I'm stuck in a dysfunctional relationship. Abused and unhappy, I can't break away, even though doing so would take little effort and improve my life.

Here's the situation: I travel a lot for business, and I fly mostly on one airline. Let's call it Amalgamated Air.

I appear to be a fanatically loyal customer. Amalgamated probably thinks so. But truth is, there is no corporation in the world I hate as much as I hate Amalgamated Air.

For decades, Amalgamated Air and its snappish, unhelpful employees have heaped discomfort, inconvenience, and even physical pain on me. They've kept me up all night, shuffling like a zombie from one hopeless airport gate to the next. They've lied to my face about flights that simply weren't coming or going. They've detained me for pointless hours on overheated airplanes parked on the edges of airports. They've made me miss important meetings, time with my family, and whole stretches of my life.

The very mention of the name Amalgamated Air gives me a gut-wrenching sense of foreboding. I could be relaxing on the beach, deep in conversation with someone I love, or praying in church—if I hear the words “Amalgamated Air,” I'll instantly become one of those red-faced scowlers you see so often in airports.

If I had a nemesis, a Lex Luthor evil genius obsessed with defeating and tormenting me, I believe he'd fall short of what Amalgamated Air has accomplished.

I'd abandon Amalgamated quicker than you could say “aircraft maintenance,” except for the free flights, upgrades, and other privileges my status as a frequent flyer gives me. And, to judge from the tales of other travelers, I could do worse. I'm a classic codependent.

Sooner or later, some smart airline is going to figure out how to provide business travelers like me with the service and reliability we want. Then we'll break free from Amalgamated and its cohorts like inmates scattering through the broken walls of a prison after an earthquake, and we'll run freely over open, fragrant fields. (I can dream, can't I?)

Say what I might about Amalgamated, I have to admit their facilities and airplanes look good. They have an attractive and consistent design scheme that inspires calm and a sense of professionalism. You can recognize it in an instant, no matter what airport you're in. Their marketing looks like their planes and their gates. It captures what you wish travel would be: a magical combination of adventure and connecting with others. They make it seem as if you're always simultaneously setting out on a quest and arriving home from one.

It's a strong, clear, and well-expressed brand. My hat is off to Amalgamated and the Brand Experts who helped them create it.

But almost every time I fly, Amalgamated Air spits on its own brand by delivering experiences that radically contradict the promise the brand makes and the mood it works so hard to cultivate. Day by day, they do more damage to that brand than an army of determined saboteurs or dozens of mocking YouTube videos ever could.

Amalgamated Air is a textbook case of a well-built brand that's plastered over a festering reality. The ideal is dramatically misaligned with the real. It reminds us that your brand is not just what you say and how you look. It's what you do. Even more important, it's what your customers experience. Your brand is the promise you keep, not the one you make.¹

I bring this up because the sad state of the Amalgamated Air brand can happen to any organization.

There Is a Better Way to Brand

This book is mostly about the “shallow” part of branding. You could master everything I'm telling you, and still blow it through the heedless actions of employees or partners who don't live your brand.

I really hope you won't do that. It would be a terrible waste of your energy and mine.

To guard against that, I recommend that you read one or more of the many excellent books on the human and cultural side of branding. One of the main things you'll learn from those books is that the deep end of branding is insanely hard to accomplish. Don't think Amalgamated Air is failing at it for lack of trying.

Building the human infrastructure of a great brand will take a long time. It will be painful. You'll have fierce disagreements that could damage relationships. You may have to get rid of people you like—but who can't align with your brand promise. Someone, maybe everyone, will have to disavow treasured beliefs or attitudes. And you'll probably never fully succeed.

Don't let that discourage you. The fact that it's hard—maybe even impossible—to build a deep and foolproof brand from top to bottom should not keep you from improving the visible part now. Don't make perfection the enemy of progress.

There are two reasons you should feel good about “shallow” branding—branding as displayed in marketing—even if you haven't nailed down deep branding:

1. “Fake it till you make it” is good advice. As many religious people know, going through the motions can lead you to the transformation you seek. Most times when I go to church, I don't feel spiritual. I stand, kneel, sing, swallow the bread and the wine—and do it all in a heedless and distracted way. Call me hypocritical—I know I am. Yet somehow, every now and then, I touch the divine; going through the motions of those odd practices somehow lifts me, flinching and unwilling, up to where I wanted to be in the first place.

   Life is like that. It works for organizations as well as people. Acting like you're there helps you get there. Going through the motions of having a brand—doing the things that the great brands do—can help build the brand into the life of your organization.

2. Even shallow branding will make a positive difference. Building the visible form of a good brand can quickly improve your revenue. In fact, shallow branding can have more impact on revenue than deep branding does, at least in the short term. There's an 80–20 rule in force here: Just as 80 percent of your revenue comes from 20 percent of your donors, something like 80 percent of the measurable good that can come from a better nonprofit brand comes from the lesser part of the work—the visible part.

   You aren't an airline, where every time something goes awry customers are there to suffer from it. The only experience most of your donors will ever have with you is your fundraising. Even if your staff were packed with donor-hating employees who have toxic interactions with your supporters every single time, most donors will never contact them. They'll never feel the sting of the broken promise.

   Get your fundraising right, and you'll be most of the way to the fine-tuned brand you need.

• • •

I doubt there's a nonprofit on this planet with the capacity to inflict its donors as much suffering as an airline, a phone company, or an insurance company. I suppose we should be thankful for that.

When we fail to connect with donors, what happens? They just ignore us. They don't get mad. They don't blog or tweet about our self-centered and irrelevant message. They just ignore us. They don't even realize they're ignoring us.

Badly branded fundraising isn't offensive. (It offends me, and it offends you. But we don't count.) It's not an insult. It doesn't cause discomfort or inconvenience and it doesn't make anyone feel ripped-off or lied to. It's just a zero. It costs us dearly in revenue we never get, but donors will feel no pain. For that reason, they'll never do us the favor of pointing out our failures.

There are some nonprofits that have that kind of impact on their donors. Small, local, specialized organizations, especially houses of worship, have real capacity to make donors unhappy by violating their own brand. (You haven't seen fury until you've seen the fury of someone who feels betrayed by his church.)

But every nonprofit should pay attention to failing and broken commercial brands—how they turn once-proud businesses into a sad drag on the economy and on society. Put them in your rearview mirror and make as much progress as you can. Starting with the outward form of your brand.

You don't have to follow the path of Amalgamated Air and others like them.