© SeenyaRita

by AVFlox (@AVFlox)

I was 10 on April 2, 1993, the day that the brand died.

 On that day, Phillip Morris dealt a 20 percent slash to the price of its cigarettes in an effort to take on bargain brands, which were seriously pwning Marlboro’s market share. The slash had serious repercussions. If Marlboro’s carefully groomed brand wasn’t enough to take on the generic brands, then there no longer was truth to the brand equity mania that had rocked the eighties.

That is, if the brand was not powerful enough to sway sales on its own, if a marketing icon like Phillip Morris had to give in to the utterly lowbrow price war being waged against it, then the brand was as good as dead.

The panic that spread over Wall Street was immediate: Philip Morris’s stock fell 26 percent, and with it, other high-profile brands went down, among them Coca-Cola, Heinz, Quaker Oats, and PepsiCo. The brand is dead, experts said. As a result, companies cut advertising spending dramatically.

But the brand did not die. In fact, the opposite happened—I have no pictures that survive from the end of the nineties that don’t feature someone wearing some gigantic logo. Brands were everywhere—you couldn’t swing your tiny Prada backpack without hitting someone’s Nike Swoosh.

While wearing a brand on your chest is no longer in fashion, gratuitous evangelism of choice brands by consumers continues. How did we go from brand-blind to evangelists? Simple. The brand made itself a cultural accessory. I need only say one word for you to get what I mean by this: Apple. It’s so much more than a company or a logo—it’s a lifestyle. iPod, iPhone, iTouch, iLife.

Where the web was initially treated like more billboard space in the early days, the tides have turned in recent years. Companies now see the web as more than a one-stop information destination for their products. Today, sites are not only interactive: brands have taken on social media to join and stimulate the conversation and connect personally with consumers.

And here we are. So why is this relevant to you? You may not be a company with a giant advertising budget to worry about, but even if you’re looking to solidify your personal brand the guerrilla way, your time is valuable, and it serves to look to history to better plan for your success.

As we’ve seen, the companies that survive the biggest shakedowns are the ones that integrate their brand image into their corporate identity and make themselves culturally relevant. In the largely egalitarian world of the web, you too can do this, regardless of the product or service you offer. But you need a solid base. As Damien Basile writes in his Guide: A Brand Strategy Checklist, having a mission and values are vital in proceeding; these two things are your foundation.

“Who doesn’t know of a company that has spent countless hours in emotional debate only to come up with values that, despite the good intentions that went into them, sound as if they were plucked from an all-purpose list of virtues including ‘integrity, quality, excellence, service, and respect.’” says Jack Welch, former chairman and CEO of General Electric, in his book Winning. “Give me a break—every decent company espouses these things! And frankly, integrity is just a ticket to the game. If you don’t have it in your bones, you shouldn’t be allowed on the field. By contrast, a good mission statement and a good set of values are so real they smack you in the face with their concreteness.”

He’s right. All those other buzz words that are so in vogue now among the marketing gurus matter, but a solid set of values is more than “return on integrity,” “trust fund,” and “transparency.” Yes, these are good concepts, but as Welch says, they’re your ticket to the game. What you need for values are concrete behaviors that are going to help you achieve your mission—and a mission should never be so generic. When I say mission, I am not talking about an “elevator-pitch” or an extension of the “Twitter-ready motto,” either. You need a more solid base than a soundbyte or two to get going. The clearer you have your mission and the values that guide it, the more these will inform everything you say and do, and the more solid your brand will become.

I know it doesn’t seem important. It’s much more fun to pontificate about transparency and better business and integrity. But none of it means anything to you until you have defined your purpose and course of action. I know, I know: we’re the now generation, we have no time to wait for experience to open our eyes and help our projects off the ground. Books are dusty, they require too much time, quiet and reflection than our high-speed lives can stand.

But do me a favor—look up Arthur Andersen on Wikipedia. Yes, right now. You can skim, even. I just want you to get a taste. I want you to feel the accounting firm go from its founding under a mission of high standards to the addition of an aggressive consulting division and how this seemingly unimportant discrepancy in mission and values tore the company apart during one of the greatest corporate failures we’ve ever seen: that of Enron.

Everything needs something solid to stand on. Come on, let’s build.

If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.
If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat.
If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.
– Sun Tzu