The Beyond Branding Blog

Jeremy Williams makes many points and I'll just pick up on a few for starters:

There is considerable evidence that if a company's brand is a family's name then the family won't permit the worst inconsistencies (or broken promises) done in their name. Indeed many families I have interviewed at board level have stated such explicitly as a reason why their company retains a sustainable advantage. Of course there is a caveat: whilst the family has influence. Of course, this links with at least two things:
-the shareholder structure - a family has lost charge once it no longer controls the majority of the votes
-the founder; almost without exception big companies as we know them today had a founder who originally had a big long-term purpose; he or she would have eaten the 90-day numbers sharks for sushi-style hors d'oeuvres, and because purpose came first the company grew; today the sharkss are gnawing away at the human flesh and structures of companies so much so that Harrison Owen creator of Open Space has said that perhaps most companies are no longer capable of doing what they were designed to do
There is absolutely no sense in any beyond-brander throwing out how human beings decode communications. We tend to remember things visually, so logos will be just one part of any brand mix for ever; what we argue is : use every powerful element of branding to do good not to take advantage of people, and dont ever get beholden to the business cas of any component supplier of the brand - eg the brand is not advertising, it is not perception to have a brand model that can only function if you for ever pay the increasing cost of mass media is to commit your customers to an ever lower value exchange; brands must think ahead and divorce themselves from any practice which was once their most economic part but has become their most costly part
Living Systems, and organisations as part of this family, are so humanly misvalued by one-dimensional financial demons that I make this offer; if you have share or passion ownership in some organisation which people value that has more human value than the number crunchers are saying - tell me ; if I believe its got more human value multiplication at ist core than you're getting, I will work for free, and you choose what to pay me (in kind or whatever) if you end up with more for everyione than the financial transaction people offered. Latest update of links:great prize gatherings for human KM. How many of the Networking Degrees of 3dom do you know?
VALUEtrue=Productivities (Know) * Demands (Value)=K1*K2*K3*K4*K5*V1*V2*V3*V4*V5