The Synaxis Keystone Marketing System provides a phased approach to the implementation, rollout, and operationalization of marketing measurement tools, web tools, and communications tools.
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Branding is Only Human
Cognition is defined as “The mental faculty of knowing, which includes perceiving, recognizing, conceiving, judging, reasoning, and imagining” (The American Heritage® Stedman’s Medical Dictionary).
It is at the heart of everything we do as human beings. It also shows why we need to have marketing and branding companies at all.
We are essentializing beings. That is, our way of knowing the world tends heavily towards looking for the essential, the typical, and the regular. We tend to see the general, the core, the one single “thing” that summarizes, encapsulates, or explains what we’re looking at. And this is the core thought behind the importance of branding.
With a person, it’s his or her “character” that we see and hold on to among all the intangible details of their everyday life. Similarly, with a company, it is the “brand” of that company that we see.
This sort of essentializing is not a voluntary action. We just tend to do it, because of how our innate human experiencing works. We need some general, reliable data to anchor our experience. We can’t function without this keystone. It “holds together” our experience by continually tying it with some key ideas.
So, it is not that we would like a person to have a character, rather it is that we expect a person to have a character. We seek it out and if we don’t see it, we look some more. When we look for this essence of the person, his or her character, we look for what’s the true nature of the person, what he or she is “really like”. If we can’t eventually find one, it’s confusing and awkward. We say this person “has no character”.
It’s the same way with companies. To humans, a company is surprisingly like a person. It has a name. It seems to be taking action in the world. And so, we expect it will have a personality—an essence. Not a character exactly, but a clear and established brand. We are looking for what is essential about a company. And when we find nothing, to apply Stein’s observation about Oakland, we might say, “There is no there there.”
Thus, a company’s brand is not some veneer laid on top of its true operations. A company’s brand is its true operations—its true nature. We need the brand to fully understand and express the company. Thus, good branding is identifying and revealing what’s essentially true about a company. And good communications is ensuring that everyone receives the right and intended message.
This leads us to what is so compelling about this business. It is a wonderful job to help companies understand themselves, to realize what’s essential about them, and then to communicate that effectively.
