When the Words You Use to Describe Your Value Stop Working

I recently read a BOMA BEST article asking a provocative question: Is sustainability being cancelled?

As someone who has spent a lot of time in commercial real estate, I was interested in the sustainability conversation. But as a marketer, something else in the article caught my attention.

Sustainability hasn’t stopped being important. Buildings still need to perform efficiently. Owners and managers still care about energy and water consumption, resilience, risk, tenant experience and responsible operations. If anything, many of those things matter more today than they did when “green building” first became part of our industry vocabulary.

What has changed is our ability to communicate all of that with one word.

The value didn’t disappear. The shorthand stopped being sufficient.

That’s a brand stewardship issue.

Every industry develops its own shorthand. We use words like innovative, sustainable, full-service, best-in-class, customer-focused and trusted because, at some point, they effectively communicated something we wanted people to understand about an organization.

The problem comes when we continue using those words without asking whether the market still hears what we think we’re saying.

A company may genuinely be innovative. A service provider may absolutely be a trusted partner. A building may be exceptionally well managed and sustainable. But when nearly everyone in a category uses the same language, the word itself can no longer carry the burden of communicating the difference.

This is where brand stewardship has to go beyond maintaining brand standards and messaging consistency.

A brand steward has to pay attention to what is happening outside the organization as carefully as what is happening inside it.

What has changed in the market? What do customers expect today that once would have been considered exceptional? What claims have become so common that they now require proof? And perhaps most importantly, what value have we built that our familiar language no longer adequately communicates?

One of the exercises I use when thinking about brand stewardship is looking at the brand through different lenses.

There is the brand lens: what do we say we stand for?

There is the owner or organizational lens: what are we actually trying to accomplish and protect?

And there is the customer or tenant lens: what do the people we serve actually experience and value?

Those three perspectives don’t always line up.

Sustainability is a good example. An organization may think it is communicating environmental responsibility when it talks about sustainability. An owner may see the same investments in terms of asset performance, operating costs and risk. A tenant may experience them through comfort, indoor air quality or confidence that the building is being responsibly managed.

Same underlying work. Different perception of its value.

Brand stewardship is partly the work of finding the connection between those perspectives and making sure the way we communicate reflects what is actually meaningful to the people we’re trying to reach.

There’s another important shift happening here.

As markets mature, broad claims tend to become less persuasive and evidence becomes more important.
It’s no longer enough to say a building is sustainable if stakeholders increasingly want to understand how it performs.

It’s not enough to say a company provides exceptional service if the customer experience doesn’t demonstrate it.

It’s not enough to call an organization innovative if no one can point to what it is doing differently.

This doesn’t mean every piece of marketing needs to become a spreadsheet of metrics. It means the brand promise and the operational reality need to be connected.

That connection is one of the places where brand stewardship becomes especially important.

Marketing can create the language, but it can’t manufacture the underlying value indefinitely. The strongest brands have something real underneath the words: an experience, capability, culture, process, result or point of view that supports what they say about themselves.

We talk a lot about consistency in branding, and rightly so. Brands benefit from recognizable visual systems, consistent messaging and a clear point of view.

But consistency can become inertia when we protect language simply because we’ve always used it.

Good stewardship sometimes means preserving something. Other times, it means recognizing that the market has moved and helping the organization articulate its value in a way that makes sense now.

That doesn’t require chasing every new trend, new marketing tactic or constantly reinventing the brand. In fact, I think it requires the opposite: understanding the brand well enough to know what is fundamental and what is simply the language we’ve been using to describe it.

That’s an important distinction.

I’ve long believed that you can’t communicate value until you recognize it.

Before changing a tagline, rewriting a website or adopting the latest language in your industry, it’s worth asking a few questions.

What are we actually good at? What do our customers value about it? What have we built that would be difficult for someone else to replicate? What has become expected in our market, and what still differentiates us? Are we making claims that our customer experience can prove? And are we overlooking something valuable simply because we’ve been doing it for so long that we no longer recognize it as remarkable?

Those aren’t just marketing questions. They’re stewardship questions.

The sustainability conversation happened to make me think about them again because it demonstrates something that happens to brands all the time. Markets evolve. Expectations change. Language gets overused. What once differentiated an organization becomes the price of admission.

The answer isn’t necessarily to abandon what you’ve built or jump to the next fashionable word.

Sometimes you need to look again at what was valuable in the first place, understand what that value means to the market today, and find a better way to communicate it.

The work of brand stewardship isn’t protecting the words. It’s protecting the value behind them—and making sure the market can still see it.

What are you seeing? I’m continuing this conversation on LinkedIn and would be interested in your perspective. Where are you seeing familiar language lose its meaning—or organizations finding better ways to communicate the value behind it?

Join the conversation on LinkedIn →