Talkback: Firms need to regain control of their brands

Building a successful brand requires a balance of power between brand owners and their communications partners.

Things go pear-shaped when the client/agency relationship gets out of kilter.

In the advertising and marketing industries, there's a certain propensity for relationship creep. Control often swings too far in the agency's favour when brand owners hand over all their brand's intellectual property. The agency takes total control and, in the end, the client is wagged by the agency tail.

Simplicity is the key to a happy client/agency relationship and successful brand communication.

The difficulty is that branding is by nature complex. It is an abstract pursuit and there's no escape from a certain depth of thinking and information analysis that is required to fuse business strategy and human creativity to create simple and relevant brand communication.

The subject matter often moves beyond the comfort zone of brand owners.

Agencies gleefully take up the slack, eventually putting the frighteners on brand owners with intellectualisation, black-box theories and weighty dissertation.

Agencies have no trouble writing ads and designing logos. They usually grasp brand fundamentals. But what is sometimes in question is a shared understanding between the client and agency.

Brand owners must have the tools to consistently control the treatment of their brand. If you totally outsource your brand soul, or don't understand it, you don't have the tools for controlling its treatment. Your agency will tell you what to do and you are in no position to argue. There'll be awards and glamour, but what has the agency's expression done for your brand among the people you want it to have a relationship with?

Branding boils down to a couple of key word words: essence and personality. How you define your brand according to these two terms should fit on to the back of a business card.

Consider Nike. Its brand essence is authentic sports performance, its personality is irreverence. The customer translation is "just do it".

Virgin's essence is customer champion.

Its brand personality is anti-establishment, which easily translates to low fares and a fun, sexy service experience.

Because these two companies understand brand essence, year after year they instinctively know what their advertising should look like.

It's time other brand owners took back control.

* Mike Pepper is a brand strategist at brand communications agency Brave New World. Send him an email by clicking on the link below.