Mediation Has a Branding Problem

A brand creates an association between you (or you business) and what you stand for in the client’s mind and heart. A brand creates recognition and anticipation—when people see your brand, they have an idea of what experience to expect.

A good and effective brand creates a positive association, ideally one that’s emotionally powerful and conveys trust and value to your audience.

While often associated with logos, slogans and other ways of conveying a brand image in simple, symbolic terms, your brand is far more than that. Your brand emerges from the accumulated experience people have with you or what you offer, from every contact they have with you, your business or your staff. In this way, your brand is intimately connected with your entire way of doing business and engaging your clients.

This is why blogging (and related approaches like podcasting and vlogging) are getting so much attention. Done well, they’re powerful ways to build a good and effective brand.

Yet if good brands create positive associations, then mediation itself has a branding problem. Consider for a moment the kinds of associations people have of mediation. Some of the less effective associations I’ve run across include:

The head-banging, take no prisoners guy with the intimidating large briefcase, who keeps people up all night until they’re so tired they’ll agree to anything.
The person who makes people sit down in the same room and listen to the awful things the other person says about them.
The person I have to go see when the judge makes me.
That nice person who didn’t really seem to do much. Made a nice cup of coffee, though, and was very pleasant.
The thing that separates lanes on a highway (median), something people do to relax (meditation), a way of talking with the dead (using a medium). [Side note: All of these came from an informal, unscientific poll conducted a decade or so ago by a national ADR association.]
Isn’t that the person who gets called in when unions go on strike?

We’ve certainly tried to alter the association for the better. In our literature, we attempt to convey the positive associations with participating in mediation:

Mediation will save you money.
Mediation will save you time.
Mediation will help you preserve the relationship or minimize further damage.
Good mediators know how to help the conversation unfold constructively.
Mediation allows you to retain control of the outcome.
Mediation helps create mutually satisfactory outcomes, increasing the agreement will last.
Mediation creates the opportunity for empowerment and recognition.
Mediation is private and confidential.

These are truly powerful ideas and, generally speaking, realities. Yet…they’re not really working in a way that sweeps the public’s imagination and interest. The dearth of hordes at most mediators’ doorsteps tell this truth in the most vivid of ways.

I expect that, in part, it’s because mediation is inextricably linked to something painful…conflict. And to the requirement that people have to confront that pain in a direct and probably uncomfortable way, often with others watching. This distinguishes what we do from the pain of confrontation in the therapist’s office and the attorney’s conference room. No one’s on our side in quite the same way. It sounds lonely. It sounds hard. It sounds scary. And it sounds emotionally and psychologically expensive.

If mediation has a branding problem, is it even possible to create a business brand that doesn’t suffer the fate of association?

Yes! And here’s where some of the earlier work outlined in the blook will help you answer that question for your own ADR business.