Initiatives that look to improve customer experience began in operations and much of the same language has carried on to this day. Six Sigma and Lean Manufacturing management practices have guided much of the process-efficiency focused initiatives in service-oriented companies.

As a result, the emphasis has been on removing problems like long waiting qeues or increasing KPIs like cross-selling. Despite a flotilla of management consultants speaking about joined up experiences, customer-centricity and grass-roots thinking, the ideal has yet to be achieved for many. There are good reasons for this situation, including:

1. Budgets assigned by function form siloed initiatives and act to resist joined up thinking on behalf of the customer.
2. Over-emphasis on process versus relationship that seeks to create an error free transaction versus a loyalty building relationship.
3. Pressure from departmental groups on front-line staff resulting in narrow targets and inwardly-facing front-line employees.

What can be done to shift this situation and create a more holistic customer service model?

1. Begin your planning by understanding what happens at the customer-employee interface and gain the perspective of both. We often try to compartmentalise the customer experience into increasingly discrete channels and journey milestones. While breaking down the detail is important, the character of the employee-customer relationship is often left out of this kind of analysis. Begin by taking a wider look at the kind of relationship being developed between employees and customers.
2. Characterise the kind of relationship that is desired by your customers and that is attainable by your company capability and business plan. The gaps will indicate priority areas and inform the direction across important initiatives that your company is supporting.
3. Listen to new ideas from the people who meet the customer the most often. Good customer experiences are not made by taking out all the errors but by being directed by customer priorities.
4. Balance the priorities of customer against other performance enhancing initiatives.

Taking a view on the kind of relationship that you want to develop with customers will give you a holistic framework to develop and prioritise initiatives that affect customer experience. From here, a channel strategy can be developed and the detail of process changes will have direction, meaning and connection to the customer.

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Emerging practices in branding – a strategy for strategy

When asked to give a presentation with the title ‘the future of branding’ audiences usually expect to get examples from brands that innovate and point to the future. This time, we took a different approach. Instead of talking about branding as a noun, we decided to speak about it as a verb, about how branding is carried out. This is a look at emerging trends in branding as a practice. These are changes led by the people who lead branding programmes – usually branding agencies together with the clients who hire and work with them.

Our presentation looks at five aspects: methodology, relationship, culture, identity and engagement.

1. Methodology or why the next big thing isn’t

For a long time, the industry has tended to jump from one marketing fad to the other. There is a whole side-industry to the marketing discipline which repurposes kernels of academic discoveries or just plain common sense insights, rebrands them as buzz-words and turns them into ‘marketing fundamentalism’.

The typical structure is ‘It’s all about X’, with X being the flavour of the month: values, experience, ‘love marks’, one word equity, buzz, relationship, customer equity, customer centricity…

Many of those ideas are important, some are empty, but the point is that it’s one thing when a single idea is used to create a focus for a book, and another when it becomes a dogma that takes over an agency or an organisation – that’s dangerous.

It’s ok for your agency to have a methodology; even more so, it should have methodologies, but beware an agency with The Methodology™. In a world where almost no axioms are left, and where best practices should be reused carefully due to the increased complexity of business, communication and audience dynamics, dogmatic approaches lead to failure.

Our reality is messy, complex, sophisticated and unique. Trying to squeeze reality into a template or a black-box is pointless.

We appreciate the fact that in the most familiar project or situation, there will always be something new.

When we approach strategic problems we try to approach them with certain looseness. We let the situation direct any tools or models used. We have a robust collection of methodologies that we can utilise and adjust to fit a unique problem. This ‘emerging theory’ approach is better equipped to deal with the paradoxical nature of marketing situations, and with real life – in all its messy, strange, mysterious glory.

In this approach, you figure out the tools, even shape them, as you delve into the problem, embracing its messiness. Then, gradually, you see meaning emerging and possible solutions take shape.

The Cracker project is a case in point: This could easily be approached as ‘yet another packaging project’. But it wasn’t.

It was full of contradictions and quirks: there was no clear free slot for it in the market, no audience or retailer was clearly waiting for it and the USP seemed to go against the fundamental nature of the category.

By getting back to basics and mapping the different stories juices tell, we were able to create a unique concept and get the product picked up by major retail players. (read more about this project)

2. Relationships or Branding that plays together, stays together

Maybe because branding is positioned as a premium professional service, it tends to collect unnecessary etiquette protocols. The marketing manager leads the programme and won’t let others near it. In traditional agencies he is in contact with a relationship manager who connects him to a consultant who cannot speak to the client directly unless he is unveiled in a presentation. The consultant cannot speak to designers, because he is ‘a suit’, so he speaks to a creative director who’s versed in the way of the suit and can translate it to the gentle geniuses of the creative practices.

This absurd tradition creates a broken telephone effect and needless frustration. Those multiple translations and limitations on communication and perspective are a sure way for meaning to distort or just get lost, as well as a lot of needless political pain.

Instead, we like to see what happens when everybody interacts, knowledge shared openly and conflicting agendas used to spark creative solutions.

The Pasta Pagani product catalogue is a case in point. It was born thanks to close interaction between consultants, designers and a variety of roles on the client’s side. This catalogue is a deliverable born out of marrying an aesthetic design led approach with practical business sensibility. The result doesn’t just look good and is different from anything else in its category, it also bridges the work of sales people with the work of the people working in the factory’s food lab. (Read more about this project).

3. Culture or There’s no insight like local insight

As an international agency, there are two traditional dogmas we try to keep away from. The first is that of the ‘benevolent imperialist’, with consultants marching into a new culture like masters of the universe whose international-marketing-guru knowledge cannot fail – all-knowing conquistadors. At the other extreme, you have over-PC-anthropologists trying to go native and ending up looking like an enthusiastic dad in a school disco.

There is a delicate ecology created when local and global cultures interact. That’s why we try to combine our international experience with local insight.

