Flushing Your Brand

It has been observed that a brand identity is like any other reputation – it takes years to develop, influences all of your relationships and transactions, and requires only suspicion (not facts) to compromise. In a business context it’s almost impossible to overstate the importance of your organization; people who know absolutely nothing about your company will assume that you have any number of positive attributes (fair prices, good quality, honest personnel, responsible fiscal or environmental policy, and much more) if you have developed and maintained the reputation for having these things. This is why many organizations are as worried about their brand identity as any high school kid is about his or her reputation – and why it’s so very bizarre to see a large and prestigious agency flush theirs for no apparent reason…

If you haven’t been following the story about the de-funding of Planned Parenthood by the Susan G. Komen Foundation, you can pick up the story from the Atlantic web site here if you want to. It seems that the Komen Foundation has been giving money to Planned Parenthood for mammograms and breast cancer screenings for a number of years now, but recently decided to sever that relationship because Planned Parenthood is under investigation by a Congressional committee, and a newly-written bylaw says the Foundation can’t support agencies that are being investigated by any government agency. All of which might be reasonable – if that’s what was actually going on…

First, it’s important to remember that Congress investigates a great many things every month, and a non-zero percentage of them are nothing more than political grandstanding. In this case, the committee doing the investigating is being led by an anti-abortion politician who is hoping to prove that Planned Parenthood is using Federal funds for abortions. They don’t, of course, because that would be grounds for the exact sort of governmental sanctions that the politician in our story wants to use to destroy the agency in the first place, but harassing a political adversary while playing to your own base is an American staple, and we shouldn’t be surprised to see it. It’s the Foundation’s part that is a bit odd…

As noted in the linked story, the new bylaw at the Komen Foundation is the work of their new Vice President for Public Policy – who happens to be an anti-abortion politician herself, and once ran for governor in Georgia on an anti-abortion platform. It’s also worth noting that this Vice President has publicly stated her opposition to Planned Parenthood, and that no other recipient of Foundation funds has ever been de-funded under this bylaw. One could easily believe that the entire point of these actions was to allow the Vice President of the Komen Foundation to vent her antipathy to Planned Parenthood and make it harder for the agency to provide health services to women who could not otherwise afford such care. But even if all of this is just a coincidence, it still doesn’t explain why the Komen Foundation has decided to flush its public perception in this fashion…

As I noted in several posts last year, the non-profit sector is all about relationships, and reputation is key to attracting donors and maintaining your relationship with them. The Komen foundation has invested massive amounts of time and effort in establishing itself as not only the biggest but also the best agency in the fight against breast cancer. Defending their copyrights, trademarks and images from use by smaller charities is occasionally bad for their image, but necessary to maintaining those assets. Developing a reputation as a haven for religious fundamentalists pushing a political agenda at the expense of poor women – in direct contradiction of the Foundation’s chartered goals – would be bad enough, but the attendant perception of race and class discrimination makes this seem like a willful attempt to destroy the Foundation’s brand perception. Or, perhaps, an attempt to destroy the Foundation outright...

Now, I know that some religious fundamentalists would prefer to see women die of cancer than have them exercise their right to reproductive freedom. And I realize that it would probably be easier for the Foundation to solicit donations from people who share those beliefs if it could distance itself from agencies like Planned Parenthood. But I find it hard to believe that it would sacrifice its public reputation just to achieve that advantage, and harder to believe that no one mentioned the consequences of flushing their hard-won brand image down the drain when this policy was first introduced…