The Peacock’s stance is that they won’t be slugging it out legally because it’s just too much of a headache for everyone. However, after seeing the huge difference in opinion over what The Tonight show actually is, I don’t see it playing out all that nicely. It will either go to court or end with NBC paying out Conan’s full termination fee (or, alternatively, Jay being the odd man out).

Here’s what it boils down to:

Conan: The Tonight Show is defined by its heritage. It must start at 11:30, or it’s effectively not the Tonight Show.

NBC: The Tonight Show is whatever show we air and call “The Tonight Show”

Conan’s contract doesn’t say anything about air time, so NBC feels fairly secure in changing it without any consequences. Conan’s rebuttal isn’t just rosy sentiment; it’s the basis for a compelling brand argument. One that might even hold up in court (For 50 million dollars, wouldn’t you try?).

Is The Tonight Show a culmination of decades of brand-building? Or is it whatever NBC says it is? It’s one of the oldest arguments in branding, and we just might get a chance to see it play out in a high-profile court case.

I made the analogy of a basketball team. A basketball team has five players who all serve distinct roles in different positions (center, small forward, etc.). Look at any basketball game and usually there will be two or three guys on the team who are making a bulk of the points. (If it’s Cleveland, there will be one guy.)

Any coach would be crazy, however, to play with only these high-scoring players on the court. The three best players in the league would have a very tough time against the worst full team in the league.

If you’re thinking of switching out players, that’s fine. The players represent tactics, not channels. Rather, the positions represent channels. Your facebook efforts might be faltering, like Jameer Nelson during the finals last year, but that doesn’t mean you take facebook completely off the court. You try something else with that position.

Newton gets a lot of credit for this idea, but let’s face it: People were noticing this a long time before he put together a theory about it. And they were noticing it didn’t just apply to physical objects.

Whether it’s the stock market, a person’s mood, or the recent batting averages of a baseball player, the rule applies: What goes up must come down.

When I read a fascinating article Reuters article on the recent brand troubles that Starbucks is experiencing, I found myself repeating the rule in my head.

Starbucks as a brand isn’t failing or dying. It has just been succeeding too spectacularly.

Starbucks gags and jokes were popular for a while. We’ve seen the chain reach ubiquity in a Springfield mall on the Simpsons. We’ve heard comedians crack jokes about how the coffee shop is appearing on every corner. But we laughed, knowing that would never actually happen.

Yet, when Starbucks has to peel back its explosive growth and finally start closing stores instead of opening them, we throw around words like brand crisis and brand avoidance. We herald it as a new trend, when really it’s just the aftermath of an old trend.

Starbucks is a simple example of brand backlash. Its backlash is greater than most, but that’s because its brand is greater than most.

Brand backlash isn’t limited to coffee shops. You can see it in almost any market where brands play an important part.

Take McDonald’s, for instance. It’s the reigning champion of fast food, but also the scapegoat for every problem the industry faces. Supersize Me focuses on McDonald’s. The term Mc Job is based on McDonald’s. Is McDonald’s having a brand crisis? No, it’s just brand backlash, and it’s one of the responsibilities they bear as the biggest and best.

Coca-Cola faces similar issues. When a chain e-mail circulates claiming (incorrectly) that soda saps bone mass, which beverage is given as an example? It’s almost never Pepsi. Even in our financial crisis, we see examples of brand backlash with industries worth of anger being poured onto single companies.

Brand backlash is one of those problems that’s inevitable. It’s a byproduct of success. I’d imagine most PR practitioners loathe having such a problem, even if it does mean they’re doing something right. It forces desperate measures like the ones we’re seeing with Starbucks.

Wendy’s, on the other hand, probably looks at the movie Supersize Me with longing eyes.

All of the PR folks in the chat promptly painted their faces with war paint and went to battle against each other.

Okay, so it wasn’t that bad. But we were starkly divided over the core idea of who owns the brand– is it the customers or the company?

I think, in the end, despite the great observations and arguments on both sides, we were really arguing semantics. Sender, receiver, signal… we were all talking about the same process. What we really needed were some common terms to agree on (and not the terms settled upon after a war, but words).

