Open Branding

Last Friday I attended a roundtable of some 20 people in Amsterdam on "Open Branding". Now I don't know the first thing about branding, apart from being a consumer that is, but nonetheless it was a great day. The people behind the meeting call themselves Chief Brand Officers Association, or CBO, and envision honest brands (hence 'open branding') as the only way to go for organisations in the 21st century.

The issues they address are things like trust, authenticity, leadership, value, transparancy, knowledge sharing, communication and the like. A familiar line up, for me, and I hope indeed for most KM-people. So their agenda closely resembled mine, and hopefully I could add to their discussions from my KM background usefully.

Later this year, a co-authored book by the CBO-group is to appear at Kogan Page, aiming to place Open Branding on the agenda's of CxO's around the world. Part of the discussion focussed on who to reach with the book, and how to do that.

As with KM, translating a vision to the workplace will only be succesful if you can list the concrete issues and needs it will help address. You can't convince someone to do KM, if there's no identified need to deal with. So the risk of developing an answer in search for a problem is something to watch out for, especially with such a bookproject.

This inspiring get-together of branding experts will certainly be followed up with extensive e-mail discussions. Meanwhile webspaces to watch in relation to this are: