Everyone is concerned with growth. How to grow market share, to grow sales or grow customer lists.
You may argue it's semantics, but the purpose of a brand is not growth at all, but about maintaining and sustaining a business.
Why is this?
Brand management is about maintaining consistency, which is a conservative exercise.
When you hear things like 'we need to protect our brand', this hasn't got anything to do with innovation, which is the critical ingredient in attracting new customers.
It's about maintaining specific intrinsic qualities that make you at the very least, recognisable.
Familiarity is powerful. However, with time and on its own, will stagnate your image. It will diminish your relevancy.
Growth, in the real sense of the word is quite tricky. Real growth means acquiring more market share. It means you take customers away from the alternative or your competition.
Acquiring new customers requires you to sell your consistency compellingly. What captivates people, what they respond to, is continually changing.
Therefore to innovate you adapt your message, not your brand. To keep changing your brand to suit the market would be absurd.
Instead, you change what you offer, how you refer to it, how it works, how it looks, how it's packaged. However, all these changes will conform to your brand values.
Brands retain. Messages attract.
This cycle of retaining and attracting is the hallmark of an effective brand strategy.
As I mentioned in an earlier article; brand strategy is the art of moving forward while appearing to stand still.