Brand Image

On the Company owns the brand side of things, we have brand image. Brand image is how a company wants you to see them. Of course, even here we’ll see disagreement, but for the most part this is the realm of the Public Relations team of the company.

Brand Perception

In the other corner stands The customer owns the brand, which we’ll call brand perception. Brand perception is how the public (the ones you are relating to) views the product. It’s the favorite team shirt a football fan wears on Sundays. A band poster hung in a teenager’s room. An opinion voiced to a friend.

So there we have it, the two sides of the branding coin. Big thanks to Shel Holtz and the others for helping to hammer out these terms near the end of the chat. In the end, both sides were right, we were just looking at it from different perspectives.

Although, if you had to look at it from one side, obviously the company owns the brand.

We decided not to use the IvyLees theme (that would be trite, right?), instead opting for something a bit more plain and clean-cut. So we went to the Release Style tool in our social media newsroom and changed it to the “IvyLees Lite” preset, with the “Plastic” column style.

And here’s what the release looks like after the change:

Looks great! Since the colors are customizable, you can get any look you want. Here, we see a softer side of IvyLees:

Your release styles are local to a newsroom, so when you change it once, it applies to all of your releases: past, present and future. Changing it again is just as easy. It’s also one of our free features. Isn’t that neat? Have fun customizing!

Why? Because personal branding is getting obnoxious.

We’ve seen the Johnny Cashes dressing in all black. We’ve scratched our heads at the Gene Simmonses of the personal branding world. Now we’ve got Marilyn Mansons running around, and none of them can stop talking about the importance of personal branding.

Personal branding is, unfortunately, a real thing. It has impact. In an ideal world we wouldn’t boil people down to brands. But some people do, and so personal branding was born.

As the online space gets more crowded with these brands, however, certain people have had the inclination to go bigger. Do not go bigger. Increasingly, people will hate you for it.

Here are some tips in a world where people hate personal branding a little bit more.

If you brand through clothing, stick to one small thing.

In That Thing You Do, band manager Tom Hanks gives his drummer a pair of sunglasses. He explains that he’s going to be “Shades” now. In another example, as mentioned before, Johnny Cash frequently dressed in all black.

These both worked (granted, one was fiction) and were classy because they were simple. I have a friend who wears a baseball cap all the time. He isn’t trying to brand himself, but if you are, follow his lead and stick to one thing.

And don’t let the one thing be a suit covered in question marks.

Avoid buzzwords

This one is the most important for your online presence. Maybe you really believe you’re a social media marketing expert who specializes in corporate synergy. Your readers won’t. This will be the biggest part of the backlash.

Don’t be a jackass

If the concept of personal branding appeals to you, there’s already a significant chance that you’re arrogant, self-absorbed and generally a pain in the ass to others.

If you briefly paused just now to consider whether you actually are those things, then you’re alright. Don’t worry about it. If you let out a brief, sharp “Ha!” or otherwise immediately dismissed it, then I encourage you to take a long, hard look at yourself.

Because personal branding holds a higher appeal with annoying jackasses, we see more annoying jackasses doing the personal branding thing. When you enter that arena, remember who else is going to be there.

Don’t “personally brand”

This is the best advice. Don’t try to personally brand. Just let it happen. Be yourself. There’s nothing wrong with making sure Google turns up the right stuff. Just don’t be “that guy.”

Every now and then, someone tells us, “But you’re not helping with this!” (Or that. Sometime’s it’s that.)

Well, I assure you: We’re planning on it. Right down to the iHandshake, an app for the iphone that shakes hands for you. (If you steal this idea after reading this blog post, I’m coming after you!)

After that, we’re asked, “Why start with Presskit’n and online newsrooms”?

And the answer always boils down to one thing: Presence.

Presence is incredibly important online. You can be present in a lot of places, including Youtube, Facebook and other such sites. When it comes to standardizing your message and getting it out into the world, the first presence you should have is an online newsroom (Well, before that, a website, but we’re talking specifics here).

So, before you conduct a PR campaign, ask yourself: Am I present?

And they’re right. They’re always right. It’s never a good time to rebrand.

