On Thursday of last week at the AIN Conference, I spent all day in a workshop about improvisation and brand strategy. We explored a lot of issues surrounding brand attributes in particular, but here are some that we found most interesting:

1) Fat words are dangerous. (Fat words are words with many possible interpretations) They’re alluring because they can mean whatever they want… but they leave an awful lot of room for interpretation. Everyone says they are ‘different’ and ‘innovative.’ But does that mean the same thing to everyone in your organization� How about to your consumers?

2) The one REAL brand attribute is authenticity. You can name off any litany of carefully crafted descriptors, but you have to authentically be those things, or you’ll be found out. And then there are the companies who try to manufacture authenticity. Mutually exclusive, anyone?

3) Brand values need to have real life applications. If you can’t define behaviors that embody that value - either on the grander marketing scale or the simpler gesture scale - then maybe that’s not a value on which to focus, eh?

And you can bet I have all sorts of interesting exercises to explore these concepts now.

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