While creating the retail design for MCS/Say in Romania, we started the project by walking around different stores with the client. Our entire team visited their sites, competitors’ stores and popular Romanian retail players in other categories. We discovered that most telecom players were just imposing on the market a bad recreation of some western retail trends. We studied what makes the Romanian audience tick and then adapted our best practices to work in harmony with this local sensibility. (Read more about this project)

4. Identity or Beauty at work

Let’s admit it: Branding has become the ‘prima donna’ of marketing.

Naturally, companies and their brands tend to adopt bigger aspirations as time goes by, and branding, developed in the later stages of marketing’s evolution and becoming more dominant as a company evolves, has a tendency to deal with ‘higher needs’.

‘The dirty work’ is left for sales, or advertising. With many organisations going as far as assigning separate managers to MarComs and advertising, out of an ambition to recognise the importance of those ‘higher brand needs’ and separate them from ‘commercial’ advertising.

As a result, many organisations find that the huge investment in branding and marketing communications is ‘not working hard enough’. Living with the results of a branding programme becomes a little like moving-in with someone very attractive just to discover they are lousy kissers, have bad hygiene and don’t help with the rent.

Instead, we like to create brand identities that work as a system and are not afraid of getting their hands dirty. Our work on No1 and Sohar are good examples. While the identity has an aesthetic sensibility that communicates a differentiated message emerging from the strategy, it doesn’t stop there. The identity system is created with the sales applications and everyday promotion in mind. That way the identity doesn’t just communicate the high aspirations, it connects those aspirations with everyday business.

5. Engagement or organic branding

Too often, a robust branding programme spends most of its life inside the marketing department. Then, ‘when it’s ready’, it is launched with fanfare on the unsuspecting, or worse, the highly suspicious, organisation. From our experience, most branding failures happen on implementation because the organisation won’t get behind a programme people don’t believe in.

Instead, we recommend engaging the entire organisation from day one of the programme and increasing this engagement after launch.

With Budapest Bank, strategy emerged from a series of workshop with a mixture of middle and senior management and key employees. Then, once it got accepted, and while identity was being developed, the organisation was engaged from the top – with workshops bringing senior managements on board; and from the bottom – with workshops creating brand champions.

Brand strategy was launched without fanfare, as a practical tool, bringing together existing programmes and different levels of the organisation, months before the identity was launched. When the actual identity was launched the entire organisation was already busy with both management and grassroots initiatives that bring the strategy to life, and the new ideas have been trickling in those internal activities as well as external marcoms, so changing the identity felt like a reasonable step forward, rather than a skin-deep marketing activity. (Read more about this project)

In summary – it’s all connected

We believe you should embrace the messiness to find meaning, instead of trying to fight it. Life is messy. Marketing is getting messier and messier.

We see disappearing barriers between organisation disciplines and agency disciplines; between brand and audience; between media channels; between product and brand.

We see more and more strategic challenges which are multidimensional and paradoxical. We see old marketing practices that stop working, sometimes unexpectedly, almost inexplicably.
Too many marketing people out there are shutting their eyes, trying to pretend nothing has changed.

We believe by recognising the messiness, you don’t give up meaning, but actually improve your chances of finding unique, authentic solutions.

We prefer to be systemic, not systematic – to be strategic about strategy. So instead of a purely analytical, modernist, approach that claims to paint a full, rational, map of your situation and then attacks a single aspect, we try to see the whole hidden in the parts, and create a state of flow that is in harmony with the basic interconnectedness of all things.

We believe that when you appreciate it’s all connected, you can create sustainable brands.

Sustainable brands, like any sustainable concept, give more than they take – to you and to your audiences.

Because sustainable brands promote sustainable relationships, and we all know that sustainable relationships create sustainable business.

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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.

Benefits of connecting your brand and your employees

1. Retention and loyalty.

The brand creates a reason for working beyond collecting a pay cheque, and increases employee preference for the company (so that it is the employer of choice). When speaking to directors of HR in UK retail banking, they find employees, particularly customer-facing employees, will move between banks based on a small pay rise, creating intense competition for a limited talent resource. In fact, employees that share the values of the company and have a meaningful connection with the direction of management, will stay longer and move less often. This point is especially true for top performing employees who naturally need to feel more connected to the direction of the company as they climb the ranks.

2. Attracting new talent and the right talent.

New recruits often prefer to work for well known brands consistent with their own values and image of themselves. So using the brand within your recruitment strategy, recruitment campaigns and interview processes, can not only be useful in bringing in the talent, but can also bring in talent that is already aligned to your direction.

3. Less conflict.

Employees that clearly understand the expected behaviours and norms work together effectively to achieve the desired work environment. Corporate development becomes a matter of inherent momentum of the group towards the vision, rather than just the policing of rules and regulations.

Brand engagement can enable employees to reinforce the same messages as the advertising campaign communicates, thereby strengthening not contradicting or fragmenting the customer experience. A brand strategy derived from management vision gives employees a sense of norms, stability and direction. The purpose of the company becomes clear and decisions are made with greater consistency and effectiveness toward achieving the company goals.

When a brand is disconnected from its employees the result can be internal confusion, cynicism towards management and internal communications, apathy or ignoring the brand messages. In such cases, employees will not lend strength to your brand in their interactions with customers and each other.

What is brand engagement?

Brand engagement plans address corporate cultural realities and operational priorities resulting in defined milestones and initiatives to implement.

1. Implementation and cascading of the plans and initiatives across the company.
2. Brand leadership building to ensure consistent messages from the top.
3. Internal communications campaigns and ongoing messaging consistent with the brand strategy.
4. Ongoing measurement and tracking of employee brand awareness and engagement.

How do we do it?

