Personally I think any recourse to injunctions is almost always doomed in the long run. Arguing ones case sensibly in the first place has always in my experience between a more effective means of bringing a bad news situation to a speedy conclusion, usually because it becomes just too boring for the media to pursue for more than a day or two.

I was at a presentation last week by Yehuda Shinar on Winning, he helped Clive Woodward become a s Sir! Essentially to be a winner you need to be engaged, learning from experience and applying that learning to tweak things as you go.

If you stand back and watch then that’s OK if you already have your pension pot filled but if you want to build your business for the future you need to be engaged in the current business activities and that includes social media.

Thank you.

Why am I not surprised by yuour experience?

However, I do agree with you whole heartedly that when done well Thought Leadsership is about much more than just marketing – it should permeate the whole organisation as it should be shaping the way the organisation thinks and behaves. Unfortunately it is rare to see it done like this and in most cases is just an extension of their traditional PR programme.

Best
Roger

Thanks for this posting. I have seen thought leadership utterly and compeltely dismissed by professional services firms. Indeed one partner I reported to in a firm that was also close to your heart, was so dismissive that he told me to distance myself from a £2.5m investment we had made with a leading university. We ultimately parted company. Another firm I worked for thought innovation was copying what their bigger industry leaders were doing by recruiting their bigger brothers’ cast-offs.

The only area where I beg to differ is that Thought Leadership is not simply about marketing. It is about re-invention, new service lines, energising the whole of the organisations. It is about finding those areas of uncertainty where we can bring to bare some new thinking or difficult learngin and leverage it. Yes, it is a cost, but failure to carry this cost will result in the demise of the organisation.

Doing Thought Leadership well is hard work, is not just about doing your existing assignment better, or indeed your nest. It is about discovering what you do not know and filling the gap – that can take years.

Regards

Richard

http://paulseaman.eu/2010/04/reflections-on-the-media-and-the-uk-election/

Now, on a personal level, I have sat on the client side of three global branding excercises, one completely new and two upgrading an existing brand and rolling both out to new territories. I have also worked with a number of clients on their branding programmes. So I think I can comment with some degree of competence!

I can honestly say that I wish I had known about the role of the Brand Implementation Advisor when I was sitting client side of the fence. In my own experience, and that of several friends who have been in the same position, once the fluffy creative stuff has been done by the brand agency, the in-house team is pretty much left to deliver the brand on their own. Certainly in some key areas, like advertising, the Marketing Director can be fairly confident that the brand will be implemented properly but once you move outside his/her domain then things become much harder to control. And usually there is so much pressure on everyone to simply deliver the new brand on schedule that there is very little appetite for worrying about costs – the MD who committed to the change is not going to thank anyone for saving a few grand and coming in a month late!

It seems to me that anything that can help you deliver the brand on time, ensure a consistent quality level, and save money at the same time has to be worth exploring. Many Marketing Directors and their teams (not to mention the people in non marketing roles who will have to implement your new brand)will not have been through a major branding exercise before (you need a lot of grey hair to have been through as many as me)so getting help from people who have must be a better idea than learning by your own inevitable mistakes. I might not be quite so grey if I had known Gideon and his team a few years ago!

There are many principles to branding that apply to SMEs as well as large global companies. It is very important to get the brand story and the visual identity right. It is equally important to consider how this will be implemented. How will the identity be consistently applied to different physical touchpoints at minimal cost? What processes need to be put in place to manage consistency across your printed collateral and marketing material? Each function of an organisation contributes towards the brand. What processes will you adopt capable of cohesively managing the brand across marketing, property, HR, sales and finance?

Although branding is a creative process you need to consider the practical aspects throughout the process to keep control of costs and consistency.

I hope this helps in some way.