We just created a new brand, Presskit’n, from a few of our former IvyLees features. Since we encountered a whole bevy of issues, I thought I’d use our rebranding process as sort of a “how-to” and a “why now” on branding. If you find yourself in need of a rebrand, but making excuses, maybe you can look at what we did and forge ahead with the rebranding process. The timing will never seem right, but if you’re making one of the following missteps, your brand probably needs a kick in the butt.

PROBLEM: Missing the target market

I sat down with a friend of mine, Dr. Bob Davis (who unfortunately isn’t blogging for the world) and he flat out told me that my brand was missing my target market. IvyLees, he reasoned, was too masculine. I was a bit puzzled– can a website be masculine or feminine?

He then reminded me that most professionals in communications, our target market, were female. So if the site leaned either way, it should be towards a feminine style– or at least in his mind, away from the strong contrasts and stark look of IvyLees.

HOW WE FIXED IT: Making a new brand that doesn’t miss

Web apps are versatile. A bakery would have a lot of trouble rebranding, and a ton of trouble making an entirely new brand. With a web app, you can buy up a domain name and get started easily.

After an afternoon of brainstorming (and some completely ridiculous ideas) we bought http://www.presskitn.com.  It’s a name that communicates the theme of our product– a veritable online press kit and newsroom– while also giving us a mascot. A cute mascot.

Note that, while we were aiming for a more feminine product, it didn’t involve any pinks, purples, flowers, or anything of that sort. Presskit’n, on the whole, ended up being very close to gender-neutral, except perhaps for the tough guys who just can’t handle the kitten-sleeping-on-cloud imagery.

Here’s a brand comparison with theme words and color palettes:

PROBLEM: A crappy logo

First, I should start off by stating the obvious: Your logo is not your brand. Branding encompasses much more than that, especially on the web. But your logo is still a big part of it.

Logos can end up crappy for a lot of reasons. In our case, the IvyLees name and logo seemed to apply more to a network than a tool. With our shift in focus to creating online newsrooms, the old way of presenting ourselves didn’t make much sense.

So in the end, the logo itself wasn’t bad, but it still sucked for what we used it for. We haven’t gotten rid of it, we’re just using it for our umbrella site now, the IvyLees Network, which will become important as we develop other tools.

So, remember, if someone says your logo sucks, don’t take offense. They might just mean it doesn’t fit. On the other hand… it might just suck.

HOW WE FIXED IT: A new, better logo

This is always an easy fix. Make a new logo and measure how it performs. That sentence always scares people, but it could be as simple as getting an opinion from a friend. Of course, if you do have the money for focus groups and multiple design avenues, those are a good route to go as well.

After creating the initial logo, we subjected it to numerous opinions. You can see a progression of a few iterations of the Presskit’n logo here (and yes, it really does look like that after I sketch in Photoshop):

And you can thank Greg for pointing out to me how a cat’s eyes look when they’re asleep.

PROBLEM: Doing too much with one brand

This one seems obvious in traditional business, but sometimes is lost with web companies (as any “web app vs. startup” thread will show). Procter & Gamble makes toothpaste, but you can’t go out and buy a tube of “Procter & Gamble toothpaste.” You can buy Crest, though, which is made by them. If you’re doing a lot of different things,  it’s best to split them up for simplicity’s sake.

HOW WE FIXED IT: Breaking offerings into smaller, easier-to-swallow pieces

We were doing four things with IvyLees. We had the network, which let business and PR professionals get in touch with each other. We had a newsroom creator and news release builder, which let let businesses establish a free online presence. And then we also had a feature that let PR pros submit and talk about news releases, like a Digg or reddit for self-published business news.

After rotating the features through the focus of the front page, we concluded one thing: Nothing was gaining much traction. The reason for this was the mere presence of the other features; they were always there to clutter whatever had the focus. Inevitably, our testers would wander into the part of the site that they didn’t want to actually use.

This was our primary reason for breaking off our newsroom features and making Presskit’n.  You can see the immediate benefit by comparing screenshots:

As you can see, going simple, warm and inviting helped us out. It was a lot of work to rebrand (or really, to branch out our brand), but it paid off in the end.

AND FINALLY: Be brave.

You’ll feel anxious about rebranding if you have a lot invested into your brand. That’s a good thing. But whatever you do, don’t put off rebranding just because the timing doesn’t seem perfect. It never will.