Brand Matters : How's Your Brand's Margin?

Contemplating the white space and time-outs

When was the last time you took your brand on a holiday? A real, live "getaway from it all" pause for refreshment and renewal? I don't mean the annual rah-rah sales meeting or the obligatory management off-site. I mean a true time-out.

In today's multitasking, chaotic and breathless work worlds, brands-and their creators and maintainers-have little margin. They are stretched to capacity; they are firefighters and crisis interceptors, constantly feeling behind the eight ball, "Crackberried" to death, racing to solve the latest problem du jour. They are running on empty.

I first learned about the concept of margin years ago from Dr. Richard Swenson, a medical practitioner who wrote an entire book, "Restoring Margin to Overloaded Lives," on the topic. It had nothing to do with brands, but rather our overloaded lives. Swenson argues persuasively that all areas of our lives (emotional, physical, financial and time) need margin. He shares this metaphor: Think about the white space surrounding this article and the white space on every page of this publication-the margin. Its cleanliness and emptiness allows you, the reader, to comprehend these words more clearly and easily. By placing less words and more space between the lines, the message can "breathe." A practical and everyday example of how less is, indeed, more. Swenson is a cheerleader for margin. By cutting his own medical practice in half, he increased the quality of his life tremendously.

Our brand lives need margin, too.

A time-out could be just what your brand and its managers need. Now. Not after you get it all done, because that just never happens. I encourage my clients to take "stop and think" time as often as possible. Unfortunately, it's a rarity in the workplace today.

The Power of Stop and Think Time
Bill Gates is famous for his "Think Weeks," where he extracts himself from the day-to-day pressures and challenges and leaves the office for a twice-a-year ritual of private thinking and deliberating about Microsoft's future. Powered by Diet Orange Crush soda, he mulls over an edited pile of strategic positioning papers from employees and responds with electronic comments for all in the company to see. He has been doing this for more than a decade. These important Think Weeks have not only been critical to Microsoft's progress, but have affected the entire industry.

When Howard Schultz returned to Starbucks in his original CEO role, one of the first things he did was order a mandatory, company-wide three-hour coffee break. The coffee shops all around the nation closed down for a brief time-out so Schultz could speak to his employees about the importance of getting back to the brand's heritage. Schultz painfully saw how Starbucks started to get carried away with more ... more noncoffee products, more distractions, more brand clutter. His first move was to say, "Stop."

Sometimes brand time-outs happen when new leadership enters in and can see the brand with a fresh lens. Talbots' new CEO, Trudy Sullivan, took a few months to put together a strategic repositioning program that will help revitalize the classic brand and modernize its fashion offering to its core customer base. Her outsider-now-insider perspective helped the Talbots team start thinking about creating consistent "brand moments" with its customers. Sullivan is encouraging the 60-year-old company to break some long-standing habits (like semi-annual sales) that its customers no longer find relevant (they want more frequent in-season markdowns).

Web-based application business 37signals is a company that understands brand margin. Its Web site proclaims:

We aim for the software sweet spot: Elegant, thoughtful products that do just what you need and nothing you don't.

We're ... committed to building the best web-based software products possible with the least number of features necessary. Our products do less than the competition-intentionally.

The idea of "less is more" is built right into the brand DNA.

Stopping and thinking doesn't come naturally for most of us. We are a nation of strivers and doers. We are not reflectors and contemplators. But it is in the reflecting and contemplating that new insights are born and that course corrections can occur. Playwright George Bernard Shaw wrote, "I like a state of continual becoming, with a goal in front and not behind." Pausing to reflect allows brands like Microsoft, Starbucks and Talbots to see just what they've become to their customers and a chance to ponder whether or not they like what they see.

Good Is the Enemy of the Best
By continually doing, doing, doing and not stopping to look up or around, brands miss opportunities and potential profits. Maxwell House missed the "power of lingering" that Starbucks capitalized upon; Blockbuster missed the convenience factor that Netflix seized; Barnes & Noble missed the revolution that Amazon.com created; Kroger missed the treasure hunt shopping experience that wowed Whole Foods Market customers.

These mainstream powerhouse brands were all doing good things: staying very busy, putting out important fires, keeping up with their competitive Joneses. But they didn't take time to stop and reflect on how customers were changing, on what niche opportunities lay at their doorsteps, on what advances other industries were doing that they could borrow. These, indeed, would have been the best things for their brands. The old proverb is still true today: Good is indeed the enemy of the best.

Working nonstop without a break sometimes gets in the way of our brand's own best interests. Our habits get ingrained, and they are not always good for us. Same trade shows. Same product rollouts. Same e-mail campaigns. We know how to do these things, and we do them well. But innovation is rarely about the same.

A Brand Breather
So, I encourage you to write yourself a permission slip for a brand time-out. Not a toddler punishment time-out, but a positive brand breather time-out. Take your brand and its creators and managers on a holiday. An informal shorts-and-flip-flops kind of holiday. Pack light. Get out of the office. Shut off all the technological tethers and just be. Celebrate all the good things you've done lately. Savor your successes. Eat your favorite comfort foods, and be sure to try something new and unusual.

Then go play in the margins of your brand. Hang out in the white space. Breathe. Look up. Look around. What do you need to stop doing? Where do your brand messages clutter your customers' minds with too much? Too many features (product bloat)? Too many options (choice overload)? Too many steps (ordering hassles)? Delete the unnecessary froth in your brand.

Next, ask yourself these equally important questions: What can you start doing that no one else is doing? What's missing from the customer experience? What has been overlooked? It may be something very simple (like a bank deciding to have customers' hours vs. bankers' hours) that will set you apart from the competition. Be bold. Be daring. Be first. Be considerate of your customers' time and attention.

Liminal Time
Sometimes brands need a purposeful and strategic transition time in order to embrace the changes that may have occurred during this period of reflection. Author Debra Farrington uses the term "liminal times" to describe how transitions can be a bit scary and unpredictable, but also full of creative potential. It is in these in-between times that we can see just how elastic and resilient our brand can be. By bumping up against our limits, we reconsider and recalibrate our actions. We stretch and grow. We get a new perspective.

Nineteenth-century poet and author George MacDonald cautioned, "Work is not always required. There is such a thing as sacred idleness, the cultivation of which is now fearfully neglected." So, whatever industry you are in, whatever size your brand presently is, however lean your staff may be, I urge you to embrace some sacred idleness now. Write yourself a permission slip to set aside this fire, this project, this deadline, this urgent problem. Then, take a deep breath, and just stop and think. 

Andrea Syverson helps companies stop and think about their brands, merchandise and creative potential. She is president of IER Partners, a strategic consultancy based in the Rocky Mountains. She may be reached at asyverson@ierpartners.com.