why instinct

Brand is misunderstood.

From a 30-year career as CEO of an entrepreneurial marketing company, Instinct Founding Partner Ted Matthews found that most professional managers equate Brand with the logo or advertising tactics, and think it belongs only in the marketing department. They labor under these misconceptions because the business schools they attended only talked about Brand in marketing class.

In reality, A Brand is what people think of you.™ It is the sum total impression and memory of every positive, every so-so and every negative experience that employees, customers and all other stakeholders have with every touchpoint of your organization.

Every touchpoint matters — so the Brand is much too big and important to be the responsibility of the marketing department alone. Entrepreneurs — in contrast to professional managers — understand this, and operate, by instinct. Even though they may not identify their thinking with "Branding," they understand that their survival depends on consistently delivering a Core Purpose, Vision, Mission, Position and Values — the key, foundational elements of all Brands — to stakeholders. They understand that they — the CEO — are the one who must own the Brand, because they are the only person who can make delivering it everyone's responsibility. They are, in fact, the CBO — Chief Brand Officer — by definition.

It is this innate sense of Brand focus that we bring to our clients through the discipline of Instinctive Brand Leadership™. For organizations led by a professional manager, we coach Instinctive Brand Leadership™ by modeling what the entrepreneur does instinctively. For firms run by the original entrepreneur, we coach steadfast focus on what made the business successful in the first place — while acknowledging the enormous pressures induced by increasing scale and constantly changing market conditions.

For North American businesses, CBO-driven Brand consistency is now more important than ever. Globalization and media fragmentation mean that ubiquitous commercial messages are being ignored by overwhelmed stakeholders. Brands must therefore be remark-able to survive and flourish: they must inspire early adopters to tell their story to trusting others, who tell still others, and so on. And our shrinking manufacturing base leaves Branding as one of the few areas of value-adding opportunity for North American businesses.

It is an opportunity that only the self-appointed CBO, driven by the skills of Instinctive Brand Leadership™, can fully capitalize upon.

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