"A brand is the single idea you own in the mind of the consumer." - Just one thought from this SlideShare.

Because our web properties are so closely tied to someone else's brand, how do we navigate branding? Do we pretend to be our partner brand or do we try and differentiate ourselves?

This has been an ongoing discussion on the CenturyLink team. All of which led us to analyzing these businesses in comparison to ours:

-Spring Mobile
-Simply Mac
-Xmission

We found a lot of similarities between these business's operations and challenges when it comes to building a brand.

There are a lot of limitations we keep holding ourselves to based on our current view of how "the world" works. The challenge is to look past some of our assumptions about branding, compliance, customer expectations and have faith in the process of branding and what it means to be a brand in our customer's eyes.

Chances are it looks a lot different than anything we're imagining now.

@Ryan There are assumptions and then there are best practices (which have been proven to work). You have to balance the two to be successful and innovate.

Ryan, true. And, historically, I think I have agreed very much with the "we can build a brand if we just try hard enough" outlook. However, lately, I've been wondering if we're barking up the wrong marketing tree.

For example, now that we're building our own brands (cabletv.com, hsi, etc.), do we just let them do all the heavy lifting as far as branding goes and refocus our efforts at becoming as closely aligned with individual brands as possible? They'll be funneling traffic and sales our way anyway--and mostly from non-branded search terms or people who are looking to compare services--which most of us can't do on our individual brand sites. So, why compete brand-wise with that?

Tanner, I know you'll have something to say about that.

@Tanner, of course. My point is that we should question our assumptions in a healthy way

James, we just had an interesting discussion in our brainstorm meeting for CenturyLink. It's important to ask "why are we competing with the brand?"

I think in most cases, we'll lose that battle. The only time its worth following the brand closely is:

-when we have to (compliance)
-when we have a secure traffic channel

In our brainstorm meeting, which turned into a strategy discussion, we identified the difference between content that is for on-site (conversion) and content that drives traffic. With the scenario of following the brand, we couldn't think of any that satisfied both. Can you guys?

- A downloadable CentruyLink price guide
- A "how to hook up your CenturyLink internet guide" pdf
- A "how to a create a CenturyLink wireless network" resource
- etc.

I think there are a number of branded content pieces that you could assist in conversion and could also drive traffic if disseminated in the right way.

Aside from that, competing with the brand would essentially finding areas where the brand is deficient and exploiting those holes for conversion--like awesome branded content OR, for example, none of the big home security companies have geo sets--we do.

Those are great ideas, but the latter two

- A "how to hook up your CenturyLink internet guide" pdf
- A "how to a create a CenturyLink wireless network" resource

seem like they would only be interesting to customers who've already converted. Therefore driving traffic, but not conversion.

Are traffic driving content and conversion content something that can be separated? Or is that a bad strategy?