One of the lines that stood out to me was when Alex talked about how they hope to really figure out the story of Microsoft, beyond it's big profitable corporate machine image.

"A big part of positioning [products] is being there in those early stages, knowing what the engineers think the story is, so the story doesn't get lost." "Apple is probably sharing stuff that maybe it's afraid to share, but that allows the agency [Chiat\Day] to get in at a level where it can produce work like that."

He's right on. In order for great advertising/marketing to work, you gotta know the story. You gotta know the personality. And finding that personality starts at the beginning.

When I consult with clients, it's frustrating how often they attempt to manipulate branding and image design to communicate the very essence and soul of their organization. As Bouchikhi and Kimberly rightly observe, "Ask a senior executive what it means to change a firm's identity, and he or she will most likely talk about redesigning the logo and visual materials and, occasionally, changing the company's name."

The logo and imaging stuff is easy when you know who you are. It's much more difficult when you don't. "Corporate identity change or rebranding is analogous to changing an individual's appearance by changing the clothing or makeup the person wears, cosmetic surgery, and, in extreme cases, by changing the individual's name."

In contrast, real identity transformation "reaches much deeper, to the heart and soul of an individual, and does not necessarily require altering the individual's appearance." The authors continue, "Although the two types of change may sometimes support each other," it's important that surface-level change and deeper change are not transposable prescriptions.

It's definitely OK to update the skins (logo, colors, etc.) of the organization, but it can't be done without the deeper soul in full view at all times during change.

We are in the midst of a transition on a global scale from an era in which the vast majority of individuals and human groups lived with a sense of clarity, continuity and consistency about their identity--their notion of who they are and how others view them--to an era in which identity is increasingly problematic across all levels of human organization, from the individual person to entire nations or civilizations.

The result of this identity crisis, perhaps unintentionally, is that organizations have now become suppliers of individual and collective identity.

In traditional societies, individuals inherited much of their own identity from the social milieu (family, place of birth, tribe, religion) into which they were born. In an organizational society, individuals are defined by the organizations in which they participate. When people draw much of their sense of self from belonging to, or buying from, a particular organization, they tend to be anxious about and resist changes that may alter what, in their eyes, is the very soul of that organization.

"[Identity] is not a private matter; it is a social construction."

Ask yourself the following questions:

• Who are we as a company?


• How do our customers see us?


• To what extent will our identity enable us to thrive in the future?

"When identity becomes problematic, leaders need to understand that they are confronting issues beyond strategy and that invariably involve struggles over the soul of their organization."

The authors point out "identity anchors" that exist in both individuals and organizations. "Just as the identity of individuals can be anchored in gender, nationality, social group, educational credentials or particular skills, an organization's identity [resides] in multiple anchors, such as core business, knowledge base, nationality, operating philosophy, a legendary founder, a governance structure or combinations of these."

Internal Benefits of Clear, Consistent and Valued Identities

• Identification: We belong.


• Loyalty and Commitment: We're in this together.


• Cooperation: We're working toward the same outcomes.


• Problem Solving and Decision Making: We have a framework that guides our decisions.


• Legitimacy: We trust that what we're doing is what we should be doing.

External Benefits of Clear, Consistent and Socially Valued Identities

• Recognition: We're noticed for who we are, not only what we say we are.


• Attractiveness and Loyalty: We're a magnet for the right people.


• Trust and Predictability: We nurture relationships that mean something.

The Dark Side, When Benefits Become Liabilities

• Narcissism: We think we're all that matters


• Conflict: We can't agree on what really matters


• Drift: We forget about what really matters


• Fragmentation: We split up and deal with smaller matters

"Leaders ignore identity at their own risk. And when identity is ignored, it almost inevitably comes back to haunt them."

"Changing the identity of an organization takes more than a new mission statement, a new name, or a new visual identity."

