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Episode 004 · Brand Strategy · Process · Management

Processual Brand Thinking

Most brand conversations are static snapshots. Michael Reinicke argues brand is a living process, and that changes everything.

With Michael Reinicke, Freelance Strategist

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Artwork for The Evergreen Playbook episode "Processual Brand Thinking" featuring Michael Reinicke.

Show notes

Michael Reinicke lays out the problems with how brand managers and marketing managers currently talk about brands — and how shifting to a processual model fixes those problems at their root.

A dense, rewarding conversation for anyone who works with brand strategy at depth and wants a framework that survives beyond a single campaign cycle.

Most of the people who work in marketing and brand management in Germany, at least that's the main market that I've seen, they don't have an impact on business at all. They do the beautiful pictures thing where they do a campaign or two every year, where they produce a ton of content that nobody wants to see, and where they show that stuff to, I don't know, the son or the daughter of the CEO, and hope that they like it.

— Michael Reinicke

It's kind of this Sisyphus work where you just push the boulder every day. You try to roll that rock up the hill every day, or maybe every year. But then it's highly rewarding, and you can see how things change for the better if you follow processes.

— Michael Reinicke

If I work with a new client, I don't ask them what are your objectives. I don't ask them how's the campaign doing. I don't ask them about the budget or anything. I ask them: let's take a look at your diagnostic measures. What are you actually tracking?

— Michael Reinicke

Incremental value means value that would not be generated if you would not have the measures in place.

— Michael Reinicke

I have my personal view on data and it involves that no measurement is perfect. And because we're dealing with humans, we're always guesstimating in some way. I feel like people quite often look too much at absolute data and absolute numbers and not enough at relative change and change over time and actually moving the needle in some way.

— David Göz

The Playbook

The core principles from this conversation.

  1. 1 Brand management is an ongoing process, not a series of projects
  2. 2 The four pillars of brand process: analysis, strategy, tactics, implementation
  3. 3 Measure incremental value, not campaign ROI
  4. 4 Document decisions to preserve institutional knowledge
Read the full playbook

The Guest

Michael Reinicke

Freelance Strategist

Formerly Head of Strategy at KNSK and Managing Director of Die Neue Vernunft, Michael is on a mission to introduce processual brand thinking to the industry.