If you’ve always suspected the “brand police” were up to no good, you just might be right. Branding, a narrowly defined exercise that says you become identifiable through consistency, can badly undermine your message.
If your brand consists of a logo, some prescribed font choices, color palates, and a list of forbidden phrases—that’s all it’s going to be.
And that’s not just neutral; it’s destructive.
As Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” Slavish devotion to brand guidelines tends to eliminate real thought. And I can almost guarantee you that anything you do that’s truly pro-donor will violate the consistency of the brand!
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Your brand is what you do and who you are. What you look like is the smallest part of that. Most branding guidebooks pay lip-service to this fact, but none of them do anything about it. And that’s no surprise, because they can’t. A brand is bigger than a set of rules you can put down in a spiral-bound book.
If you have a great brand—one that aligns with the beliefs, hopes, and self-image of your donors—you can laugh at the puny efforts of the brand police to achieve consistency.
Old-school branding is a lot like the thing it’s named after: You burn your logo onto your donor’s butt with a red-hot iron. Whether she wants it or not.
New-school brand building is almost exactly opposite that. You discover how you fit into your donor’s dreams. Then you articulate that with passion.
Jeff Brooks is creative director at Merkle|Domain, a direct-response agency serving the nonprofit world. He blogs at the Donor Power Blog.
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