|  Scott Regan

Your brand is like a small stone tossed into a pond. As it splashes into the water, it radiates ripples outward along the surface, each band growing increasingly larger than those preceeding it.

Rippling water is a wonderful metaphore for brand building. Consider the stone your mission and vision statements. The first ripple in the water is your executive team. The second ripple is middle management. As the ripples continue to gain momentum, we move on through your medical staff, employees, patients, and the community at large.

The fact that the ripples grow in size is not important. The key learning here is that the ripples have an order to them. In other words, there are a series of concentric circles that envelope your brand and eventually become your brand. And to give your brand strength, you have to move through these circles in a logical order.

Should you do much brand building with your patients if your senior leadership team does not represent the brand in their day-to-day actions? Is it worth your while to invest on an external brand-building campaign if your front-line employees don’t understand what the brand stands for? And should you train your staff on the critical components of your brand if middle management is not first serving as a strong brand ambassador?

The answers: No, no, and no.

To build a successful brand requires that you first have a stone to throw into the pond. Having meaningful mission and vision statements are first and foremost in brand building. Second, you then have to work through your concentric circles — one at a time — ensuring that each circle is entrenched in the brand before moving to the next outward ring.

Do this, and your brand has a much higher chance of success. But if you fail to pay attention to the logical order of your concentric circles, your brand will likely have a rocky childhood. If your brand is currently struggling, review your concentric circles and see if one or more was left out of your brand-building process. Chances are, you will find the source of your struggles somewhere within the ripples.

How many words are in your organization’s mission statement? Go ahead, count them. More than 20? More than 50? Two full pages of 10-point type? If it takes that many words to explain the essence of your organization, then how do you possibly convey that essence in your brand?

Great mission statements are the brand. They allow you to hire, train, promote, and fire. They are the touchstone for every decision, strategy, brand extension, and policy. And they are imbedded in the vision, values, strategic plan, and operations.

Tightly weaving together your mission and brand creates a powerful organizational dynamic that provides perfect structural alignment. While this is difficult work, it is far from impossible – unless you are unwilling to jettison the four-paragraph mission statement that currently adorns your lobby walls. To create the kind of mission-brand integration that elevates organizations to market dominance requires short, succinct mission statements – eight words or less – that resonate with both internal and external stakeholders.

In 2000, Memorial Health in Savannah, Georgia, adopted a five-word mission statement: “We help people feel better.” The organization carried that mission statement into its branding, with the simple, two-word tag of “feel better.” After tightly aligning its mission and brand, the organization rose to market dominance, which included four consecutive years on Fortune magazine’s list of “100 Best Companies to Work For,” as well as record margins.

In 2008, LibertyHealth in Jersey City, New Jersey, adopted a three-word mission statement, “We enhance life,” and a two-word brand tagline, “Enhancing life.” Since then, the organization has made tremendous strides culturally, clinically, and financially, and is emerging as the market leader in New Jersey’s highly competitive Hudson County.

It takes a great deal of thought and reflection to define your organization’s mission in eight words or less. Doing so requires you to strip away all the extraneous stuff you think is organizationally important and home in on the purity of your existence. However, when you are able to do this, amazing things happen. At Memorial Health, every employee not only knows the organization’s mission, but also how his or her job helps people feel better. And at LibertyHealth, they all implicitly understand how what they do everyday enhances the lives of those they serve. In other words, they live the mission while also living the brand.

For these two organizations, is the mission the brand? Or is the brand the mission? The simple answer is that they are both the same, which is as it should be. Mission and brand — inextricably linked as one.