What do you do to brand your company? Is it the best way?

The buzz word of advertising for two or more excruciating decades was “branding.” If you ran a company and didn’t understand basic branding principles, you were out in the cold. Living in the Ice Age. Irrelevant. Most probably your employees still hung around the water cooler and key punched data into a mainframe.

Sure, “branding” sounded impressive, but few actually grasped its meaning let alone its basics. Clients just knew they wanted it.

I once had a client who searched for hip, nouveau words to attach to his business. You might compare this to using emoticons, if they had been in place back then.

Some business owners hire a marketing agency or public relations firm and pay big bucks to work out their own creative angst or energies. These people are actually seeking affirmation and back-up for plans they alone devise. This particular client was just over 30, bright, relentlessly ambitious and already successful in his field. He viewed himself as a tactical genius and at whim he adopted particular words in the trade vernacular to enhance his business.

For awhile he was particularly enamored with the word “synergistic.” He used this vague but zippy-sounding word in staff briefings, employee functions and at community speaking engagements. Everyone nodded approval, not exactly knowing why. “Synergy” blasted its way into company training programs, stakeholders’ letters, annual reports, employment applications and the company website. Even yellow sticky notes to colleagues were “synergized” in some way. As his advertising partner, our company was given an edict to incorporate “synergistic” into a brilliant new marketing and advertising plan — one that veered far from the well-wrought, multiple year strategy we had so carefully presented the year prior. Little else mattered but “synergy” — he was a man obsessed.

Six months later he had discovered “preemptive,” a raw and robust — if not menacing — word that would take on usage unknown to everyone but bridge players and military officers. Our task as his agency: to build this shiny new word into the new company “brand.” Yes, another new word, branding, was the goal with “preemptive” as the key strategy.

Somehow, we all survived the hubris of the business owner, but the company closed after four years, its rocketing success flash-frozen by emerging technology. There are lessons to be learned here. To build and maintain properly, branding takes decades of team effort and millions of dollars. It is much more than a cool graphic logo, a slogan, a single clever campaign or a collection of appealing buzz words plugged randomly into a blog, a radio script or a social media post.

Branding is the unique story of a business as it evolves coupled with a recognizable culture of respect for the services or products it provides. Done correctly, it is a well-studied practice that creates a positive, realistic identity carefully crafted and widely communicated.

This story was originally published May 2, 2017 at 1:11 PM with the headline "What do you do to brand your company? Is it the best way?."