The most difficult thing I find with Vision is how you capture it in a way
that can be communicated within organisations and ultimately reflected
outward. This is the role of a leader. Not the setting of the vision but
capturing the elements and spirit of it within an organisation and finding
a way of reflecting it back to others engaged in or needing to be enrolled
in its achievement, thus motivating them to take part.
I find Built to Last very useful in thinking about brands. The
traditional approach is to see brands as physical identities that are
designed, however without a core purpose and vision for the future and how
it relates to customer needs , they are empty and will not survive.
I am currently playing with another metaphor that I feel complments and
balances this one sided view. It is the flip side of term "brand" , that
is the burning flame, that motivates, lights the way and guides a brand,
or organisation into the uncertain future and the decisions needed to go
there. This brings the focus of branding back to the employees in the
organisation and how they feel about the company's brands, their relevance
to their own goals. This parellels the thinking of Chris Macrae and his
Brand Chartering concept that made links with learning processes inside
organisations as an important element in approaches to branding.
So, as a though maybe the vision can be encasulated and communicated in
the brand, giving the brand concept a different role in organisational
strategy. I call this "branding from the inside out". There is a growing
interest in this within brand consuilancy in the UK but no one to date has
explicitly started to do it, to my knowledge. The main barrier being that
it requires a completely new mental model for many marketing
practitioners- > difficult to sell the concept!
For what its worth
Martin Silcock
Wagstaffs-Brand Partners
Crown Reach
147A Grosvenor Road
London
SW1V 3JY
Tel 0171 834 0534
"Our problems are not so much
in finding new ideas as in escaping
from old ones"
John Maynard Keynes
--Martin Silcock <msilcock@wagstaffs.com>
Learning-org -- Hosted by Rick Karash <rkarash@karash.com> Public Dialog on Learning Organizations -- <http://www.learning-org.com>