How do you grow “brand”?

Amongst what is sure to be a plethora of April Fools’ Day blogs I thought I’d resist temptation and instead deal with growth. How to get it. How to sustain it. How to manage it. And more specifically, how to “grow brand”. It’s a subject that I’ve been thinking more deeply about lately.

My default response for a long time has been that you don’t “grow brand”. You grow the organisation and the brand is the result.

You grow the number of people who know who you are and what you do. You grow the number of products and services you offer. You grow the number of customers. You grow how many people work for you. And how you go about doing those things in turn impacts the brand.

But I wondered if my default response missed something important because, of course, growth is not always bigger. When you learn something new or expand your thinking we say you’ve “grown” but that growth has nothing to do with size. In that context ‘grow’ is about learning and doing better not just doing bigger.

But does applying that different lens to growth change the answer the question?

Mostly no. The brand is still a result. Even if the result is part of a loop that evolves, changes and learns to be better not to get bigger, it is still a result of the organisation doing things, making decisions, taking actions.

It comes back to the same fundamental things. Be deliberate. Be conscious of what you are doing, why and how you are doing it. If growth is your goal (no assumptions here sometimes where you are is where you want to be), focus on what kind of growth you want, why you want it and what steps you need to take to get there.

Whatever growth you work on – bigger, wider, smarter, better – the brand will still be the result.

See you next week.

Michel is an independent brand analyst dedicated to helping organisations make promises they can keep and keep the promises they make – with a strong, resilient organisation as the result. She also publishes a blog at michelhogan.com. You can follow Michel on Twitter @michelhogan