So, according to the legend, the 7 blind Hindus felt different parts of the elephant and came to 7 wildly different conclusions. One feeling the elephant’s side declared that an elephant was “very like a wall.” Another felt a leg and concluded that an elephant was “very like a tree.” A third grasped the elephant’s tail and decided that it was “very like a rope.” And so on.

This ancient “Consulting Task Force” failed to achieve consensus, since they got hung up on seven different Situation Analyses. (The one holding the tail also got elephant manure on his loafers, an occupational hazard for visually impaired pachyderm fondlers.)

Like that legendary beast, a brand performing below expectations is often approached from multiple directions, with marketing experts tugging and probing and prescribing, triggered by whatever portion of elephant anatomy is at hand.

The ad agency detects an advertising problem; the brand manager’s spreadsheet proves that retailers are at fault; the sales promotion agency knows it’s a promotion problem; the packaging experts say a redesign will save the brand; the regional sales managers want an extra 5% for a new trade deal, and the CFO says it’s a brand in decline, so quit spending on it.

You shouldn’t conclude that this is a case of literal blindness … but you should recognize the limitations of strategies based on narrow perspectives. Somebody somewhere will get elephant poop on his Allen Edmonds.

First of all, brand asset management is a new discipline for most brand holders. It’s a perspective that differs sharply from “beancounter-centric” accounting, the conventional viewpoint that values brick-and-mortar more highly than, say, the knowledge and skill of a sales force. We have to move beyond the bias that accounts for a paper clip, but discounts a company’s reputation.

Most brand managers focus on tangible, easily quantified assets. When you combine that with “next-quarter-itis,” the national penchant for focusing on short-term numerical goals regardless of the impact on brand equity, you get systemic long-term problems. While it’s most apparent in publicly-traded companies, it’s contagious. In this mind set, for example, volume will always seem more important than market share, and easy-to-measure quarterly results will matter more than hard-to-measure customer satisfaction.

Add to those institutional biases the short-term perspective of Brand Managers at major companies who know they’ll be on X Brand for 18 months, tops, before moving on to Y Brand (or field sales, or something). They know their career path is paved with short-term fixes. Is it any wonder that budgets for indiscriminate high-value couponing (and other brand demotions) are growing far faster than budgets for brand-building?

Instead, let’s learn to audit together. Over the next couple of days, we’ll pick a brand from your company (or your company as a whole) and keep score. If you have more than one brand to choose from, pick the one that makes you lose sleep at night. Grab a pencil and keep score as we review sixteen of your brand’s vital assets. Use a separate piece of paper if you want someone else to go through this for the sake of comparison.

More to come tomorrow!