Our approach: Plans versus cultural patterns

It is not enough to produce an operational plan that tells you how to integrate the brand into the business if the current culture will resist the changes in direction. If you are addressing any form of brand development, you are talking about change. This is an exercise that goes beyond the marketing team. You will want to create forums for open dialogue, an interactive and contributory process that is undertaken in a way that secures people’s honest views. Using principles from organisational theory, such as appreciative inquiry and other systemic practices, you can unearth the potential cultural patterns and other factors that are either consistent or in conflict with the brand direction. You can address or utilise patterns in order to create successful change.

Cultural patterns are not created by one person alone. They are ways of working together that have developed over time, often with good historical reasons. For example, a company that goes through a period of uncertainty may adopt strict controls around risk. However, many ways of working outrun their usefulness or appropriateness to the change you are trying to create. Years later, the same company may have recovered from uncertainty and now needs to take more risks in order to achieve expansion or innovate in a changing market. Some patterns will help us in developing our brand and some will hinder its coherent implementation. These issues and patterns of behaviour need to become part of the discussion with the appropriate levels of management.

Operational plans need to be developed in conjunction with the people responsible for the work. Often when people are handed their plans or priorities without their involvement, they feel little responsibility for the result and important insights from them may not be considered. Several obstacles to their performance can be created before you have begun. The right people need to be involved at the right time to set the actions that need to happen and bring the others along with you.

Large events, small group events, and coaching for managers combine elements of training with culture development and action planning. These activities are not just about learning, they are about enriching the detail and meaning of the brand vision and connecting people to this vision. Using internal stories that describe ‘on brand’ experiences and successes can be gathered and shared in forums and then incorporated into internal communications. These stories will help others build a picture of where you are going and what is expected. Within these forums, key stages from the appreciative inquiry model can be used to develop employees thinking on important issues and bring them to the point of innovation and action planning. These key stages are:

Discover what works best, deconstruct and learn from successes.

Envisage the future with the brand vision and define what the company and employees would be doing, what the company would look like, and who would be involved.

Create the action plan with the vision in mind, ultimately asking what needs to be done differently.

Implement the plan and create mechanisms for follow up and support to sustain efforts.

Typical steps to brand engagement

1. Brand check

Uncover insights into what is working well and what is not working with your brand strategy. Is this a neglected brand that needs renewed leadership and participation? Is this an existing brand that is not having its full potential realised by customer facing employees? How do people respond to the brand vision? How has it been used so far? How is it being communicated and through what channels? Ultimately you need to ensure your strategy is relevant, credible, and differentiating.

2. Plan objectives

What do you want employee engagement to achieve? What do you want to see done differently? Set objectives that, when reached, will show how things have changed.

3. Infrastructure mapping

Map out the organisation. Find the areas where the brand is being used well and where it is not. Are there gaps in the use of the brand in any of your major functions? Develop the communication and feedback links needed to progress the project. Identify the best people and where and when they need to be involved.

Map out the inter-dependent activities that are running concurrently in your organisation. How does the brand relate to these operational and strategic directions? How does it relate to other communications and business strategies? Determine how the brand should influence and be used within these other work streams.

4. Developing insights into cultural patterns

Uncover the usual ways of working in your organisation, the cultural patterns that will help and hinder progress with brand development. What it is like to work there? What works well? What needs to be different to achieve your objectives and your brand vision? Bring these patterns into discussion with the people who need to hear it. Discuss within management teams how to address these patterns, and whether they are indeed priorities for change.

5. Engagement plan

Set the priority areas to target for building brand engagement with employees and within operations. Develop the initiatives and actions that will begin the process of culture development that will ultimately synchronise the brand and culture. Set priorities for the operational areas to work on both within their usual process of working and through special initiatives. Write a plan that outlines the results of the above exercises and the important cultural and operational insights made. Get feedback and sign off on the next steps from the appropriate channels.

6. Implement and cascade

Begin implementation. Set up and deliver the culture development workshops as per your plan. Begin training with the brand where needed. Engage employees in their roles and responsibilities towards helping the organisation achieve the brand strategy. Communicate as widely as possible internally, developing campaigns and integrating the messages into your usual internal communications channels..

7. Follow-up

Any new plans should be integrated into current work practices and progress tracked. Much of what can be done is the same work undertaken in a different way, so it is not always about creating new work to do.

When obstacles arise, help each other address and work through them. Focus on the learning and successes that are happening along the way. You need the right communication links between people to ensure consistent follow up and support.

8. Measurement

Running throughout brand engagement activity is measurement. You do not want to measure for the sake of it, nor to tick a box and look like you have done something complex. Keep measurement as simple as possible. You want it to be realistic for your resources to implement, so that you can capture the change and test repeatedly over time. You can capture this change by incorporating the right questions into current employee surveys, customer surveys and by relating the work to current KPI’s which you would expect to be affected by the brand.

Another perspective

The benefit of using an external consultancy is the outside perspective that facilitates and ensures progress when confronted with difficult situations. An outsider can more readily identify patterns that may be difficult to face from the inside and provide the skills needed to facilitate employee groups around issues of brand and leadership development. These issues are often best dealt with by someone other than a colleague or manager. The contribution of a consultant is to facilitate new approaches to working, develop the forums that promote reflection on how best to reach your objectives and why, and then generate the momentum to act on the common vision. Using principles from both marketing and organisational development combines the best knowledge and practices necessary for complex brand related change.

Case Study

Budapest Bank

As a GE Money bank, the company wanted to create a differentiated brand in what is an overly generic market. Looking to the market produced no answers. We needed to look inside the company to find the answer and set the direction. Once the positioning was created, the company began its journey. This is when brand engagement helped them find the path to develop who they wanted to be and how they were going to make it happen. We looked across employee touch points, customer touch points, key service offerings and to the senior management team to not only create the means for expressing their story, but to create leadership in developing the company toward one vision. We did this in a way which fostered unified leadership from within and created a momentum for growth that carried on beyond our involvement.

