Branding Strategy Insider

Employee Alignment: A Brand Positioning Mandate

It will hardly be big news for readers of Branding Strategy Insider, but we now live in the era of the brand. Most marketers are fully aware that the ultimate factor that will determine their personal career progression and the general health of their organisations will be their ability to build and protect their brands.

But despite a plethora of debate within the industry on the topic, most organisations are still struggling to get to grips with their own specific brands. The problem for most managers comes when they attempt brand positioning.

Look across any strategic activity - marketing communications or packaging, for instance, and it's clear that all of these and many more activities depend on having a clear and concise brand position. What is our brand?

How does it behave? What does it stand for? These are all questions that must be answered if a brand is to succeed.

The problem with most companies is that they miss the central tenet of brand positioning: less is more. Most marketers are driven by their large capital expenditures on brand positioning and the enormous amount of personal time they devote to the project to produce an elaborate and complicated multiple slide presentation.

Marketing + HR = Employer Brand Power

Strong brands ultimately have four classic effects on markets. First, they reduce acquisition costs. Amazon, for example, has a much lower marketing spend per consumer transaction than its less prominent internet rivals because it invested heavily in its brand equity from the outset.

Second, strong brands create relationships between consumer and producer and these relationships are very beneficial. A consumer walks into a sandwich shop at 2pm looking for an egg sandwich, she discovers that all the egg sandwiches are sold out, "What a useless sandwich shop!" she later tells all her friends.

Meanwhile, a brand-loyal consumer walks into Pret A Manger at 2pm looking for an egg sandwich. She discovers that all the egg sandwiches have been sold, "Ah," she exclaims, "I got here too late". Brands guarantee performance, but as the sandwich example demonstrates, brand relationships also influence the perception of that performance.

Third, strong brands increase loyalty and this loyalty leads to increased customer retention. Tony O'Reilly, as chief executive of Heinz, had the simplest definition of brand loyalty. A consumer walks into a supermarket looking for beans. There is every brand of beans available except Heinz.

She leaves without any beans. Strong brands are not only able to attract consumers for less, they are likely to keep them loyal for longer too.

Linking Mission, Vision and Brand Promise

When a CEO intends to build consensus around and anchor his or her organization’s raison d'être, he or she often looks to mission, vision and core values statements to do this. The CEO leads the process of crafting these statements with his or her senior leadership team and board of directors, usually with the help of an outside facilitator.

When the organization’s primary or sole brand is at an organizational level, a similar process can be pursued to anchor the brand’s essence, promise and personality.

These exercises (organization mission/vision/core values and brand essence/promise/personality) are complementary and can be addressed together. For instance, the mission talks about what the organization does, while the brand’s promise talks about the covenant it intends to make with its customers. A strong promise will focus on meeting an important customer need in a unique way. This provides the added dimension of relevant differentiation.

The vision focuses on goals to be achieved. Obviously, this should be closely linked with brand’s promise if the brand is an organizational brand. The brand’s essence is closely related too as it captures the brand’s “heart and soul” in an economy of words. And the organization’s core values should complement and support its brand’s personality.

So one can make the argument that the organization’s mission, vision and values and the brand’s essence, promise and personality can be created in sequence or together using a similar process. I have begun to do this for an increasing number of organizations. CEOs like this as it provides even greater clarity and depth around which to “rally the troops,” while chief marketing officers like it as it provides clear direction on brand strategy that is cohesively linked with organization strategy.

Sponsored By: Brand Aid

Internal Brand Building: Overcoming Obstacles

We have conducted numerous “Internal Brand Building” workshops in the last few years.  The following are approaches that people in various organizations have found to be effective in overcoming some of the obstacles encountered in creating brand-building organizations:

Issue: How do you get corporate officers to support brand management initiatives when they don’t understand the value of brand management or marketing?

Ideas:

•    Influence the leaders with books and speakers.
•    Enlist the help of credible outside brand experts to spend some time with the corporate officer group.
•    Provide case studies of how brand management has worked in comparable companies and industries.
•    Symbolically “clean house” in the marketing department. Hire some new high profile marketers with a history of success.
•    Understand operating units’ objectives.  Help units achieve their objectives through brand-enhancing initiatives.  That is, tie what you do to others’ objectives.
•    Invite senior executives to help you solve brand management problems.  Appeal to their egos and their propensity to mentor.  (They will be much more bought in to the solution if they helped craft it.)
•    Build momentum for brand building initiatives from a grass-roots groundswell.  This requires intensive communication and education.  Start by identifying and influencing brand advocates throughout the organization.
•    Work with HR to integrate a brand-building module into a variety of employee classes.
•    To instill confidence, the marketing leaders should be optimistic, using words and phrases such as “control,” “promising opportunity,” “return,” etc.**

Issue: How do you get corporate officers to act as brand champions when they are accountable for other corporate priorities?

