A column by William “Skip” Hidlay about the intersection of brand strategy, leadership, storytelling, and AI. Connecting your team members’ passion to your organization’s purpose builds trusted brands, one moment at a time.
Trust Builds Strong Brands
What a lifetime of storytelling has taught me
The managing editor worked in an office with a glass wall facing the newsroom, presumably so he could keep an eye on the reporters. He seemed to have built-in radar for me – or at least for whenever I’d file a story.
He’d see me drop off the paper slip with my story file name at the city desk. As I walked back to my desk, he’d come out of his office, snatch my story slip and retreat to his computer to review my work.
I was in the third year of what would become a 30-year journalism career, taking me from reporter to news editor to executive editor for some of the biggest media brands – Knight-Ridder, The Associated Press, and Gannett.
But at this moment, I worried only about the managing editor – and the grueling interrogation he’d put me through whenever I turned in a story.
Guardian of the Brand
He grilled me about each word, each sentence, each paragraph. He wanted answers to questions I’d forgotten to ask. He asked about angles I’d not thought of. Most of all, he questioned me relentlessly to make sure I had my facts straight and that my story was accurate and fair.
I didn’t realize it at the time, but this was my first lesson in building and protecting a brand. In this case, the brand was a small, scrappy morning daily newspaper in a medium-sized city in North Carolina.
The managing editor served as the guardian of the brand, ensuring that every story we published was accurate, fair, balanced and thoroughly reported.
In doing so, he was helping us build and protect our own personal brands as journalists.
News Media, Healthcare Share Key Brand Ingredient
After three decades in the news media, as the traditional business model began to crumble, I shifted my career into healthcare marketing, communications and digital strategy.
Over the next 15 years, I plunged into the world of brand strategy, omnichannel marketing campaigns and owned media storytelling.
While news companies and academic medical centers couldn’t be more different, their brands share one essential ingredient: Trust.
Both are businesses built on trust, their brands shaped by what happens at the moment of contact between a person and the organization.
These two very different businesses also illustrate one of the most important – and misunderstood – elements of brand strategy:
Brand is not a logo, an identity system, or an architecture of sub-brands. Brand embodies and grows from every experience a person has with your organization, your team members, your leaders, your website, your social media channels.
Every moment of contact is a brand experience:
- It’s the valet parking cars as patients arrive.
- It’s the way a nurse extends grace to a grieving family.
- It’s the way the call center handles a complaint at 4:55 pm on a Friday.
The strongest brands grow one customer interaction at a time.
Unfortunately, many companies, healthcare systems and large enterprise organizations neglect the hard work of aligning team culture, behavior, and experience with their brand promise.
That gap between a brand’s promise and its customers’ lived experience is where trust dies.
Once lost, trust is the most difficult thing in business to rebuild.
StoryPower Connects Teams and Brands
I founded W. Clair Communications to help leaders build brands on a bedrock of trust — brands forged from the alchemy of culture, experience and authentic storytelling.
This is what I call StoryPower: Connecting Passion to Purpose.
It’s a way of thinking about how to connect what your team members care about with what your organization exists to do — and then embedding that connection in culture, storytelling, and customer experience.
Brands that endure aren’t the loudest. They’re the ones whose people know what they are part of and why it matters. That’s how brand trust is built.