Our brand engagement processes not only provided plans for cascading brand messages and adapting current systems to suit the brand, we also found cultural patterns within the organization that helped and hindered progress. We brought these patterns out for discussion to either challenge them, or use them. Subsequently, we created forums and experiences within which employees could innovate, be creative and find meaning in the new direction for their work. This process took the company beyond their traditional methods of planning and problem solving towards a process of change and innovation.

We did this by using the principles of appreciative inquiry (AI) to create forums and develop thinking amongst employees to find out how they would take responsibility for the new vision. Important insights developed that helped to create realistic and achievable plans that acted on the vision in each priority division.

The key principles used from AI were:

1. Discover what works best, deconstruct and learn from successes.

2. Envisage the future with the brand vision and define what the company and employees would be doing, what the company would look like, and who would be involved.

3. Implement the action plan with the vision in mind.

4. Develop mechanisms for follow up and tracking.

We created the space and time for people to be creative, to work from their own experiences and to learn from successes as much as focusing on what needed to be different.

The program was well received by employees, who found the process energizing and productive. They committed to new actions to achieve the company vision and requested more time together to further innovate and plan with the new vision. They all agreed to embed the vision across the company and they were eager to develop similar skills to ours with which to do so. The success for us was not only defined by the positive employee feedback, but by the actions which arose subsequent to our involvement.

Budapest Bank Testimonial

‘Brandinstinct’s approach to brand building not only delivered a great and relevant new brand concept to GE Money Bank, but their facilitation was also fundamental to the internal approval and engagement process. With their help we have a new communication strategy that delivered positive business impact and improved brand strength significantly, most importantly our organisation is aligned to delivering what we promise to our customers.’

-Andrea Szabo, Chief Marketing Officer
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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.

This case, amongst many others, demonstrates the power of emotional perceptions of a brand, compared with purely rational perceptions of product performance.

It seems to me that advances in technology, combined with changing patterns of living, and the aspirations that change with them, are a continuous threat to established brands. These changes though, also serve as the catalyst for creating new brands. To those in the communications industry, the support of existing brands and the creation of new brands is all-consuming. They believe there is a requirement for continuous investment in reinforcing positive brand perceptions and the adapting of brands to ensure they are relevant to changing consumer aspirations. If you ask someone in the brand strategy discipline however, a different outlook on branding emerges. They will express a stronger focus on the brand values that exist within a company itself.

Their emphasis is more directed to identifying and expressing those values that determine a company’s culture. This company culture is regarded as an all- important determinant of a company’s longterm success in whatever market it operates. The importance of this approach has been broadly recognised, and in the 1980s and 1990s there was expansion of companies wrestling with ways to express their corporate brand values.

Many of these expressed themselves in their “mission, vision and values” statements. In many cases the company values stated were a reflection of reality and so constituted a step forward. In other cases the values were “manufactured”, often by CEOs under pressure, and did not reflect the true values held within the company. This created a disconnect within the company and its employees who did not recognise, understand or share the professed values. In such a situation the values are often dismissed as management speak and, crucially, not reflected in company staff behaviour towards either customers or suppliers, who then in turn notice the disconnect between what a company claims to be, and what they actually experience. Such an internally divided company struggles to be successful with its brands.

From a brand strategist’s viewpoint all members of a company need to know which attitudes and behaviour will likely elicit approval (and reward) from their colleagues, and which will likely elicit disapproval. The values that define these attitudes and behaviour are seen as the very essence of the esprit de corps of a company, and a recognisable esprit de corps is one of the most identifiable attributes of a company that has been a successful brand builder over the long-term.

Many companies have had spectacular success in the short-term from a brilliant idea, a breakthrough
technology or an inspirational leader. So many of these companies have had an equally spectacular decline when the idea has lost its shine, the technology has been superceded or the inspirational leader has died. History shows that for a company to prosper in the long-term it has tohave a set of values that guide it beyond the big idea and beyond its founder. These values, if held throughout the company, help to concentrate the efforts of management and employees and prevent efforts being dissipated into actions and activities that do not fit the company competence or ethos.

So it would seem that the communications industry is primarily focused on consumers and their erceptions of a product or service brand, and the brand strategy industry primarily focussed on the values that exist within companies and their employees. But which of these disciplines is more important for a company’s long-term success?

Are they of equal importance? Surprisingly many of the most successful brand marketing companies were formed well over 100 years ago. Nestlè in 1816, Procter & Gamble in 1837, Unilever in 1885, Coca-Cola and J&J in 1886, 3M in 1902, and L’Oréal in 1907. These companies all have identifiable sets of values, a core ideology, that has guided their activities since they started life. Their cultures are very distinctive and well known to those who work with them. They have seen many brands die but have created new brands in their place. They have all been through difficult periods but have survived to be a force in their markets today.

They lost their founders long ago and have experienced many changes of management, but most of these companies were fortunate in having not just a founder, but a founding setof values. These values have been reflected in the products and services they have marketed and seem to have been instrumental in ensuring their companies’ long-term success.So the question as to which marketing discipline is most important for brand success can now be seen in perspective. The question looks academic.

Both disciplines have to strive to understand and express their client company’s values in whatever they do, however difficult that may be. These values also have to be seen to be reflected in the product or service brands that are offered up to consumers, and be reflected in the communication that is directed at these consumers. The values of the company then connect to the values of their customers, and then the platform is set for long-term branding success.

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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.