Finally, the authors suggest some personal application to people considering a change of employment. "No matter how attractive the job or the package, if you are at odds with the soul of the corporation, and if you are unwilling or unable to close the gap in one direction or the other, you are stacking the odds of success against yourself."

This book is an excellent read, packed with real world examples--good and bad--of organizations dealing with issues of identity and soul.

Brandtags was created by Noah Brier and is a fascinating lesson in branding. This simple site randomly loads a logo in place and asks you to type in the first word or phrase that comes to mind. It's simple word association. You can do that to as many logos as ya like. You can also see what others have said about any of the companies featured on the site.

When you click on it, you'll see all kinds of words pop up. The larger the word or phrase, the more people entered that word or phrase. Take for instance McDonald's, the words most often associated are: mcdonalds, burger, bigmac, fat, fastfood, greasy, grease, junk, unhealthy, food, evil, arches, etc.

These words make up the unspoken definitions in the minds of thousands of people! Those definitions make up the brand, regardless of what McDonald's is saying (looks like most people aren't "Lovin' It").

This is a great lesson in what branding is all about. It's way more than a logo!

Q: What do basketball and marketing have in common?

A: If you don't follow through, you won't do well.

Allow me to explain.

I remember basketball summer camp like it was yesterday. That's where Mr. Urcheck taught me the correct way to shoot a basketball. I learned how to position my legs—shoulder-width apart, body angled toward the basket. I learned how to hold the ball—shooting arm in a C-shape, palm facing up and ball resting on the fingertips.

I can still hear Mr. Urcheck barking out instructions: "Bend your knees, extend your arm, follow through!" I also remember having to run laps for not following through on my shot!

He was trying to make us realize that one of the most important factors for a shot's success happened after the ball was released—aka the "follow through." We were told that a correct follow through involved pretending we were sticking our fingers down into the hoop after we let go of the ball at the top of our shot. The purpose? To ensure the shot was as targeted as it could be and the rotation of the ball was correct. In short, it helped ensure the ball had everything it needed for its journey toward two points (or even three!).

The older I get the more I see the importance of follow through in every aspect of life. Your marketing is no different.

I'm convinced that businesses—and people for that matter—don't wake up thinking, "Today I want to make sure we don't follow through on our plans." Life happens, business happens! Invoices, customer service, purchase orders, payroll, kids' soccer games—you name it. You get caught up putting out fires leaving little to no time for executing your marketing strategy.

Planning without execution is pretty much useless. If you find yourself in this position, do yourself a favor. Ask for help—don't let your own busyness sabotage your progress. Help's available in many different ways depending on what you need. Great staffing agencies, freelancers and consultants like us can make sure you have the project management and creative guidance you need to accomplish tasks and follow through.

We like to call it peace of mind and it's yours if you need it.

Don't let "business" happen to you. We don't want to make you run laps, but we will if we have to.

When he took the creative reigns, Starbucks' image was controlled by all things dark--dark brown, dark blue, dark green and dark rust. The stores felt kind of like a private study. It was still a nice look, but it gave you the feeling that you should be wearing a smoking jacket, or at any moment you might be shhh'd by the librarian.

Enter Mr. Hainsworth ...

"One of the first things I presented to Howard Schultz was the redesign of the whole bean packaging, and it was dark green with a geographic flavor [i.e., maps]. He asked me if it was something I'd be proud of 10 years from now. I said no. He said, 'Everything that you do here, I want you to make it transformative.' That was permission to do what I thought I'd been hired to do."

Eventually Stanley went on to create five emotional filters that guide and direct all things Starbucks. These filters are five emotional words that capture the identity and soul of the company: Handcrafted, Artistic, Sophisticated, Human and Enduring.

A few years ago, I heard Stanley speak at a national design conference and had the opportunity to meet and chat with him. I was inspired by his approach to shepherding the Starbucks brand. So inspired in fact that I came home and went to work trying to figure out how Stanley's philosophy could be translated into a formal process for small and medium sized businesses without the luxury of giant creative departments and Madison Avenue gurus. Since we've been using it, we've seen first hand, how powerful five words can be for a company's growth and success.

