Gone are the days when each function inside a company focused on its own work in isolation to the rest. It is widely accepted that companies that work together to achieve a shared vision are more successful.
Branding has a vital and major role in getting your people working together towards a shared vision. A brand strategy is not just about marketing a product or service. It is a statement about the company, what it values and what it aims to achieve. A brand strategy has much wider application than communication & design activities. In order to get maximum benefit, a brand strategy needs to steer all customer touch points, including how employees and customers interact.
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By: Ian Dunlop
Beginning my marketing career at Bass in the UK, before moving to the communications side, then brand strategy, and working throughout Europe and the Far East, I was always curious as to why some companies could produce successful brands and others seemingly could not. My journey through the disciplines has produced some interesting observations.
If you ask anyone in the brand communications industry as to what constitutes a brand they will likely respond that it is a blend of rational and emotional perceptions of a product or service in the minds of loyal consumers. At any one moment in time this would seem to be true. There was, after all, the famous case of Persil soap powder remaining brand leader in its category long after the introduction of infinitely more effective detergents. The accepted rationale for this is that the perception of female users was that Persil signalled that they were “caring mothers”, and this was a much more compelling brand attribute than product efficacy alone.
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By: Uri Baruchin
The narrative aspect of marketing has been getting academic attention for many years but only in the last decade has it become a practical focal point for marketing communication practices.
Many traditional branding methodologies rely on values & attributes to define brands, but these tend to be homogeneous in competitive markets. “Innovation” and “simplicity” come to mind as popular values for most technology and service brands, “empowerment” and “enabling” were popular attributes amongst telecom brands during the last decade.
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By: Gillian Garner & Aaron Shields
As consultants, our mandate is to help clients better understand their cultures and the behavioural patterns that are helping and hindering their progress. Our clients want to hold on to the best of their culture during times of growth and evolve the culture when setting a new vision or strategic direction. Different agencies have different ways of beginning this process. Since we straddle brand development and organisational development, we often look for ways to extend learning from one field to the other. This short paper explains our view on how cultures are formed and how we can use narratives to help develop cultures and brands.
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This article featured in Brand Strategy Magazine in February 2007
Growing up in Canada gave me the impression that Russians are all cold, stoic beings that walk around in non-descript, uncomfortable clothes having very serious conversations in dimly lit cafes. Of course nothing can be further from the truth. If you need a reference, the Italian culture is probably more useful than any other. In fact, the Russian people have had a close relationship with both the Italians and the French for hundreds of years.
Italian architects designed the Kremlin and most Russian cities are littered with Baroque and Beau Arts influenced buildings. It’s not just the buildings that are glitzy. Russians themselves have a flamboyant style in everything from the way they dress to the way they hold-court in conversations with friends.
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Alright, you have identified that you want to shrink the number of brands in your portfolio in order to gain cost efficiencies and create more clarity for the customer. Furthermore, senior management are on board and have given you the green light for the plan. How in the world do you sell this to the teams that gave birth to these brands without dashing their hopes and switching their emphasis to your parent brand.
Naturally, some of the brand owners expressed concerns over loosing what they have created in the market and felt somewhat threatened by the recommendations and international best practice that were reviewed. We think it would be very productive if we could also build confidence around the changes and demonstrate that the brand-owners have responsibilities for the changes that will take place in the portfolio of brands.
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People often need more than instruction to make changes to their normal patterns and routines. Essentially what we are asking of people is to share our values, share our vision and act within it. Internal branding aims to develop this cohesion. I will discuss how we use appreciative inquiry to facilitate employee brand engagement, briefly discussing some theory and relating it to a case study. I would like to share this practice to emphasise that more is needed to create strong brands, than internal advertising and brand training.
Appreciative inquiry (AI) is an approach which can be utilised to maximise employee brand engagement, whether setting a new direction or needing to boost your current brand. The aim of internal branding is the adoption of shared and cohesive values, beliefs, purpose, and core behaviours across staff and stakeholders for all levels of the organisation. We see AI as a way to actively involve people across the organisation in exploring the meaning of the brand and collaboratively deciding the use of the brand strategy for individual and organisational benefit. Internal branding is an elusive yet important success factor in the building of brands. Common methods of internal branding currently fall into events, internal communications, and brand training, which although needed can fall short in developing a deeper connection for staff to the brand.
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As sure as day follows night, when marketing budgets are ample, the number of brands in a portfolio will swell. Marketers just cannot seem to help themselves: when given larger budgets, they will create new brands. Likewise, the recent trimming of budgets has precipitated a culling of sub-brands as we aim to get more mileage out of fewer brands. In the end, this culling is usually a good thing. Now that marketing budgets are once again on the rise, CEOs and marketing directors must regulate the proliferation of brands in order to encourage effective resource management.
One effective method of control is requiring approvals for the development of every new subbrand at a senior level. Another means is to integrate strict ROI accountability for creating new sub-brands, however, this route is only recommended for those companies with sophisticated brand-programs already in place. No matter which brand you choose, developing simple guidelines for branding new offers is an essential step to better brand portfolio management. This situation is especially true for companies that have decentralised management, since they are most likely to have problems with brand proliferation.
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