Values and attributes are useful as handles but have limits when deeper meaning is required. Their benefit as a reference point is useful but when employed alone, they can lose their original meaning and be interpreted in different ways by different people. Stories are closer to the way people interpret, articulate and communicate meaning in most contexts, especially complex or emotional ones. The associative connections people make about brands are tangled, fluid, complex things. Stories areso central to culture and the way our minds make sense of the world, that the same message communicated using a story enjoys some of the following advantages:

• Stories are more memorable
• Stories are more interesting
• Stories are more evocative
• Stories are perceived as more unique
• Stories are more believable / authentic
• Stories encourage identification and empathy
• Stories contain conflicts in a credible manner
• Stories are more viral

These benefits are not generic to every story, but the use of stories can confer these traits. Over time you can tell variousstories about a brand; some may accompany it for its entire life. It is essential to recognise what the long-term brand narrative is rooted in. Only then can positioning concepts create a current version of that story that is credible, relevant and differentiated.Brand narratives don’t exist in a vacuum; they exist in the marketplace together with other stories.

The dialectic interaction between different stories influences both the way audiences perceive any single story and the multitude of stories in the market at any one time. For example, when Orange entered the market, they were one of the first to offer a future-oriented positive story about technology, so the story was differentiated and powerful. Today, many technology brands offer this as part of their story, so optimism has become a part of the background and brands are looking for other ways to differentiate their narrative.

A side effect of the interplay of narratives in the marketplace is that stories can be told about that interplay, and about patterns which repeat, change and manifest across markets, categories or segments. The academic jargon calls these stories about stories “metanarratives”. We prefer the more practical term “marketing plots”. The view is that these recurring patterns are the plots of marketing stories. In our work, we have recognised that interpreting marketing plots and using them to inform brand narratives is a rich source of insight into strategic marketing challenges.

The Number One vs. Number Two Drama

Some stories are so strong that they are bound to repeat across categories. Here is the plot for one of the classic stories about competition and differentiation. This is the No. 1 vs. No. 2 drama. No. 1 is a brand that creates a new category. He may not be the first one to come up with the idea or the product, but is the first one to leverage it for the mass market.No. 1 learns how to tell the market about the new product, No. 1 teaches people that it is good, and eventually many people are convinced. Maybe No. 1 even comes to stand for that idea or product.

Their brand is the strongest in the category by far, there may be some small players pitching similar products, but they can’t touch No. 1. No. 1 is the one who teaches the market why the entire category is good, why it works, why it is important. Everything is fine until one day, No. 2 comes to town. No. 2’s product isn’t as revolutionary as No. 1’s. Maybe there’s a twist on the original idea somewhere, but sometimes that twist is more in the way they communicate the brand. You see, No. 2 is quite happy with the fact that No. 1 is synonymous with the category, because it means No. 1 stands for values & attributes that are generic and shared by every player in the category – big or small.

Ironically, it is the fact that No. 1 built the category and told everyone what it was all about that made them generic and vulnerable. This is especially true if the category has commodified in the meantime. This situation gives No. 2 a chance to look at the category and tell a new story about it. No. 2 will usually do that by either finding out what it is “really” about or by making a claim regarding what’s important. Anyway, No.2’s claim comes off as strong, especially if it is emotional in nature, mainly because it is focused and different, and that makes No. 1’s loyal customers pay attention.

Before you know it, No. 2 is a serious threat to No. 1’s domination of the market. They get a bigger and bigger share of the exciting, more unique aspects of the category, and their popularity accelerates. At this point, the story usually takes one of two paths: No. 1 doesn’t realise what’s happening quickly enough and before you know it they start being perceived as dated and boring. They lose their No. 1 position forever. No. 1 wakes up in time to reposition themselves, using their more established heritage to make a more emotional claim that they are the real thing. Even then, life will not go back to being as easy as it used to be.

The seminal example of this story is the Coke vs. Pepsi story, but we’ve seen it manifesting in various categories and markets – from yoghurt brand wars in the Middle East to multinational telecom brands fighting over European markets. So what is the value of recognising this plot? The lesson for established brands is to watch out for that moment when what was once an innovative message becomes obvious, and to try to stand for something unique even before the need to differentiate is pressing. If a newcomer plays on difference, it’s time to find a fresh way to reclaim your heritage.

The lesson for challenger brands and many of our clients belong to this category, is that leading brands are not as indomitable as they may seem and that it is possible to isolate the area where the leader has created a standard and become generic, and use it against them to find a unique story. Sometime that story is the heart of the category and standing for it in a marketplace can be priceless. Easier said than done? Sure. Complete solutions will take much planning and hard work, but the point is the inherent value in recognisingthe narrative pattern of this plot and using it for your benefit – recognise your brand’s role in the drama and your communication goals become clearer.

The Leader’s Lament

Working with brands emphasises the need to use their stories to differentiate them in competitive markets. Here is another plot which points to a generic trap, a “golden generic cage” of sorts. Another case where being successful brings with it the curse of becoming generic. It’s fascinating how time after time we’ve come across stories where leading brands have become stuck in that generic spot everybody is trying to get out of. These are players who worked very hard to get to the top, only to discover that they’re all pretty much the same up there.

As brand strategists, we like working with challenger brands, but often find them trudging through a painful plateau that can be quite depressing for a hard working over achieving team. This is a plot that repeats itself in highly competitive global categories, especially with big service oriented B2B companies. In these categories it is common to have hundreds if not thousands of global players, but there will usually be a group of leaders that tower above everyone else. They may be top 5, top 10 or top 50, it depends on the category, but they stand apart from all the rest.

When a brand enters this exclusive club a common mistake will be to get stuck on things that no longer matter for audiences. During our first meetings with such players, often someone will say something along these lines: “We’ve grown a lot in the last couple of years - nobody seemsto know it. Let’s make more noise about how big and good we are.” The harsh reality is that no one cares. Of course you’re big, that’s why you’re a top 10 player. Thus, paradoxically, this fact becomes boring and irrelevant to your audiences.

What got you here will not set you apart from the rest of the leaders. Why? It’s like the Olympics. When you compare all the runners in the world the performance varies greatly, but on the Olympic track, the winners differ by just 0.1 or 0.01 of a second. When this happens in business, you’re in trouble. Many of your differentiating achievements magically disappear and turn into “entry prices”. The things you spent years fighting for, no longer mean that much to your audience. Established practice is the new average.