An AdAge article this week announced that Stanley has moved on from Starbucks and taken the plunge to start his own agency in Seattle--Tether Inc.

I wanted to take a moment in the odd chance that Stanley might stumble upon this to say thanks and wish him luck.

I'm sure you'll be hearing more from the guy with the crazy hair in the months ahead.

I didn't buy it and I didn't let him off the hook that easy. "Let's look at the DNA of the particular products you are selling," I suggested. This approach quickly returned results of big-hearted scientists and inventors that wanted to save lives and improve the quality of living. Now we were getting somewhere.

I predict that in the coming years, we're going hear an insurgence of conversations about finding and returning to our roots. I blogged last month about Starbucks' current quest and today I bumped into a comment by Nelson Peltz, CEO of Trian Fund Management, former owner of the Snapple brand before they sold it in 2000 to Cadbury Schweppes. Referencing the success Trian had with increasing Snapple sales, Peltz said, "We returned to our roots by winning back the local delis and pizza parlors that first made the brand a success."

Warren Buffet had a similar thought. In response to a reporter's question about how people can know when it's safe to invest when the big financial institutions don't seem to know what's in their portfolio, Buffet said, "They can't, they can't. They've got to, in effect, try to read the DNA of the people running the companies."

Finding your roots. Tracing your DNA. It's all part of identifying your personality.

We've been encouraged that many have told us that the evaluation has been helpful in bringing things to the surface that need to be fixed and also accurately framed up their organization's current position.

We're opening up this tool and placing it on our site for everyone to access. You can download it here.

Some people have begun sharing it with their employees and coworkers and even employers to gain an even more accurate picture of where their company is at. Please feel free to share it with others, that's what it's for!

When you submit your results back to us, we'll send you back a free report that sheds even more light about your score and what you can do to improve it. we hope you'll find it as helpful as those who've already taken it and responded.

P.S. - The download is a dynamic PDF and you'll need Adobe Acrobat 7.0 to see it. And as always, we don't share or rent or sell out your information in anyway shape or form.

Up until recently, the conversation about companies having personality has been for the most part silent. And while I am not so naive to think that we here at Personality™ have a corner on the conversation, it has been a little lonely. Thanks to Rohit's book, we may be meeting some new friends.

I've got to say up front, unfortunately, that I read Personality Not Included with a bit of skepticism because of how engrossed in the idea of organizational personality I have been for the last several years. While I don't apologize for the bias, it does temper my enthusiasm because a lot of Rohit's ideas are echoes.

That aside, the book is indeed a decent read. It's divided into two sections. The first section is comprised of just six chapters because, says Rohit, of the more than 100 marketing and business books on his shelf, "Chapter 6 is the sweet spot." The second section of the book is packed with techniques, guides and tools that work alongside the first half's six chapters. Combined, the book is an argument for why personality matters in your company and how to go about doing something about it.

Here were the six "sellevator" pitches for the six chapters:

1. How Organizations Lose Their Personality
Being faceless doesn't work anymore. Today you need to have a company of individuals (instead of people) who are empowered to share control with your customers.

2. How Unlikely Voices Are Shaping Your Brand
Your accidental spokespeople are the employees or customers who are speaking for your brand already (often without your approval or knowledge) and your first challenge is to find ways to embrace these individuals.

3. How to Define Your Organization's Personality
The personality of your organization is the combination of what is unique, authentic, and talkable about it. The UAT Filter helps you identify your personality by looking at these elements sequentially.

4. Crafting a Backstory People Care About
A backstory offers a reason for your customers to believe in your brand. There are five key models of backstories: the passionate enthusiast, the inspired inventor, the smart listener, the likeable hero and the little guy versus the big guy.

5. Getting Your Organization to Embrace Personality
Fear is the underlying reason behind most of the barriers to personality and manifests itself through success, uncertainty, tradition, and precedent. To overcome these, you need to find a position of authority within your organization (based on respect or authority).