Of Branding and Greed

In a recent post, I attempted to clarify what branding is all about. It comes down to building perceptions about what makes your product different and what the benefit is in this difference.

Now for the bad news: Building a brand is often easier than keeping it from being destroyed by internal forces.

This destruction often happens because of the pressures that financial guys put on an organization. To make the numbers that management wants them to make, people start to do things that begin to unravel a brand.

To ratchet up more business, the organization starts to lose focus on what makes it unique. They do things that erode the core brand. They chase business they shouldn't chase, such as Marlboro trying to sell menthol cigarettes or Cadillac trying to sell small Cadillacs. Sometimes, they create a sub-brand, thinking it will give their new effort some legitimacy, as in the case of Holiday Inn Crowne Plaza. The customers thought that the Crowne Plaza version was a little too expensive for a Holiday Inn. It never flew.

It's easy to see the problems of trying to go up-market with a down-market brand, but what about the reverse? That can be good news and bad news.

Internal Brand Building: The Strength Within

In the late 1990's I had the opportunity to chair the first conference focused on internal brand building. Almost a decade later this concept remains in its infancy for much of the business world. I'm reminded of this when I hear something similar to the following from marketing executives:

"We conducted exhaustive consumer research. We carefully positioned our brand. We developed and instituted comprehensive brand identity standards and systems. We are running our new advertising campaign. Now what do we do? How do we get the rest of the organization to understand and care about the brand and its promise? How do we get the organization to deliver on the promise? How do we make the brand promise real?"

Those questions drove us to create an internal brand building seminar which we deliver regularly at conferences and organizations.

David Aaker posed this very important question when he visited Hallmark during my tenure:

"Until everyone from your CEO to your receptionist can accurately and consistently articulate your brand's promise, how do you expect your customers to?"

Kristin Zhivago captured the concept well in an article that she wrote for Business Marketing. She said:

"A brand is not an icon, a slogan, or a mission statement. It is a promise — a promise your company can keep. First you find out, using research, what promises your customers want companies like yours to make and keep, using the products, processes and people in your company. Then you look at your competition and decide which promise would give you the best competitive advantage. This is the promise you make and keep in every marketing activity, every action, every corporate decision, and every customer interaction. You promote it internally and externally. The promise drives budgets and stops arguments. If everyone in the company knows what the promise is, and knows that they will be rewarded or punished depending on the personal commitment to the promise, politics and personal turf issues start to disappear."

Certainly the brand promise drives your marketing communication and your brand identity standards and systems. But it must do much more than that. Your products and services, every point of contact your brand makes with consumers and the total consumer experience your brand creates must reinforce your brand's promise. This has tremendous organizational implications. How can an organization deliver against its promise if its front line employees don't know (or care about) what its brand stands for?

Extending Your Brand to Employees

I recently had the opportunity to present and lead a panel discussion at The Conference Board’s ‘Extending Your Brand to Employees Conference’ in Chicago, IL. The conference provided a forum for marketing, brand, communications and HR professionals to share how they have engaged their employees to embrace and deliver upon their brands’ promises.

Here are some of the more interesting quotes and thoughts from that conference:

“Branding is all about the promises your company makes to external audiences and the promises it keeps with those audiences.”

Randall S. Rozin, global director, branding and marketing communications, Dow Corning Corporation

Scott Davis, senior partner, Prophet, indicated that he believes the following three things are most important in branding today:

-Brand relevance
-Customer experience
-Employee engagement and alignment

“It seems to me that when people talk about employer branding, they are talking about one of two things:

Positioning the organization to potential and current employees
Engaging employees to deliver upon their organization’s promises to its customers
These two things are important and related, yet different.”

Kristen Weirick, employer brand manager, Whirlpool Corporation

Bonnie Gellas, director, corporate communications, Merrill Lynch indicated that at Merrill Lynch ‘Human Resources (HR)’ has been renamed ‘Leadership and Talent Management,’ reflecting how that company views the evolving role of that function.

Lissa Reitz of Target Corporation indicated

Brand Expression: The Vision Statement

Before you can tell people what you want them to think about you, you must know clearly who you are. A quick review of most corporate sites reveals a disappointing lack of unique brand visions and distinctive corporate identities. Though some company executives devote time to thinking about and defining who they are and where they want to go, the vast majority seems to come up with impotent copy-and-paste statements, redolent with empty clichés and nebulous objectives.