Worse still, best of breed is the new average. When this happens, top-of-mind surprisingly counts for a lot. If it’s a competitive B2B category, a decision maker will have one or two favourites, the first ports of call, but beyond that it’s the first top 10 name that comes to their mind. Being this top-of-mind player brings with it a chance to win new projects and clients, amongst them those star accounts and star deals which are so important to have the first chance to acquire, as they create a benevolent circle with the reputation that precedes them.

This is true whether you’re a VC cherry-picking entrepreneurs, a chemical manufacturer seeking key B2B partners or a professional services provider looking for prospects to turn to you automatically . ”So now what?” That’s your big question, and yes, it can be aslightly depressing one. The futility of achievement is one of the challenges of leading a meaningful life, and that goes for doing meaningful work as well.

Now is the time to start exploring what successful habits have brought you this far and what’s different about you. If the answer is “nothing” it’s time to figure out what you want to stand for. Once you find it – tell it concisely at every opportunity you have. Preferably, find some juicy stories you can use. Like the way Sequoia Capital uses the star internet brands they invested in (Google, Paypal, Youtube and more) when talking about themselves, thus creating a virtuous cycle of star-deals.

Architectural practices use their star projects influentially, their stories being told in a very obvious way. Welcome to Olympus! The bad news: everybody is immortal around here. The good news: it’s a clear and limited group to stand out from. Pattern Recognition as insight brand narratives are powerful at focusing and differentiating your brand, but like other types of narrative they too interact with other stories; whether they are the ones told at the time or in the past through traditions of stories and storytelling.

This is why recognising the recurring patterns of marketing narratives or marketing plots, is so valuable. Recognising the unifying dynamics of how different stories interact across markets, categories and segments will lead you to meaningful insights along the way to your strategic solution. Those insights will show you how to use your story in order to reinforce perceptions of the marketplace or subvert the perceptions your competitors are trying to create.

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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.

First, let us examine the way that cultures are grown. Company cultures are made up of accepted patterns or ‘ways of doing things’. These patterns should not be confused with operational systems, but are derived from the way all employees go about their daily activities.

Compare the way two people walk up a hill. One is focused on getting to the top as quickly as he can. The other takes a meandering route looking at this and that as he goes along. Both people have the same goal, but the way that they go about achieving that goal can be as different as day and night. If we continue this metaphor a little, we can also predict the results of doing things one way or another. One man achieves his goal quickly and one slowly. One man experiences the joy of self-satisfaction that comes with reaching the summit as quickly as he can. The other man enjoys the discovery of learning along the way and experiencing every little pleasure that comes from paying attention to the journey.

It is important to recognise that both ways of climbing the hill are valid. For the study of human behaviour and company culture, it is useful to understand what compels one person to go up the hill quickly and one person to take his time. One might suppose that a person driven by achievement or social recognition may want to ascend as quickly as he can. The other person may be motivated by notions of contentment or wisdom, so would therefore want to enjoy the journey and observe the environment.

These differences in what each person values are how the practices of branding and organisational development are fundamentally connected. As human beings, our values guide our behaviour. This axiom is just as true for the group as it is for the individual. In organisational development, we connect what we value with how we behave to focus or modify our behaviour towards our goals. In branding, we focus on the outward expression of our values and behaviour in the market through the stories we tell.

If we were to listen in on a conversation with the quick man later on in the pub, we might hear him recount how fast he got up the hill, how sublime the view was from the summit and about some of the techniques he employed to get there so quickly.

In the same way, we can listen to people in a company tell stories in order to understand the rules and values that underpin their behaviour. When we join a new company, one of the first things we do is try to learn the rules which we are expected to conform to. Many books have been written about why people seek to conform to rules. For the sake of brevity, let us say that conformity to these unwritten rules helps everyone get to the top of the hill without bumping into each other too much along the way.

These rules form the culture and are the accepted norms that newly inducted employees use as markers for their behaviour. Some of these rules propel a company toward its vision and some hold it back. Some rules have been with the company since the beginning and some have been more recently brought into the mix. Some rules are widely accepted across divisions or even countries and some are to be found in isolated pockets of the organisation.

As agents of organisational development, our first task is to facilitate insights into these rules and understand their affect on the company’s march toward their objectives, vision and desired state.

While these stories can be uncovered in one-on-one meetings with employees, we find that both our clients and ourselves are able to identify more stories and at greater pace when we get groups of people together. Listening to multiple perspectives reveals the rules from the different ways that people add to the stories that are being told at that moment. The people in the room shape the stories together; which enables the dynamic required for others to gain insights and see what patterns are occurring.

There are key moments when listening to these stories that make us sit up and pay attention. Critical phrases like ‘when I see a customer in the street, I walk the other way’ or ‘we need research to support every decision we take’ indicate a pattern of behaving. Taken alone, these indicators – or rules of behaving – may point to something or indeed, they may not. In order to understand their relevance, we need to investigate whether these rules will help us get to the desired state of the organisation or whether they will hold us back.

The first example above was heard at a company that wanted to promote greater intimacy and empathy between customers and staff. The second example was heard at a company that required greater risk-taking in decision making as part of its desired state. So, our task was to help these clients move past these unhelpful rules by gaining insight into when these patterns were useful in reaching their vision and when they were not. We further coached them towards different ways of acting to reach their vision.

Large change consultancies primarily focus on implementing processes and restructuring systems that surround the culture of a company. Every tangible component of the business can be considered – from policy to IT – but as you can imagine systems alone will not change the culture. Structural changes need to be complimented by insights into behaviour.

If we go back to the hill analogy, system changes are akin to creating a path on the hill, but these systems do not guarantee that people will use the path we build. Research shows that many large change efforts fail. We suggest that failures result from a lack of appreciation of the rules that govern behaviour. The wanderer will not race to the top simply because a nice path is provided. We need to encourage the intrinsic motivation that comes from a connection to their values, and an appreciation of the new vision that guides them. Only once this appreciation is encouraged can people see what, if anything, is preventing the company from achieving it.