6. Finding and Using Personality Moments
Focusing on personality moments means making better use of the times when you already have your customers' attention (during and after purchase) as well as using your personality to attract attention during other phases.

Conclusion
The biggest problem I had with this book was the lack of depth and real tangible application you'd would expect from someone with Bhargava's impressive background. If anyone has the credentials to talk about organizational personality, Rohit is it. However, the actual application--particularly when it comes to figuring out the personality of an organization--was lacking. To his credit, Rohit tried hard to do this, but it seemed more like an afterthought. And in all fairness, I'm partial to the way we here at Personality™ approach this stuff. For us, it's our business. For Rohit, it's the last half of a book. Big difference.

Overall, Personality Not Included should be recommended reading for everyone involved with marketing and communication, especially business leaders that are starting new initiatives or leading in the midst of change.

In the next week, we'll roll out the evaluation tool to our Think subscribers, along with an accompanying guide that helps companies interpret their score and figure out how to increase their confidence factor.

It's just one of the many things we're working on here at Personality™.

Building Momentum (PDF, 124 KB, 2 pages)

Barbara Kiviat wrote a great profile piece on Howard Schultz in the April 7 issue of Time magazine. The gist of it is Howard's journey back to the heart of who Starbucks really is. "We haven't been as good at telling our story as we once had in the past," says Schultz.

Kiviat rightly concludes that "To Schultz, keeping in touch with the past is key to future success. Remembering who you are is the first step to becoming who you should be." She tells the story of Howard and how he sometimes goes to the original Starbucks at Pike Place in Seattle and lets himself in before the store opens. "He puts his hands on the wooden counter and thinks about how he felt at the beginning, what it was he was trying to do."

Remembering your roots is critical to knowing your personality as an organization. And keeping your roots rooted is critical to staying the course. Perhaps this is why Howard has brought back several people from his original management team. He's also been circulating a memo that he wrote in 1986. "We recognize this is a unique time; when our coffee bars will change the way people will perceive the beverage. It's an adventure and we're in it together." He even signed it the same way he signs memos today. "Onward, Howard."

So here's a sampling of 'less is more' thinking:

• It's why burrito joint Chipotle won't serve dessert.
• It's why Semco restricts memos to one page with a headline that gets to the point.
• It's why 37Signals switched to a four-day work week.

Of course these all came from 37Signals, the less is more software company.

We organized our conversation around two themes this year: Current State and Future State. We then did an exercise to "mind the gap" that connects where we're at now (current state) to where we are going (future state). The "mind the gap" conversation resulted in a task list of about 10 things. All of those were grouped into three primary categories that we phrased as objectives:

1. Survive and thrive.
2. Build the team and build the brand.
3. Think ahead.

Next up is drilling down each of the objectives and tasks and turning them into projects and milestones that can be managed.

Progress!

The next morning I looked it up and sure enough--April Fool's. But it got me thinking, what if it wasn't a joke? What if Ford did this? Would this be a good idea or a bad idea? Here's my thoughts--let's pretend this was a real story and Ford actually did revise their logo.

Think about it, people don't think overwhelmingly positive thoughts when they hear GM, Ford or Chrysler. They just don't. The tarnishing of these great brands has eroded virtually all the positive memory of why we loved them in the first place.

Separation from all that erosion could be just the thing Ford needs (or GM or Chrysler). All of the sudden, with something as simple as a logo shift, there is a pause between what the eye sees and what the mind already knows. The mind has to work harder to associate the negative thoughts towards the old with the visual impression of the new. Even though we all know it's just a logo, it still creates separation in the mind. And that separation means opportunity.

Opportunity to redefine itself. To show the American consumer and the world that our country's great brands of yesterday are ready to invent again. They're looking to embrace what's next, not just hold on to what they've had.

I think this was a brilliant joke--but perhaps an even more brilliant strategy.

Ford, you listening?