Take a look at this excerpt from one company's vision statement:

"We will be seen in all our markets as the quality leader among international airlines. This will be achieved by:

• Mobilizing our joint talents, know-how and skills
• Inspiring all staff to support our persistent effort to improve quality
• Placing quality first in everything we do
• Setting an annual target of measurable improvement
• Doing things right the first time
• Providing both our external and internal customers with a reliable and punctual product and careful and friendly service."

Now, tell me, which airline is this? American Airlines? British Airways? United Airlines? Well, in fact, it could be any of them, couldn't it? This was taken from KLM's vision statement but, demonstrably, most corporate vision statements read the same. They're largely cut-and-paste jobs, with the only difference being in the company name.

I'm not criticizing the way people run their companies. But I am flagging such vision statements with huge question marks. What value do companies gain from such statements?

'Inside Out' Branding: How Do You Rate?

As a brand management consultant, I have identified some rules of thumb to help you quickly determine how well your organization has embraced “inside out” branding.

You know your brand ‘has arrived’ when...

•Your CEO talks more about the ‘brand vision’ than financial targets
•Organizational leaders ‘walk the brand talk’
•Employees know what makes their brand special
•The brand’s external messages ‘ring true’ with employees
•Competition always mentions your brand as a point of reference
•The press can’t seem to write enough about your brand
•Customers brim with enthusiasm about the brand
•The brand’s market share is increasing

Organizations that do the following are much more likely to have enthusiastic and loyal employees when:

•They understand why they are in business
•They deliver unique and compelling benefits to their customers
•They treat their customers well
•They can be relied on to do what they say they will do
•The values from which they operate are admirable
•They are consistent in how they behave at each customer touchpoint

Bill Stacy, one of my bosses at Hallmark Cards, was fond of saying, “Remember to thank our customers for your pay check.”  This statement was a constant reminder that all of an organization’s revenues and profits result from one thing – customers who are willing to pay money for products and services that meet their needs.  Any brand management initiative, any marketing initiative, and indeed any business or organizational initiative must start with a solid understanding of the customer. 

Indeed, organizations exist for one purpose – to meet human needs.  Thriving organizations do that exceedingly well.  Venerated organizations have managed to meet evolving human needs over a long period of time.

“Inside Out” Branding: The Hallmark Story

In the mid to late 1990s, I was Hallmark’s first official chief brand advocate. In that role, I was responsible for increasing Hallmark’s brand equity and market share. I had the help of a few brand managers who reported to me. I reported to an executive vice president who was responsible for the company’s North American strategy and marketing, but not its product development, sales, retail network or operations, all of which had their own vice presidents. To accomplish my objectives, I needed the support of the entire organization.

My department approached this task in the following ways:

•We created a cross-functional brand management council consisting of middle to senior level representatives from the OD, corporate communications and training departments, as well as business unit general managers hand picked for their understanding of our mission and their influence throughout the organization. I chaired this council, which met monthly.

•I assigned one person in my department to serve as the keeper of the brand’s identity. He, in turn, developed a brand identity system and standards and a brand identity oversight group consisting of the most senior people whose departments most often used the brand identity on products, packaging, merchandising, promotional materials and licensing. He chaired his group, which met regularly to review new uses, proposed exceptions and inconsistencies. The group quickly became a self-regulating body that consistently interpreted and applied the brand’s identity across all uses.

•After conducting internal research to gauge employee’s baseline understanding of the brand and its promise, the brand management council developed a comprehensive two-year internal brand alignment plan, which focused on internal training, internal communication and culture change. This plan set different goals for senior managers, marketers, salespeople, customer service people and employees in general. We focused on some groups separately because of their importance to specific customer touch points, while we focused on the senior managers separately because of their importance to the successful adoption of the brand’s promise throughout the enterprise.

•We integrated brand training into many ongoing training programs, including new employee orientation, sales training and new manager training. I personally delivered this training in each and every class right after Don Hall (Hallmark’s chairman, CEO and president) presented an overview of the company, including its beliefs and values.

•We made sure brand training reached all employees by passing it down the organization from senior managers to middle level managers to lower level managers to employees through a PowerPoint presentation, presentation script, key talking points, discussion guide and FAQs

•Internal communication paid particular attention to the proper progression of messages and the best ways to maximize their frequency (at least seven times each) so that employees would finally hear them.

The communication took many forms, including the following: