Ep.6 Brand Execution: Why your brand strategy dies during execution

Pim

Welcome back to Brand Focus, a podcast about brands that want to grow in times when growth is anything but a given.

 

I’m Pim. I’ve been running DPDK for more than twenty years now, and I have seen the marketing profession change quite a bit. That is what I want to talk about today. I also want to explain how I arrived at the Brand Focus methodology I developed, and which we are now successfully rolling out with several of our clients.

 

Marketing has changed significantly over the past twenty years. When I think back to how a marketer would come to us twenty years ago, and what kind of motivation they had at the time, it is completely different from the way marketers come to us today.

 

Because I believe brands are fragmenting. I explained this in an earlier podcast as well. If you look at all the developments affecting brands, you see that the brand is under pressure. There are more channels than ever. Consumers are becoming increasingly immune to advertising. Brands are being challenged by AI, but they also see opportunities in it. As a result, they are bringing a lot of production in house.

 

And brands are fragmenting because a brand now has to be rolled out across an enormous range of online touchpoints. That number has grown massively over the past few years.

 

Twenty years ago, DPDK started as a digital production agency. We mainly built websites, and every now and then a campaign website. In that sense, the brand domain was much easier for marketers to oversee. It was essentially one way traffic. A brand was broadcasting, and a big idea was rolled out through a campaign or communicated through a website.

 

But what do you see twenty years later? With the future of AI, the growth of all those touchpoints, consumers who expect far more transparency and value from brands, privacy concerns, personalization, and automation, the brand domain has become incredibly fragmented.

 

Translating the direction of a brand into consistent behavior is what many marketers and brands are struggling with. And I see that in the way the question we get at DPDK has changed over the years. It has shifted from mostly execution, which is what it was initially, to brand direction and strategy, which is what it is today.

 

Many brands think they can fight fragmentation by designing an ever better strategy. But that is not how it works.

 

Because many brands that are performing well today do not necessarily have an exceptional strategy. More often, they are organizations that are able to maintain the same direction consistently over a longer period of time, and execute that direction with focus and discipline.

 

That is how you see fairly average brands become successful. Meanwhile, brands with much greater potential often struggle to execute the direction they have chosen for themselves.

 

Because ultimately, a brand is what you do, not what you say. And that is also one of the first principles behind the Brand Focus methodology we developed at DPDK.

 

If there is one pattern I have seen throughout my career with the agency, it is that many brands keep going back to the drawing board. They create a strategy, present it with great enthusiasm, and then that strategy dies in execution.

 

When I look at strategy and execution, I personally believe that strategy is 20 percent and execution is 80 percent. In other words, you can elevate an average strategy with excellent execution. But even a very strong strategy will never reach its full potential with average execution.

 

That is where many brands leave a lot of potential on the table in practice. They lack focus. Again and again, I see that strategy creates a lot of hope around giving the brand a certain direction, but that direction fails in execution.

 

And that is because marketers have to manage a huge amount of complexity. If you look at what is happening in house, enormous internal teams have been built. You could say marketers are starting to act like agencies themselves. I understand why, because part of your brand domain is hard to own. So you want to manage it well and cost effectively.

 

But managing a production process is very different from defining a brand direction.

 

What has been central throughout my career is that I often entered organizations from a production angle. But an important part of DPDK’s added value has always been helping marketers and marketing teams take control of their brand in relation to the complexity of all the channels that need to be managed.

 

That means translating a brand direction into production, for example into a website or a campaign. But it also means making sure the behavior of the brand across all other touchpoints, in the visitor experience and within the culture of the organization, aligns with what the brand says. Because again, a brand is not what you say. It is what you do.

 

Partly based on all those experiences and learnings over the years, we developed our own methodology at DPDK, which we call Brand Focus. And we translate that Brand Focus into the brand system we have created.

 

What irritated me was that, when I looked at the literature, I could not find a model that connects brand strategy to brand execution. I am a strategist. I love models, frameworks, and theory. There are many strategists in the marketing field whom I admire.

 

Of course, there are social media strategy frameworks. There are beautiful strategic brand models. We all know them, the Unilever model and many others. And there are all kinds of touchpoint frameworks. But there is not a single framework that connects brand strategy to the total execution and management of all the channels a brand has to manage.

 

And that bothered me, because that is exactly the daily reality we deal with at DPDK, together with many of our clients.

 

So we started designing that model ourselves. And that became the Brand System Canvas. At the center of that Brand System Canvas is Brand Focus.

 

What is Brand Focus to me? Brand Focus is nothing more than the discipline of keeping your business strategy, your positioning, and your brand behavior consistent with each other. That sounds easy, but many brands fail to do it.

 

Either they have not translated a strong business strategy into positioning, or they have a clear positioning but the brand behaves differently.

