Cementing the Bricks of a Legacy Brand

Good morning, afternoon, or evening, everybody. I’m Wanda Thibodeaux, and this is Faithful on the Clock, the podcast all about getting your faith and work aligned. And today I gotta ask, do you want your brand to stick around a while? You do, right? That a yes? Then you stick right where you are and keep listening, because today’s episode is gonna cover how you can build a true brand legacy that endures for the long haul. I hope you’re ready, because it starts right now.

To get us out of the gate here, I just want to define what a brand actually is so we’re all on the same page. It’s just any product, service, or even a concept that you’re able to distinguish from whatever else is out there on the market. It’s possible to attach your brand to the entire business, but a business also can be an umbrella for multiple brands.

So at its core, branding is just about differentiation. It’s playing that old Sesame Street game you might remember, One of These Things Is Not Like the Other. But the problem every company has is that you have to find a way to maintain that differentiation even as the world changes, as culture shifts and people develop. That’s the only way to survive for the long haul. And what often happens is, leaders run into this dilemma of, you know, they feel like they have to totally pivot and change the brand to keep that differentiation going and to satisfy their customers in the current moment.

And so I want to connect this for a moment to Jesus and his storytelling. When Jesus was out preaching, he used a lot of different analogies to illustrate the same point. For example, when he was trying to get across one aspect of what Heaven was like, in Matthew 13 he compared it to all kinds of things. He said it was like a man who sowed good seed in his field, like yeast that a woman mixed into her bread to leaven the entire batch, like a net that caught all kinds of fish, a merchant seeking pearls, and so on. And all of these analogies or parables are different. But they all have the same theme they’re getting across, that Heaven is all about bringing everything together, improving, and really just magnifying every little thing into something extraordinary. And if you think in terms of brand, that’s the value concept, that differentiating sell point that describes the purpose. So what Jesus did was, he found that central story, that central theme of collecting and improving, and then he just adjusted the language for different audiences so they could understand and connect to it. But the core lesson, the core concept, that never changed.

And so branding your business to build a legacy, that works exactly the same way. You find the core value, the core mission or vision that you’re all about that nobody else in the market is doing. And over time, you might swap out the analogy or use a different platform or maybe new technologies, but you’re always connecting it back and making sure that it revolves around that original vision or value concept. The way you communicate the message can shift, but the message itself does not. And what that allows you to do is respond on the fly to whatever’s going on in the world without sacrificing your central identity that people are going to lean on when deciding to trust and stay with you.

Now, something else that Jesus did very well that’s connected to this is that He remembered His history. Every time the Pharisees or anybody else got up in His face and tried to, you know, trip Him up or trick Him, he’d pull out the writings of His people. And one of my favorite examples there is the cleansing of the temple in Mark 11:15-19, where He just loses it on the money changers and he says, “Is it not written, ‘My house shall be called a house of prayer for all nations’? But you have made it a ‘den of thieves’.” You know, he was calling them out and essentially saying, this is what it was originally designed to be and you guys are just totally forgetting everything and destroying it. And He kicks them all out and tries to restore it back to the way it was intended to be. In Even in Matthew 4, when He’s being tempted by the Devil, every time the Devil dangles something in front of Him, Jesus comes back with a writing that puts Satan in his place. And so over and over again, He was always looking back and using those prophesies and that history as guardrails.

So the thing I want you to remember is, just like Jesus used history to kind of, you know, make decisions and teach other people, your company’s history needs to be at the front of the story you tell. It becomes the voice or advocate for the brand. And if you’re not sure what to do, if you’re not sure if the fresh parable or language in the marketing is the right choice, then you look back and see if what you’re considering is consistent with the history, with that original value concept. If it’s not, you pitch it. If it is, well, good, then you go forward with the plan and you make your social posts or videos or whatever it is. You can keep reaching your audience or even expand it and you don’t sacrifice yourself in the process.

I can’t end this episode, though, without explaining how to do that in a practical, everyday operations way. And the first thing I’d recommend is, make sure that you’re keeping good records. You know, your marketing team 30 years from now, they should be able to look back and say, you know, “Hey, back in 2021 we did this ad that really worked, so how can we revamp that for our customers now?” And make sure all of that data is accessible to everyone so that everybody knows the brand intent and history and can be an advocate with the same degree of accountability. And then the next thing I’d suggest is having a Chief Brand Officer on your board. Their entire job, when you have a board meeting about brand decisions, their whole job is to play historian and make sure that the original brand voice is heard. And the CBO doesn’t have to be somebody who’s been with your company since day one, they just need to really know your story and its value, and to be able to connect all the history and legacy you have to opportunities you have in the moment.

So that is how you cement the bricks and build a legacy brand. You tweak the language, not the value concept, and whenever you make decisions, you take pride in the history of the brand and let that history guide what you do.

And with that, let’s close out, as always, with a brief prayer.

God, when Jesus came to us as your representative, He wasn’t afraid to tell the same story, the same truths, in a lot of different ways so as many people as possible could understand. He always let your history influence whatever He did next. So as we try to create brands that won’t just crumble, show us how to translate in the moment. Make sure that we cling to our value concept no matter how crazy the world might be, but more than anything, make sure that everything in that value concept is a service to you. In Jesus’ name, Amen.

That’s everything for this one. Next time, I’m gonna tackle how to create a workplace that’s actually fun, and why some approved shenanigans can pump up your bottom line. Tune in for that in ONE WEEK, all right? Go ahead and subscribe to the show if you haven’t already done it, and until next time, be blessed.