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Does your brand have a through line?
Every organization—whether it’s a for-profit corporation or a nonprofit—has a top line and a bottom line. But does your organization also have a robust “through line”?
by Joe Grossmann · 6 min read
illustrations by Melanie Lindsey
Since you’re reading this article, I’m guessing you agree that “brand” is a real thing, and maybe also that it’s a topic worth exploring. It probably comes as no surprise, but not everyone agrees. I’ve met people who think “brand” is a fluffy marketing concept that doesn’t have much to do with the real world. And by “real world,” they usually mean “business”—more specifically, generating revenue, minimizing expenses, and maintaining a profit.
These folks have a point after all. What good is any high-minded concept if your company can’t sustain itself economically and end up in the black?
I’ll agree that “brand” may sound like a high-minded concept, but it’s not.
Every business, no matter how big or how small, has a brand. Some businesses have robust brands that create obvious benefits (or “value”) for those organizations and their stakeholders, while other businesses have weak or negative brands. (Weak brands have relatively little recognition and usually lack clarity. Negative brands have greater recognition, but for all the wrong reasons.)
What is the relationship between “business” and “brand”?
The relationship is not always simple. It can be positive and symbiotic, but it can also be negative and even mutually destructive.
Let’s start exploring this by returning to the concepts of “top line,” “bottom line,” and “through line.”
In a profit & loss statement, as you know, the top line is the number representing total revenue, and the bottom line is the number representing net income (after deducting the operating expenses, depreciation, interest, and taxes).
This snapshot of a business is just that: a highly compressed and simplified view of financial performance over a specific accounting period. It’s one way to characterize a moment in time, purely in terms of money accrued and spent.
A through line, on the other hand, is a sequence of choices and related actions which are oriented toward a long-term goal.
While your top line and bottom line can be thought of as defining aspects of a single snapshot, your through line can be imagined as a pattern of behaviors that appears across many consecutive snapshots, all consistent with a particular outcome.
(The first known use of “through line” with this meaning, by the way, was by the Russian director and actor Konstantin Stanislavski in his 1936 book An Actor Prepares, which laid the groundwork for what came to be known as the Stanislavski System or the Stanislavski Method. Stanislavski taught actors to achieve more credible portrayals of characters by focusing on behaviors leading toward a “super objective.” The Stanislavski Method evolved into modern-day “method acting,” and the phrase “through line” is now applied widely across many creative fields, sometimes to simply mean “overarching theme” or “plot.”)
Healthy, vital brands tend to have strong, positive through lines—highly focused and consistently oriented patterns of behaviors that benefit current stakeholders and attract new supporters. When you strive for clarity and maintain mutually beneficial relationships, your brand can take on a life of its own.
Think of any company, nonprofit, or school you respect deeply. Aside from offering products or services you admire, that organization probably won you over in other ways. Perhaps you’ve enjoyed routinely positive interactions with its employees. Maybe you’re aware that the organization exemplifies high ethics, supports some of the same causes you do, or engages deeply with local communities or people in need of aid or extra resources.
If you’re a loyal fan of that organization and support its work, then many other stakeholders probably do as well. You and your fellow fans may be willing to pay a premium for its offerings or, if it’s a nonprofit, donate to it on a monthly or annual basis. Because of the organization’s values, its value to you, or both, you don’t want that organization to disappear or diminish in any way. You’ll stand by it even if their revenue or net income dips. You might even increase your support!
When a brand is strong—with positive energy and loyalty shared by employees, partners, and customers, clients, or donors—the consistent behaviors, values, and sense of community associated with that brand can help an organization withstand the ups and downs of financial uncertainty or even bounce back from major economic challenges.
If your brand is new or lacking momentum, focus on developing a clear, constructive path of action you can execute without swerving or backtracking. This is the first step toward cultivating a healthy, vital brand, which in turn can support business growth. To then maintain the health of the brand, you may need to periodically tweak or refocus your through line to be responsive to both stakeholder and business needs, but that’s okay, as long as you don’t betray your core values.
What if you have a wobbly through line? Or none at all?
The lack of a strong through line can undermine even the most financially successful organization. Notable inconsistencies in quality, ethics, engagement, and other key behaviors can lead to the deterioration of relationships with employees, partners, and customers, clients, or donors.
Sometimes, the decline of these relationships can be so gradual or delayed that it’s difficult to connect the dots and link the loss of trust, loyalty, and enthusiasm to the irregularities in your organization’s behaviors. For example, you may begin to recognize signs of attrition and wonder “Why are we losing long-time employees and supporters?,” but attribute the losses to external factors like new competitors, rising costs, or macroeconomic trends.
In this case, even recently departed customers or employees might have trouble articulating exactly why they left you. They might attribute their decisions to the most recent negative interaction they had with your organization rather than identifying a long pattern of inconsistencies that alienated them.
The takeaway? If you know your through line is shaky, with recent dips or detours in key brand traits and behaviors, stay on high alert for any signs of decreasing loyalty or mass exits of stakeholders. Conversely, if you first notice drops in loyalty or attrition, don’t automatically assume external factors are to blame. Inconsistency in your operations or how you handle relationships may be a major factor.
The worst case scenario?
A negative through line—that is, a consistent pattern of behaviors that are at odds with the values of your stakeholders or threaten their interests—can be much more destructive than an inconsistent or nonexistent through line.
There’s no shortage of horror stories of high-flying ventures and major corporations that have deceived their stakeholders or engaged in harmful or criminal behavior. (You may recall Enron, Lehman Brothers, Theranos, or FTX, to name a few.) But even small organizations can descend to these lows all too quickly when guided more by the top or bottom line than serving their stakeholders.
How can you reach your brand’s super objective?
If you’re a founder or in the top management tier of your organization, you may well feel that you’re “in charge” of your brand. But it might be better to think of yourself as a faithful steward than a commander. Ultimately, your stakeholders—both internal and external—will have the final say in evaluating and determining the health and vitality of your brand.
Your role as a leader is to focus your organization’s activities, exemplify brand values, reinforce behaviors that serve the greater good of your stakeholder communities, and amplify positive signals throughout your brand ecosystem.
Maybe we can all learn something from Konstantin Stanislavski?
