Brand For Purpose, Not Elitism
- Abhijit Das
- May 1
- 3 min read
Updated: May 2
Branding isn't about elitism—it's fundamentally about purpose and intentionality. This is all that it takes to build a brand as basic foundation of the business.
The medium of brand thinking is business actions. If brand is ‘wealth’, business is ‘cash’. Where your cash is deployed will decide ‘if and how’ your wealth grows as an outcome. Being discerning at scale is where ‘values’ come into play. And the first act of discernment on business is to prepare a strategic blueprint towards achieving a purpose. As business actions routinely operate under uncertainty, a good grip on ‘brand purpose’ helps wade through that uncertainty without getting paralyzed.
Toyota, Patagonia, Faber-Castell, TATA Group, UNIQLO, Shiseido, Singapore Airlines, Alibaba - all of them have lived through many uncertainties and stood tall with a clear purpose at hand.
Speaking of intentionality in business on which strong brands are built, we must remember W. Edwards Deming, an American engineer, statistician, professor, and management consultant who is widely credited with inspiring the Japanese economic miracle following World War II. His seminal book “Out of the Crisis”, was published in 1982, during a period when American manufacturing was losing ground to Japanese competition. Deming argued that the crisis facing American industry was not due to worker laziness or Japanese trade practices, but fundamentally flawed management systems in Western businesses.
His 14 points for management, a set of principles for transforming business effectiveness were:
1. Create constancy of purpose toward improvement: American businesses were focused on short-term profits rather than long-term sustainability. Deming advocated allocating resources for long-term planning, research, and education instead of quarterly earnings.
2. Adopt the new philosophy: Management was tolerating delays, mistakes, and defective materials. Deming urged a complete rejection of the widespread acceptance of inefficiency and poor quality as inevitable.
3. Cease dependence on inspection to achieve quality: Companies were relying on mass inspection of finished products. Deming showed this was costly and ineffective, arguing instead to build quality into the process from the beginning.
4. End the practice of awarding business on the price tag alone: Procurement departments focused exclusively on price, ignoring quality. Deming advocated developing long-term relationships with fewer suppliers who could demonstrate statistical evidence of quality.
5. Improve constantly and forever the system of production and service: American companies pursued stability rather than improvement. Deming insisted quality improvement was not a one-time effort but a continuous process involving everyone.
6. Institute training on the job: Workers were often poorly trained with inconsistent methods. Deming emphasized standardized, comprehensive training to reduce variation.
7. Institute leadership: Supervisors were focused on meeting quotas rather than quality. Deming distinguished between leadership (helping people do better) and supervision (meeting numbers).
8. Drive out fear: Workers feared reporting problems or suggesting improvements. Deming recognized fear prevents honest communication and problem-solving.
9. Break down barriers between departments: Companies suffered from departmental silos competing against each other. Deming advocated team approaches where research, design, sales, and production worked cooperatively.
10. Eliminate slogans, exhortations, and targets: Management relied on motivational campaigns rather than improving systems. Deming believed slogans created resentment when the means to achieve them weren't provided.
11. Eliminate work standards (quotas) and management by objective: Numerical quotas focused on quantity over quality. Deming showed how they encouraged shortcuts that reduced quality.
12. Remove barriers that rob people of pride of workmanship: Performance reviews and management by numbers demoralized workers. Deming argued these systems destroyed intrinsic motivation and teamwork.
13. Institute a vigorous program of education and self-improvement: Companies weren't investing in worker development. Deming saw continuous education as essential for innovation and adaptation.
14. Put everybody in the company to work to accomplish the transformation: Quality initiatives often became specialized departments. Deming insisted transformation required participation from everyone in the organization.
Remind me again, why was I, a brand guy, discussing Deming with a German Engineer at a Vietnamese furniture manufacturing facility tucked away in Binh Duong?
Nevermind.
My apologies to those who would rather have me stick to Brand Name, Logo and Design discussion.
Let's set up a meeting to talk about why "Toyota" and not "Toyoda" and what's was the 8-stroke story behind the motif.
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