This is a branding book that covers a unique topic, the death of a brand. Using a fictional case study, Reliance Hospital, the book shows why businesses must remain proactive about every important aspect of their brand or risk watching their brands die.
What is Preventing BrandSlaughter About?
Understanding the importance of proactively managing your brand is the core message of Preventing BrandSlaughter: How to Preserve, Support, and Grow Your Brand Asset Value. In this book, branding is more than a graphic you slap on a product to identify your business. Branding is the lifeblood of your organization. Without attention to the things that feed your brand (dedicated employees, high standards, focused leadership), your brand suffers and eventually dies. When a brand dies, the business is next to fall.
To illustrate his point, David Corbin provides a fictional case study of a hospital. The book follows two stories. The first is about new employees attending an orientation at the hospital. These new employees are introduced to the concept of Preventing BrandSlaughter along with the specific principles the hospital uses to prevent the death of its brand. The second story follows two doctors at the hospital who want to integrate new technology but encounter a clash of personalities.
As both stories in the case study emphasize, branding involves more than the marketing department. There are two major aspects of a successful brand, the external (how you define your business to the world) and internal (what your employees do to support your brand). The goal of a business is to be consistent with its external and internal branding. A brand that accomplishes this is said to have integrity.
Reaching brand integrity isn’t automatic. It requires regular auditing to identify and fix areas that need improvement. By doing this, brands reinforce a high-performing culture that continues to evolve. This high performance, in turn, keeps the brand growing. High-performing businesses that proactively grow their brand avoid the same fatal missteps of a business that takes its customers and branding for granted.
Author David Corbin, known as “Robin Williams with an MBA“, is a former psychotherapist and consultant who currently works as a keynote speaker, author, and entrepreneur. Corbin has worked with the top leaders at companies such as AT&T, Hallmark and Sprint. He was a host and the star of a movie called ”Pass It“ and was recently featured in another movie ”Three Feet From Gold“. Corbin was ranked as one of the top speakers at INC Magazines’ national conferences. He also received the International Enterprise of the Year award for designing a touchscreen patient interview system.
What Was Best About Preventing BrandSlaughter?
As described above, most branding advice focuses on how to launch a brand. This advice doesn’t focus on maintaining a brand over the long-term. Preventing BrandSlaughter fills that role and does so with ease. Utilizing a heart-warming case study, it reinforces the core simplicity of branding rather than getting obsessed with the technical details. This focus on branding fundamentals and high standards of excellence remains crucial in a world requiring businesses to balance growth and agility.
What Could Have Been Done Differently?
Preventing BrandSlaughter has a heart-warming story, an empowering message and a principles-based perspective that can be applied to any organization at any level. But the the book’s examples focus more on principles than specifics. For example, the book references a specific type of branding audit (called “Accreditation of Brand Integrity” or ABBY audits) but fails to give any detailed examples or guidance on how to create one.
Why Read Preventing BrandSlaughter?
Many business owners have relegated branding to the marketing department, but David Corbin’s book emphasizes why readers should not do this. Instead, Corbin asserts that branding is something everyone is continually engaged in. Every transaction, every communication, every touchpoint is an opportunity to build or destroy the brand. If a brand isn’t integrated into a business demanding accountability and excellence from its employees, it runs the risk of bringing about its own death.
Because the concepts discussed in Preventing BrandSlaughter should be utilized by everyone in a business, the book is relevant for everyone. However, the content will be of special interest to leaders because of the core message it reinforces: Branding is everything. Unlike other branding books which tend to get abstract when discussing branding, Preventing BrandSlaughter focuses on the down-to-earth implications of not taking your brand seriously.
This article, “How the Best Businesses Are Preventing BrandSlaughter” was first published on Small Business Trends