Gandhi on Piccadilly and building a brand

From Thursday, June 25, drivers on Piccadilly Line trains in London will be asked to embellish routine service updates with quotes such as Gandhi’s “There is more to life than increasing its speed.”

That is certainly not a quote I would associate uniquely with Gandhiji, as he is referred to in India. On the other hand, existentialist Jean Paul Sartre’s quip about “Hell is other people” (which will also be belted out by the train driver on the Piccadilly line) sounds uniquely his.

If we were to ask a set of educated human beings around the world (whether travelling by Tube or otherwise;-)), the values they associate with Gandhiji, the reply would be unanimous: “Non-violence”. A more learned response would be “Civil disobedience” a trick Gandhiji learnt from Thoreau.

But to make this thought experiment more rigorous, let’s switch the question around: what if we gave a set of values that one would normally associate with a leader, say a set of five, a. Vision b. Non-violence c. Revolution d. Education and e. Determination and ask people to match them to various leaders, say, a. Churchill, b. Gandhi & c. Kennedy?

My guess is, Determination will go with the bull-doggy Churchill; Vision with the man-on-the-moon Kennedy and Non-violence with Gandhiji.

Shouldn’t this experiment work with building a brand?

After all, a brand, at its simplest and deepest level, is a single big idea, an idea that doesn’t change with circumstance, an idea customers and consumers and employees can relate to and embrace as their own…
Yet, most corporate brands fail this simple test! Shocking but true. Because the values that they stand for are expressed in language that is meant to confuse rather than clarify.

For example,  here’s a mission statement I plucked off the web:

“To be recognized as an important and environmentally responsive company that derives superior growth and returns from quality products and responsive services based on pro-prietary technology and operating excellence that provides genuine benefit to customers worldwide, rewards talented and dedicated employees, and satisfies shareholder expectations”

It is impossible to remember this even if you were the CEO and you had written this balderdash…leave alone associate it with one single corporate brand.

When compared to great leaders, there is a second and simpler problem with statements of value that companies put out: they are not loyal to them.

For example, would you associate this with Merrill Lynch? “Our vision is to be the pre-eminent…company in the world. It is a drive firmly rooted in the things we value most: our intelligence, our principles and our optimism.”

The traditional meaning of brand loyalty is the customer’s loyalty to the brand.

To us there is a new meaning of brand loyalty: that the corporate brand is loyal to itself…over decades. That’s when a truly great brand is created. This is the key to building a brand.

When Walmart says, “We’ll lower the cost of living for everyone” you believe it. (Yes, we are all aware that Walmart does not stand for gender equality, but that is the problem with any unidimensional statement).

When Vice Chairman Charlie Munger of Berkshire Hathaway says, “I also want to say proudly that we have no mission statement” you believe him even more. Because everything they do reflects their unarticulated values of ‘slow and steady’.

Analysis: To us, as brand analysts, we believe a brand’s loyalty to itself continues to be the key ingredient for the success of an idea called the brand…this is especially true of corporate brands.

Insight: What happens to mediocre brands, brands without a Brand Core? Like some leaders, they remain mediocre, also-rans in the business race. The truly iconic brands not only create wealth, but also create a new way of looking at the world. Remember, “There is more to life than increasing its speed.”