http://russelldavies.typepad.com/planning/2006/06/the_tyranny_of_.html

Found this on Russell Davies’ blog this morning…he talks about how branding is not about the Big Idea, but a bucket of smaller ideas…especially in light of social media which is broadly integrated.

Russell Davies writes…The thing that make these idea buckets work is the precise opposite of what people usually look for in Big Ideas. They’re vague – which means they can accommodate all sorts of other, often contradictory thoughts. The vagueness means they’re hard to codify, which means they exist in conversation, images and bits of film, which lends itself to idea creation, and which means they’re hard to smelt down into an ordinary Big Idea. They’re often emergent – no-one sits down and creates them as the future of the company, because that’s impossible. They grow out of philosophy, sometimes via advertising, sometimes as other things, but they’re adopted and emerge as an expression of the idea bucket rather than imposed as such.

Another excerpt offers some ideas…

1.    Starting doing stuff. Start executing things which seem right. Do it quickly and do it often. Don’t cling onto anything, good or bad. Don’t repeat much. Take what was good and do it differently.

2.    Look for the patterns that emerge. Look for the phrases that people use to describe what you/they are doing. Collect the things that seem to work as summaries. Notice them, put them in a drawer, don’t turn them into CI guidelines.

3.    Try not to write too much down. Manage the brand through conversation and impressionistic media – videos, stories, images, heroes. Not through mandates, best practise or benchmarking.

4.    Don’t be media neutral. Favour the things that are rich with experience and texture – events, retail, social media, film. And relegate the things that are thin and specific. Because the rich stuff is more likely to help you move forward.

5.    And something else and something else.