Confessions of a brandaholic
What do you do when you’ve created your brand, tweaked it, honed it, marketed it? When you’ve worked hard for months doing whatever your particular brand enterprise demands, and it appears, when you examine everything, that all the stuff you need to do is done?
My confession is that by nature I’m inclined to just continue tweaking, trying to improve things a bit here and a bit there. There’s nothing wrong with a degree of that and I remain a strong advocate of continual nurture of your brand. But there is a line between nurture and obsessive meddling. It’s a line that workaholics like me can cross too often.
Healthier for you the brand protagonist, and indeed for the brand itself, is to leave things alone for a little while. Let things settle a bit, maintain a weather eye of course, but avoid the temptation to keep adjusting. Instead take some time out to reflect on what you’ve created. Genuine reflection (which takes time) is not frequently practiced in the heady rush to bring a brand to market, nor in the day-to-day battle to keep your brand ahead of the pack. But I have discovered (against my obsessive nature) that reflection is not only healthy but vital. It is also enormously productive.
This seems contrary to common sense, and indeed it might be called uncommon-sense. When I’ve taken time out (proper time, not minutes, but hours and days) to reflect, to muse, to ponder, to meditate (call it what you will) on my brand and business then it has invariably been the case that a new and powerful idea has emerged (often fully formed) from the apparently random meanderings. Take some time out, for your brand’s sake and you own.
Photograph: Sally Blackburn at Energi Technical