 

To me, Brand Focus is ultimately the glue that holds your business strategy and your brand strategy together. It ensures that, over the long term, you steer your brand with focus toward the ambition you have for it.

 

I believe every brand has its own Brand Focus. But as a marketer, it is up to you to find it. And then to roll it out with discipline across your entire brand domain, across your entire brand system.

 

That is what we do at DPDK. With all of our clients, we have gone through a process to find their Brand Focus, or we are currently working on it. And from our Brand System Canvas, we systematically roll out that Brand Focus across the entire brand. There are many benefits to that, which I will talk about in a future podcast.

 

All communication from a brand ultimately contributes to brand perception and brand personality. Whether it is a small automated email from a CRM system after someone buys a ticket, or a large brand campaign, all of that communication adds up to the total image of a brand.

 

That is how you are supposed to behave as a brand. Not only based on what you say in your big campaign.

 

Another principle behind Brand Focus is more about the future of a brand. Because I believe a brand is the only asset within an organization that can make the future visible.

 

Your brand is the future of your organization, made visible today. The way your brand looks today should say something about where your brand wants to go. That is the tension a brand should operate within.

 

A brand is not simply what you are today or what you were yesterday. Your brand needs to contain something your organization is moving toward. You should not pretend to be something you are not yet, but you do need to show what you want to become.

 

If you play that game well, your brand becomes much more than a communication asset. It attracts new customers, but it can also be an asset that helps move your own people forward internally.

 

If your brand story is strong enough to not only attract new customers, but also empower your own people internally, then you are using your brand to its full potential. Ultimately, your Brand Focus also needs to contain an element of ambition.

 

Another very important principle behind Brand Focus is that your brand is not a campaign. It is a living system. A system you need to update, maintain, give attention to, give care to, and keep running.

 

That is not how many people look at brands. There are still many marketers and CEOs who translate a brand into a campaign. The old way of marketing, moving from a big idea to a major campaign through a TV commercial, is really over.

 

Your brand now runs across so many channels at the same time. It needs to be able to interact with your audience. It needs to be understood by AI as well as by people. You need to be able to measure it through performance, serve it in a personalized way, and provide value to your audience over a longer period of time.

 

So your brand is much more than a campaign. And that is also how we look at your brand system through Brand Focus. Ultimately, it is a systemic approach to branding.

 

Another important principle behind Brand Focus is credibility. Your brand has to be credible. If you paint a picture of the future that you cannot live up to, your brand will fall through the cracks.

 

There needs to be tension between where you stand today and where you want to go, but it still has to be believable. As a brand, you have gone through a certain evolution. And one of the signals we look at when we search for your Brand Focus is your history, and with that, a degree of credibility.

 

So when we build from your ambition, from trends in the market, from what your competitors are doing, and from your strategy as an organization, we make sure that ambition is realized in a credible way.

 

Another important principle comes from storytelling, which I am sure is familiar to you. I believe that at the core of every brand there is a story worth telling. And if it is a good story, it resolves a certain tension.

 

Because most stories contain a tension that needs to be resolved. If you look at Disney movies, every film starts from a broken world and points toward a promised land. The film is about the journey from that broken world to that promised land.

 

Take Aladdin. He wants to live in the palace. How does he get from his current situation to that palace, and to Jasmine? That is what the film is about. Interestingly, for Jasmine, it goes the other way. She feels the need to break free from that palace.

 

But that is what makes a good story worth telling. A story contains tension, and that tension gets resolved. Every brand has a story like that at its core.

 

If, as a marketer, you are able to bring that story to the surface from your strategy, positioning, and ambition, then you have something truly powerful. And that is what Brand Focus is about.

 

Finally, there is one more important principle: a brand does not necessarily have to be better than its competitor. Above all, it needs to be distinctive.

 

Distinctiveness, to me, lies in the strong story you tell and in your clear Brand Focus. But it also comes down to truly distinctive branding. What do you look like? What do you sound like as a brand? Ultimately, it is about embracing branding that is genuinely distinctive and staying away from all those brands that are starting to look more and more alike.

 

But yes, these principles are not new. I think almost every marketer will recognize them, or at least partly believe in them. What matters most is what you do with them.

 

Because most principles do not survive Tuesday afternoon. When things get difficult for your brand, when short term results are under pressure, when a competitor makes a certain move, the question is whether you can keep your back straight and have the discipline to hold on to your direction.

 

That is where many brands are bending right now. That is where they ultimately lose the battle, because they cannot bring themselves to commit to one direction for a longer period of time.

 

And that is what DPDK helps brands with: finding their Brand Focus, and rolling it out across a brand system in a long term and sustainable way.

 

That is it for today. See you next time.