Ask three people on your team what your brand is.

If you get three different answers, you do not have an internal communication problem. You have an identity that has stopped operating.

The symptom is usually read as an alignment problem. A workshop is organised, a values document is drafted, a manifesto goes up on the wall. A few months later, each area is still deciding as before.

Identity is not what the brand says about itself. It is the criteria by which it decides. When those criteria disappear from decisions, each area fills the gap with its own: product decides from what sells, marketing from what is communicated, sales from what this month’s customer asks for. Each decision has its logic. None comes from the same idea.

The problem is not that the brand’s idea disappears. It is that it stops turning into decisions.

A case

A luxury operator in the United Arab Emirates. Six product families (collection, catwalk, accessories, fragrance, make-up and lifestyle), three channels (web, its own app and a flagship) and four areas working at once: product; marketing; sales and customer service; and PR and brand experiences.

The starting point: each department decided by its own criteria. There was no shared framework from which to assess a collection, a launch or an experience. The brand existed in the discourse, but it did not govern decisions.

The brief was to train the teams in how a brand is built. Not in what it says, but in how it decides. We worked by division, by department and by customer type, over eight weeks. At the close, three things were working:

• Documented criteria for how the brand is built in each division, each department and each type of customer.
• Teams applying them without depending on external validation.
• Launches that came out aligned across product, channel and communication.

Identity is not communicated to the team. It becomes the criteria by which the team decides.

A values document is not criteria

A values document says what the brand is. Criteria say what to do with a specific decision: what goes into the collection and what does not, in which channel, with what message. The first is read once. The second is used every day.

The difference shows over time. Without criteria, every new decision goes back through the person who ‘knows what the brand is’. With criteria, the team decides and the brand stays the same. That is the real result of identity work: that the system works without the person who designed it.

What to look at in your brand

Try the test in the title, with one more question. Ask three people from different areas to tell you what your brand is and then what they would do with the next collection decision. If they agree on the first and not on the second, your identity lives in the discourse, not in the system.

And one question for you: how many of last week’s decisions had to cross your desk to come out coherent? If the answer is ‘almost all of them’, the brand depends on you, not on its identity.