Brands have a hard life. The tale of Black Beauty acts as a useful analogy. First Black Beauty has a nice owner who brings him up as a foal and loves him. Then he gets a new owner who is nasty and makes him work too hard so he goes into decline.

Black Beauty is sold off to a man who is poor but has a good heart and some cute kids. Then he gets another nasty owner and so on… Happily for Black Beauty, it all turns out well in the end. He finishes his days in a field eating grass and cavorting with a bunch of mares.

The key insight is that brands get a dog’s abuse sometimes because the fate of a brand lies with the people who manage it. Brand management requires a mixture of paternal discipline and maternal nurturing.

If the parenting is dysfunctional or neurotic, the brand gets damaged. So you have depressed brands, phobic brands, psychotic brands and well balanced brands and people pick up on these personality traits.

Most of us like to hang around with people who share our views and values. We like to surround ourselves with brands that reflect who we are or who we would like to be.

When brands become dysfunctional, we move away from them to protect ourselves. The most stable brands are those run for a long time by well-balanced management. If a brand is going nicely in the hands of an introvert, the arrival of an extrovert on the scene is likely to result in an abrupt change of personality, confusion and loss of self.

Managers tend to treat their brands the way people treat their children. Some parents are very demanding. They are determined that their children will be winners. You see them running up and down the sidelines of the football pitch shouting and screaming at their kids playing in an under-eight friendly. Or, they have their child groomed to be a ‘You’re a Star’ winner from the age of three.

In clinical psychology, people sometimes turn up with a ‘problem child’. After a while the psychologist invites the parent to make a second appointment, not for the child but for the parent, realising that the child’s problem is actually a reaction to the parent’s dysfunctionality. Help the parent and you help the child.

Put in a brand management context, brands that have been developing smoothly suddenly go high energy for a while and then suffer burnout. Those that seemed to be on a constant, happy high, become morose and depressed. When new parents come along, the rules change. If you can adapt, fine. If not, you have a problem.

So if a brand takes a dive, instead of hauling it off to the design agency and putting the advertising out to a seven-way pitch, a little brand management psychotherapy might be more effective. Fix the management and you fix the brand.

Experienced people in ad agencies tear their hair out because new brand management arrives with a bucket load of ideas as to how a brand should perform and a complete lack of respect for a team that has kept it running smoothly for years. So the agency makes the ad management wants, which turns out to be a pile of Black Beauty droppings and gets shot when the brand nosedives.

Brand management’s job is to safeguard the brand, keep it healthy and pass it on in good condition both physically and psychologically. Some management teams do this exceptionally well, others badly, turning a healthy bouncing brand into a lost soul.

The brand strategy should be locked away in the boardroom with a requirement for two keys to open the safe. The relevance and effectiveness of the strategy should be monitored on an ongoing basis and nurtured appropriately to facilitate re-direction if straying off the path, but not a complete change of personality overnight. If the latter is the only option available, the parents have been indulging themselves and have not been caring for the children.

Strong, confident brands can weather competition and misfortune precisely because they have the resources and strength of character to adapt. They get this from the positive parenting they receive as they move through the life-stages of infancy, childhood, adolescence, young adulthood and maturity.

We should lose the corporate speak we use when dealing with brands and start using parenting speak so as to take out the hard-assed, macho culture and replace it with a culture of nurturing, support and character building that will inform a better quality of brand and organisational development.

If people see brands as extensions of themselves it must make sense to think of brands in people terms, a sort of positive anthropomorphism. Anyone for the job of brand parent, or would you rather be a child manager?

(Feel free to use any elements of this article that suit your needs but please give credit where credit is due when you do.)

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