The Diffuse Brand Strategy - What Went Wrong?
This post is one in a series on our biggest brand strategy secret here at Distility: That most bad brands can be traced back to a failure of exploration, a failure of commitment, or both.
This diagram sums up the way most brands go wrong, and what it takes to get to the holy grail of the authentic brand.
The Fragmented Brand and Diffuse Brand share a common lack of team commitment. But the diffuse brand also lacks exploration. This is the brand we find with our most R&D focused clients. Hard core science - not marketing - is their life blood. Given the right facilitator and workflow they are great at inventing brands. But left unattended, brand is absent from their brilliant minds.
There is a certain kind of business apathy to a Diffuse Brand. No time has been taken to explore possibilities, and no one is willing to commit to any one brand strategy. While exploration may have seemed like a waste of time, not taking the time can mean no one ever knows who you are, even inside your very own company! That seems a bigger waste. Even if people do know about you, with ambiguous and undefined positioning at the helm your team may find it difficult to confidently sell the brand convincingly to the right people.
You don't want to be this brand. There isn't enough energy behind this brand to even bother with good marketing, so why should any client want to bother considering it?