Brand is a warehouse for value

Try thinking about brand as a warehouse for storing the value created by peoples and organisations day-to-day actions.

Most of the time, you’re depositing your actions in the warehouse.

The experience people have working for you and buying from you lives by the door. The promises you make and keep are the forklifts moving things in and out. Your reputation sits on the top shelves. Products and services are ready inventory.

You get the idea.

The trades you make stock the warehouse, and every building block of your brand result involves exchanging one kind of capital for another. People, intellectual property, reputation, social standing, environment and yes, money all move back and forth.

When the activity aligns with what you say you care about, the value stored in your warehouse grows. When it doesn’t, it depletes. The goal is to achieve the continuing accomplishment I talk about in other articles.

Still, none of us gets the trade right every time. So while there will be peaks and dips, that’s ok, as long as the overall value goes up. Because if you destroy value too often by making bad trades and wrong promises, you will eventually empty the warehouse.

People almost universally use ‘brand’ to mean the business. But, run out of value to trade, and it is the organisation that will cease to exist.

You’ve seen what this looks like, even if it’s not called out.

Devoted customers betrayed when a beloved product is discontinued. Ongoing restructuring and rounds of redundancy destroying morale. Short-term investments strip mining capital instead of supporting future innovation.

Filling your warehouse with enough value to survive and thrive requires a more deliberate analysis of how you trade.

Brand is often rendered fuzzy and unknowable by the way it is packaged. The warehouse metaphor strips away the layers and lets anyone in the organisation simply ask whether what they’re doing deposits value.

Multiply that across every person, and your brand will have a bountiful store of value before you know it.

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