Speaking of Identity

I received a lot of feedback on my rock-star/corporate-identity post of a while back (okay, no actual ‘comments’ per se, but a clamor of attention from my imaginary audience) which brought me to think a bit more deeply about what defines a company and what does (can) a company do to define itself.

When I was growing up, if I thought of a company or a business at all (which , believe me, was seldom), I pictured it as something remote, inaccessible, cold and austere; something mechanical, like a big clock somewhere in a big building in a big city – the concrete and steel version of a British banker with his spectacles and bowtie and bowler hat, never betraying the slightest emotion. But in generally I just didn’t think about a company or a business at all. I looked past it, or beyond it, or through it, to the products that it served out to the public; whatever it was that I wanted to get: The pump-action BB Gun from Daisy, say, or a Spalding baseball mitt, or maybe when I was a little older that fine RCA 8-track player, pre-plugged with Back Home Again by John Denver. I know I’m dating myself again, but oh how I lusted after that slice of cutting-edge chrome-and-plastic technology: the 8-track. But RCA? What was that. I barely knew the logo,

Perhaps this was due to my youth, naiveté, and general myopia about the ‘larger’ world around me. Perhaps I simply didn’t look past the baseball bat to see the tree it came from, never mind the forest of other trees. But I think it’s pretty indisputable that a seismic shift has occurred; that, in those days, companies probably preferred to remain behind the scenes, and certainly didn’t think much or care about creating a strong ‘personality’ for the world to see and judge.

Alas, (or perhaps Mazel tov?) those days are gone. Now for a company, no matter what size or scale, to not to be constantly asserting/revising/refining it’s ‘public persona’ as well as constantly and deeply integrating itself to the cultural ‘conversation’, is anathema to Business Common Sense 101. Building a strong, immediately recognizable, sympathetic persona is as essential to big business as it is to a solo performer, and vice versa. It’s telling to note how authors, actors, musicians are all encouraged to ‘build their brand’ in the same way big business is encouraged to ‘get connected’.

So how do large companies do this? Well the easiest way it to buy it, and they do so by associating themselves (endorsements, cross-promotions, etc.) with celebrities who embody the characteristics that they wish to portray. They also spend huge amounts on focus groups and PR to figure out what personality their business should have. Once that’s determined it’s embedded and embodied through branding, advertising, marketing, of course, but also, and here’s the critical point of all this, more and more commonly through social networks. Find a big company these days, and you’ll find a blog, a forum, a facebook page, and probably several Twitter streams, all to help establish and promote their brand personality. And the interesting thing is that all these tools are just as available, maybe more so, for the small business or the individual as they are for the multi-national corporation.

Thoughts?

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