This kind of appreciation is only gained by identifying personally with the new direction and the ability to put the vision into context. If this important step of generating context and meaning is missed, then the new direction will remain something that is not relevant for the employee. It’s important to appreciate that most change programmes are about identifying a new direction that will undoubtedly feel alien to the current accepted way of doing things; the rules that define the current context and culture. So, if context is the key, how do we go about encouraging a shared meaning of the new direction so that everyone can understand and personalise the vision to their own working lives?

There are two parallel practices we can look to for inspiration. Narrative-based marketing efforts have been helping us transmit complex, value-laden stories to customers for decades. The advent of social marketing has focused even greater attention on narrative-based marketing techniques, getting customers to participate in the narratives that companies propagate and to contribute to the greater dialogue being generated online.

The other link can be found in mental health with narrative-based therapies helping people reframe the way they think about their own situation. Therapists use this method to elicit the stories that have led the patient to their current distress or situation. By helping the person re-author the way in which they approach their story and position themselves and others differently in their story, we are able to change the way the patient sees themselves and others. Armed with a reframed view of themselves and their future, a patient creates more possibilities for acting to achieve their desired state.

By using stories and narratives, we are not only able to transmit complex ideas clearly, we also benefit from the transformational character of a story. We can help people reframe the current story of an organisation and understand the need for a shift in behaviour – as a group and as individuals. Stories are also a superior tool since they perpetuate themselves beyond the original nucleus of the narrative. Once the core of the story is understood, people use it to create awareness; a trigger to act differently in similar scenarios. The learning we can derive from the little boy who cried wolf, goes well beyond that particular limited scenario.

Using a narrative-based approach to cultural growth also has benefits for creating consistency between the external stories told about the brand to the market and the stories formed inside the organisation.

Identifying narratives within your own culture is not easy. The unwritten rules that are learned when a new employee joins the company are soon forgotten as they become subsumed into normal working practice. Once uncovered, our clients always recognise the patterns we identify, but they are rarely ever able to spot the patterns and rules that have formed the current culture.

Recognising the patterns does not mean that they are easy to change. Cultural patterns are like meandering rivers. Once the course of the river is cut, it is difficult to change. Powerful tools like narratives help clients tackle ingrained behaviours in order to move onto new directions while preserving existing successes and positive ways of acting.

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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.

This flamboyancy is often referred to as ‘The Big Russian Soul’.

Most international marketers have been relatively slow to take advantage of this characteristic of the Russian psyche. Instead, they have depended in the ‘not-from-here’ notions of appeal and superior quality of international brands to drive their wedge into the market. The Italians by contrast have been very quick to recognise the character of the market. Like in Italy, brands such Dolce & Gabbana, Versace, Valentino and Hugo Boss reign supreme in Russia. The more glam and glitter the better and it seems that the newly liberated market cannot get enough.

While slick, minimalist, international brands have their place in Russia, they are chiefly consumed by a small number of the elite in Moscow and St. Petersburg. We need to contrast this small ‘minimalist’ niche against every Russian youth owning a drawer-full of the most ‘maximalist’ D&G t-shirts that can be found on the black market. With this in mind, it is time to take a page from Italian marketing books and capitalise on the Dolce Vita aspects of Russian living. Russians prefer images of living life in the large. While the larger than life image changes from brand to brand, life and life-styles are parodied in successful communications. Of course, there is a risk. We need to be cautious with the difference between exaggerating life with a bit of theatre, and making any illusions that is actually how life is or should be. Contrast this against British or American promotions that use aspirational peers to try to push people’s perception of what they should want. As a result, marketers have been adopting this aspirational peer approach with an ever-decreasing level of success in Russia. Most ad agencies are pumping in best practice from Anglo-Saxon markets and finding that the approach simply does not fit the Russian context.

The combination of Western-like capitalism and Italian-like ostentation combine for a less-than-subtle effect best in Moscow. Here, brands are everywhere and billboards are crammed into every conceivable view. Even the area around the Kremlin is wallpapered with gigantic billboards costing a million-dollars a week and featuring brands like Rolex and Versace.

Of course, Russia is also a land of contrasts and while the Dolce Vita may be the ideal, the real picture is a little less sweet. There is a tremendous amount of wealth in Moscow, but your average Muscovite earns US$ 750 per month. Moscow just topped the list as the most expensive city to live in the world last year, so this wage gives an indication for how far the market has yet to develop for everyone.

It’s important not to dismiss the Russian urban/rural divide as something that occurs in every market to a similar degree. The gap is more extreme in Russia, looking more like the gap between urban and rural customers in Asia, than in other parts of Eastern Europe. City-dwellers in Moscow and St. Petersburg dream of vacations abroad and lifestyles that are more a kin to Western European standards. Rural households dream of a buying new winter clothes for their children or to purchase their first mobile phone through systems akin to micro-credits first developed in India.

So, on one hand, we have the Big Russian Soul craving for a bit of bling and on the other we have the constraints of a newly capitalised economy that is still living with extremes (and will do for decades to come). This situation presents interesting dilemmas for brands and branders – especially for mass-market brands such as FMCG, banks and telecoms.

As you can imagine it is easy to intimidate someone that is earning US$ 200 per month with visions of the good life that would make your typical middle class Russian shrink away with an ostentatious yawn. Promoting values that relate to social recognition, respect and achievement are tricky when promoting to the masses in Russia. Banks and telecoms have had an especially hard time in getting their promotions right since messages of achievement are easy pickings in other countries and they are going on best practice. But when they promote achievement-focused messages, they alienate the poor since they are overly aspirational and they alienate the wealthy middle class since they are hopelessly dull. The problem is one of specificity and relating the function of a product to the aspirational values that you want to promote. While fashion brands can make you feel like you are walking down a runway in Milan, yogurt cannot help you become more popular with your friends.

