Branding

So, there is no doubt that I am a product of my parents. My father brands BK and my mother brands AmEx. Before becoming a mom, my sister branded hi-tech companies. So, why is it that I am working for NREL doing strategic planning for the Department of Energy's Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy instead of at some marketing firm? Well, for lots of reasons, but I haven't entirely escaped the family business.

We are currently helping our clients (the Planning, Analysis, and Evaluation office) in their planning process for the next fiscal year. My proposal is that PAE needs to build its internal brand. I thought you might get a kick out of this exerpt from an email I sent to my team:

"As you can probably tell, I am a believer in the power of branding. It is important to create positive expectations about the quality and usefulness of your product. When you spend some time selling yourself, you can then spend much less time selling each individual product you offer - the consumer is predisposed to trust your products. This results in considerable economies of scale. When the Assistant Secretary comes to think of PAE as a source of valuable products, they will need to expend much less effort demonstrating the value of things like the planning summit, risk modeling, or anything else we would like him to focus on. Branding is not easy though. It requires discipline and consistency and can be undermined MUCH more quickly than it can be built."

You can take the boy out of the marketing family but you can't take the marketing out of the boy.