Is the Rutabaga Anyone’s Favourite, Go-To Vegetable?

When I worked in government, part of my role was to review and approve government advertising campaigns. One day, a memorable script came across my desk for a 30-second TV ad for Foodland Ontario, encouraging people to buy locally-made Ontario fall produce. 

The script proposed – you cannot make this stuff up – a call to action that roughly said: “So this fall, pick up fresh Ontario rutabaga from your local grocery store.” 

That’s right: Rutabaga.

Now, for those of you reading this from further afield (if you’ll pardon the pun) Ontario farmers grow tomatoes, corn, asparagus, apples, and many other things.

If your strategic objective is to raise the market share of all locally-grown fruits and vegetables, why pick the rutabaga? Why not leverage the halo effect of your top performers instead (which, in all likelihood, would lift rutabaga sales as well)? 

I remain perplexed to this day about why the creative team picked the rutabaga (with its ridiculous name that makes people giggle) for the lead role in a short ad. 

It would be like if you were a zoo, and you happened to have a baby pygmy hippo – but the ad agency came back with creative that focused on the zoo’s wasp or skunk exhibits. People like baby pygmy hippos. But wasps and skunks have bad brands.

Rutabaga, tomatoes, baby pygmy hippos, and skunks all have brands. So does your organization. As do you.

Which brings us to the thesis of this article: everything – from vegetables, to consumer-packaged goods, to your organization and even you yourself – has a brand. Not names or logos, but file folders that occupy space in the minds of target audiences. At MacPhie, we define a brand as ‘how a product, organization, or person lives in the minds of its target audiences’. 

Leaders therefore have a choice: to actively define and articulate aspirational brands – which capture how you want to live in the mind of your target audiences – or not. 

If you are not actively curating how your organization is living in the minds of your target audiences, other forces will define your brand. Either it will flop around in the wind or, worse yet, be shaped and defined by your competitors. 

Remember how cruel Apple was to Microsoft in what I still believe to be the most effective negative advertising campaign of all time here? And the reason that campaign was so devastatingly negative is that it made us laugh. In that campaign, Apple simultaneously managed the file folders in people’s brains of both their own brand, and that of their major competitor. 

But brand goes further than ad campaigns, no matter how effective they may be. To work well, brand should be central to strategy: defining and then managing your aspirational brand should play out in every facet of your organization and its touchpoints with the world.

Brand is Culture and Culture is Brand

For leaders, articulating your organization’s aspirational brand is as important as defining its purpose, vision and mission. In our view, brand and organizational values (or guiding principles) are complementary tools that are two sides of the same coin. Successful organizations ensure that the brand positioning they seek doesn’t just show up in their communications and messaging, but permeates their culture and how clients or customers experience every single interaction with their organization.

I recently spoke with a client who shared how they were undertaking a branding effort (not working with us, so I just smiled), and spoke about how it would help with their messaging, case for support, and web site. All important things – but caught in the oldthink of brand being the domain of creative and communications, not strategy.

If you are spending precious resources on a brand definition, is it simply focused on your next ad campaign or website revamp, or is it actually going to show up in the psychometric profiles of how you filter candidates of whom you might hire, the vibe of the physical space you occupy, and the design of your product and service offerings? Because if it is just about a website and external communications refresh, you are wasting your time and missing the point.

I’ll give a concrete example: our firm’s brand character statement is a ‘smart, energetic, friend.’ We therefore only hire people whom our clients would see as ‘smart, energetic, friends.’ That’s just one example of how one aspect of a brand definition shapes the whole of the organization including, in this case, a people strategy.

So, be strategically deliberate about how you define and articulate your brand – and weave it into all aspects of your organization. All while enjoying delicious locally-grown produce, including the rutabaga.