This Single Skill Assures Your Business Success
Learn to Build (and Maintain) an Illuminated Brand
There are businesses and people that you prefer to engage with, that you and millions of others love most. They are your go-to choice. Maybe they provide a product or service you need or want and is difficult (or expensive) to get elsewhere. Maybe you engage with them solely through force of habit, tradition, or consistency.
Now let’s take this thought further.
Think about the businesses or people you loyally engage with eagerly, again and again. Perhaps it’s the product whose innovations and coolness factor delight you enough to pre-order or get onto a waiting list. Or the restaurant where you proposed to your sweetheart or the hotel you reserve for your anniversary. You get the picture.
These are the service providers or brands you choose and even recommend most readily to others. And even if a competing alternative offered you a significant discount or upgrade, it wouldn’t pull you away. Nope — you’re hooked and remain unaffected by competitors’ seductive advances.
Which brands have won your loyalty? Your answers may or may not match the national research on most loved brands (Patagonia and Costco top the list for 2023’s Top Ten that also includes John Deere, Trader Joe’s, John Deere, Chick-Fil-A and Samsung).
But as you place your votes, the factors of trust, culture, purpose, and innovation are probably present, along with excellence and consistency in value, customer experience, and service.
We can also observe how easily the current world’s affection for a popular brand can turn fickle and drop off if a business violates our trust through dishonorable actions or divisive politics (i.e. Budweiser, Subway, and Bed Bath & Beyond).
We could sum the phenomenon up as “magic,” but business expert David M. Corbin breaks it down in a more programmatic and practical way. I first interviewed Corbin for Forbes.com in 2015. That article, on continually finding and fixing the negative to uplift the brand’s reputation, lives on. Eight years later, as he continues to teach organizations to succeed in any economic or competitive condition, he maintains even more strongly that brand integrity is the single greatest path to the peak position he calls the Illuminated Brand.
What’s an Illuminated Brand?
When a brand’s delivery is consistent with its stated and implied brand promise at every touchpoint, the result becomes so evident and aligned it exudes from the very pores of the company’s people and products. It emanates from the customers as well, as they extol the experience. “It’s a feeling, conscious or unconscious, that is transferred that connects and builds an almost impenetrable relationship,” Corbin says.
How do you achieve this pinnacle? Corbin breaks it down in The Illuminated Brand, but offered this summary in our interview. An illuminated brand (which pertains to people and teams as well as products and business) understands and intentionally creates the Intended Brand Descriptors (IBD’s) they would like their brand reputation to contain, and they work by design to achieve it. The reactions of employees and customers show them whether the descriptors are the right issues and, more importantly, whether they’re being upheld.
An Illuminated Brand goes still further by instituting a process to continually re-examining the IBDs from the very top of the organization and through to the managers, departments, front line staff and customers. These steps determine how well the actual experience adheres in practice to the descriptors that make up the Brand Value the business proclaims.
“It works like this,” Corbin explains:
And isn’t this what we’re all after?
So, if we spell it out, the equation is fairly simple:
1. If … the Brand Value is worthy and well-defined,
2. And …you Audit for adherence to the Intended Brand Descriptors at all touchpoints (Brand Integrity),
3. Then … you Illuminate and address the gaps through Strategic Business Initiatives, and
4. Count on achieving Massive Brand Value in the hearts of the marketplace, your bottom line, and increased brand asset value.
How do we learn this?
Corbin is currently codifying his process for training and certification for the use of everyone from front line employees with no high school or certification to CEOs, and everybody in between. Beyond his books, the organizations he coaches and the keynote presentations he gives this will give many more organizations the ability to create and achieve massive value from the Illuminated Brand principles by doing what Corbin describes as “building a culture that remains brand centric, even under pressure.”
Be it COVID, economic conditions or cultural or competitive pressure, the issues remain the same.
“Positive thinking is ‘positive’, but in my experience and companies the most success happens when we illuminate the negative,” he maintains. “Delve in. Don’t sweep it under the carpet, because in the dark, like mushrooms, the hidden problems will multiply.”
“Illuminate it: Face it, then follow it and fix it,” he maintains, to coin a few of the “F-words” he prefers in his book “Illuminate: Harnessing the Positive Power of Negative Thinking.” And he also points out that diligent process and persistence is key.
“You’re either building your brand consciously, or the law of entropy happens and you’re killing your brand,” Corbin maintains. “Nothing is neutral. It’s either brand integrity or you’re committing BrandSlaughter in the first, the second or the third degree.”
When we look at the lists of most beloved companies, why do they shift? Why might a prior winner slip down the list?
According to Corbin, maybe it’s because someone came forward that is so successful in the Illuminated Brand principle, they are pushing the previously greater companies down. Another reason may be that a brand’s emotional connection with its audience is slipping. A company with great market clout may lose sight of the needs and wants of its audience or even attempt to leverage its hard-earned clout to push a political position.
Multiple examples show how even the most dominant brands can fail by ignoring the hearts and sensibilities of their customers no matter which extreme political route they pursue and consequently break the emotional bond with their brand devotees.
Learn to ask the hard questions
To avoid these risks, when the pressure of massive competition or tough environmental conditions are looming you should ask, “What are some of the unique qualities of the pressure that is currently facing us as we deliver on our promises and earn our desired descriptors?”
“How does that pressure impact our brand integrity and what are the areas where we may end up in BrandSlaughter?”
“Who is our competition and what are the brand descriptors they promise?”
“Which of our descriptors are impacted by the competition they bring, and how can we reduce our vulnerability and close any gaps in our brand promise delivery?
These are the questions that seek to understand and respect the brand impression you hold within your customers’ minds and hearts: the ‘love connection’ that exists when you are living your brand values and descriptors. The right questions that help all agents of your organization eliminate the temptation to use your hard-earned brand reputation to excuse poor behavior or to exercise political sway.
“The analogy we often use is this: the brand is like a precious Faberge egg. If it’s not passed on with care, respect and reverence from leaders to managers and from managers to supervisors and front-line workers and, of course, to customers and prospects,” Corbin says. “It can be inadvertently dropped, cracked and rendered of no value.”
“Imagine that! An extremely valuable and well-crafted asset reduced to nothing in a matter of moments. That’s BrandSlaughter,” he concludes.
An Example in Practice — Boston Newbury Hotel
A great example of an Illuminated Brand in practice Corbin offers is with the Newbury Hotel in Boston. It was the first Ritz Carlton in the country, then the Taj Mahal, then over time fell into disrepair and was bought by a group that developed it into the current Boston Newbury Hotel that later achieved a ranking as the #1 luxury hotel in Boston. How did this dramatic change come about?
Corbin notes the Illuminated Brand work the company did can take only some of the credit for the success of the work the Newbury Hotel has done. The hotel’s brand is “the well-crafted life,” with every aspect of that brand promise continually examined in detail. Everywhere they’ve failed on the promise, they’ve redoubled their efforts as they illuminate themselves, their behaviors and every touchpoint.
For example, the hotel created a fireplace concierge position to not only come and start the fire in the room, but to also offer its guests the choice of wood based on the length of fire you want and the aroma of the wood you prefer.
It was a wonderful idea, Corbin notes, but at the time of its creation, the position was fulfilled by only two people, who served the fire concierge requests one at a time.
People were coming to the hotel very excited about this innovative service they’d heard about, but if one of the two concierges were sick or absent, the hotel couldn’t fulfill in a timely way. The Newbury was understaffed on its ability to reliably provide this service that was becoming increasingly popular. They were failing on the promise and creating BrandSlaughter — the Achilles Heel of the illuminated brand. So, following their Strategic Business Initiative phase of the program, they developed cross training to allow others involved in room service to add this element to their own service, to ensure their brand promise would always be kept. This was a simple solution to a simple problem that had a massive impact on their brand integrity and earning their Illuminated Brand status.
How important is a simple situation like this? Corbin recalls sitting in the hotel’s restaurant and seeing two academy award-winning actors walk in. which was not unusual. He walked up to one of them and struck up a conversation.
“Have you been here before?”
“No, but it was recommended to me by another actor who said this is a wonderful hotel and that I should try it out, and I’ve observed a number of other people I know and trust who’ve suggested I try it as well.”
That’s an example of an Illuminated Brand at work.
In another example offered in Corbin’s book, “The Illuminated Brand,” a nurse was leaving her hospital to walk home during the pandemic and saw a man outside the hospital crying because he wasn’t able to go into the hospital where his wife was giving birth. The nurse had just gotten off her shift and shed her PPE. She was exhausted, but mindful of brand integrity, suggested she could go back into the hospital, suit up, and help him to share in the experience via FaceTime.
The nurse had been inspired to go above and beyond thanks to the focus her department had been placing on strategic brand initiatives during incredibly difficult times. The effort taught her to think creatively about how to manage the once-in-a-lifetime situation that was making this young father and husband distraught.
This — as Corbin notes — is the power of Brand Integrity. Taken to fruition, it illustrates the full possibilities of an Illuminated Brand.
