brand that incorporates both promise and experience, branding success is fully measurable. Not just when your brand gets valued at $70 billion like Coca-Cola, but all along the way. The philosophy that defines a brand this concretely is called Heart & Mind® Branding. It recognizes that every company and every person within the companies has a heart side and a mind side. The mind side is what we ordinarily think of when we think business. It’s the spreadsheets, the budgets, the goals, the quotas. It’s the necessary stuff that makes work feel like work. The heart side is the creativity, the passion, the purpose that makes work feel like a mission.

Our most successful branding projects are for companies that allow us to discover their heart and use it to envelop all the mind aspects of their promises and their experiences. In this series’ next five articles, we’ll cover the stages of this branding method so you can apply it to yourself, your business and your products, starting with the first stage: Heart. Then we’ll move through Message, Image, Actions and Systems. Through this, you’ll discover how business plans become brand plans and what it takes to truly break through.

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Heasley&Partners, Inc.    heasleyandpartners.com

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This article appeared in the September 2011 issue