Branding : Thinkering and Tinkering

Improve your brand with a little focused wordplay

Sometimes companies can spend way too much time dithering. You know how it goes; you've been there: Lots of corporate nods to and fro in meetings spent jockeying for departmental positions, followed up by numerous CC'd emails where the actions agreed upon in the meetings end up diluted or vetoed by rounds of inaction before they're forgotten or trampled over by the next day's crisis.

Instead of wasting a company's precious resources—time, energy and enthusiasm—dithering, I encourage clients to put that energy into "thinkering" and tinkering with this simple exercise from my BrandAbout process.

Play With Two Powerful Letter Combos: 'RE' and 'ER'
"Thinkering" and tinkering does takes time—"stop and think" time! Both words contain two of the same lowly 1-point Scrabble letters as are in "dither"—"E" and "R"—but thinkering and tinkering are much more productive. Tinkering requires hands-on action and involvement. Why not have your brand team play with those two letters as a prefix or suffix and create as many word possibilities as you can imagine? I've provided a few examples (in the box on the right) to get you started.

Next, write your team's top 12 favorite "RE" and "ER" words on separate index cards. Pass out one card per team member and have each one develop three ways your brand could "recalibrate" an aspect of itself or become "simpler" in some way that is truly meaningful to your customers. Now, take some "thinking" time to mull over your tinkering and see what happens. And then find out which brand leaders want to sign up for spearheading some of these key initiatives. Spend no time dithering, just get busy doing!

Real-World 'RE' and 'ER' Stories
Here are a few examples of companies that have used this BrandAbout exercise to take these two little letters seriously:

Smaller, Lighter, Faster, Better, Quieter
• Nothing stops Amazon from continuous improvement. Despite the Kindle's phenomenal success since its launch just two years ago, Amazon's latest version is smaller, lighter, faster and with 50 percent better contrast. That's four "ER" words the firm's e-readers truly care about! Sometimes companies stop tweaking their best-selling products. That's simply a wrong strategy.

• Bose—which uses the tagline "better sound through research"—knows that its customers care deeply about noise. For 20 years, this manufacturer has been the pioneer of noise-canceling technology research, and its headphones are a traveler's dream on loud and crowded planes. However, the company continues to pursue the next level of noise canceling perfection and has recently introduced a product that's even "quieter than before."