While this situation is true to some degree in all markets, the nature of the situation is exaggerated in Russia. For example, if a mobile phone brand promotes notions of international travel to the market in order to promote a new roaming tariff, they will intimidate the vast majority of customers. Or when a vodka brand promotes people drinking at a trendy bar, most consumers will feel alienated.

Branding people need to exercise caution with the specificity of marketing message in Russia as it relates to the product that they are marketing. If a product is naturally glamorous, then notions of a generally glamorous lifestyle will work wonders (see Big Russian Soul). However, if the product is not directly related to glamour – like a bank account or a soda drink – then presenting an aspirational lifestyle is especially risky.

This extent to which Russians reject insincere marketing messages is severe. After 70 years of communism, Russians know a bit of propaganda when they see it. Up till now, the basic need to grow brand awareness across the country has masked the need for more effort in differentiating brands. But the awareness-growing gold-rush is now coming to an end. As marketing requirements mature from simple awareness building into preference building, market cynicism will make things increasing tough on branders.

Branders have recognised this cynicism and have been trying to define what aspects of Russian culture, values and norms will be acceptable for the mass market. Somewhat ironically, these have culminated in a resurgence of Russian nationalism communicated to the markets through brands. Major brands from beer to banks to telecoms are espousing nationalistic messages and trying to capture the essence of that Big Russian Soul. MTS, the largest telecom with over 70 million subscribers, recently relaunched the brand and capitalised on the Big Russian Soul in the process. They used authentic images of Russian people portraying daily life situations in a way that profiled Russian living and what it meant to be Russian. Further, MTS congratulate the country in advertising spots that celebrate national holidays and other significant occasions.

Other brands like Baltika are trying to leverage the Russian love of all things cheeky. Dark humour reins above all other forms and for all their suffering, Russians know how to laugh at the darker side of life. Still this kind of humour needs to be tempered against a need to be cautious around social norms. Unbelievably, your average Russian young-person feels less need to stand-out from the crowd and poke fun at anything too specific. Specifically, being irreverent as a whole social group is OK, but being irreverent as an individual is a big no-no.

There are many conceptions and misconceptions about Russia as a land and the Russian people. People looking from the outside-in have formed their opinions of the motherland from propaganda promoted during the cold war and often approach the market with a father-knows best attitude. People looking from the inside are looking outside for the answers since they realise that there is so much to learn about the science of branding.

In the end, what’s obvious is that marketers need to look much harder on the inside of the culture in order to get it right and to figure out all the paradoxes that make Russians tick. Marketers need to become more sophisticated with the messages they promote in Russia. Nationalism serves as a good stop-gap for some of the major brands, but is not appropriate for every situation and will soon live out its course. We need to do more work in order to plug into the Russian psyche and unpick the critical, cultured and sophisticated nature of the Russian mind before we build truly great brands for the country.
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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.

In our experience, brand owners naturally take great pride, not only in the brand they have created, but in all the positive actions that have gone into creating that brand. The trick is to capitalise on these constructive actions in order to continue growing your parent brand. An important message to convey – again and again – will be that you are not abandoning all you have learned in the creation of these sub-brands as the company transitions to a streamlined portfolio.

You will want to reinforce this message in the actions you take next, so you can reassure the sub-brand owners that all their good ideas will be used as you continue build the parent brand with greater focus. As a first exercise, you can meet with these brand-owners and ask them to take inventory of all the activities and communication techniques that are working well with their sub-brands. This activity can be done with you facilitating the groups in smaller sessions to get them talking about the detail that led to their sub-brand’s success. The sub-brand owners’ activities and the effort in focus can be current and in the past. You essentially want to understand what the team has been doing well so you can transfer as much of this learning and skill into their new roles and not lose any of the intellectual capital associated with the development of these sub-brands.

This exercise has three effects. First, it helps the team build their confidence that their hard work is appreciated and will continue to be appreciated. Second, it will capture important information about the ‘sub-brand experiments’ that have been ongoing before we eliminate them and potentially loose the knowledge that has made them a success. Third, through talking about the detail of each effort, the brand owners will be able to discern what elements of their effort were due to creative strategies, approaches to market, and customer focus versus the virtues of the sub-brand itself. As a brand agency, we often find that this exercise results in the realisation that the parent brand does not hold the sub-brand back. Indeed, brand owners often conclude that if they applied the same efforts and actions to the parent brand as they did to the sub-brand, that their service would have been even more of a success.

There are no magic questions to ask during these sessions. The key to successful sessions is in getting down to the detail and having an open i.e. not an agenda-driven, conversation about the reasons behind the successes they have enjoyed with the sub-brand and what they would like to take into the future. Since these are smart, driven people, you will not need to ‘lead them down the garden path’. With an examination into the detail behind their success, they will draw their own conclusions – either during the session or shortly afterward.

I’ll emphasise the need to promote the fact that the brand owners’ activities up to this point have been worthwhile and have produced positive results. In order to understand how to repeat and improve upon these results for the parent brand, we will need to ask them about the detail of what works well in the promotion and delivery of the brands that have created. What tricks did they learn when selling this brand? What messages have been particularly effective? How much detail do they go into when talking about the technical nature of the product or service? What aspects of their promotions stuck in customers’ minds? What kind of customers respond best to the brand they have created? Why do they believe this? What elements of the sub-brand have them so excited? How have they lead the market against the competition?

How will you use this information? You’ll need to plot out the major milestones for purging the brands from your portfolio (e.g. stage one is immediately, stage two is at the parent brand re-launch, stage three is one year from the parent brand re-launch) so that you can plan the migration of the brand portfolio.

You can use the inventory developed by the brand-owners to help put into context how much work will be required for bringing the sub-brands back into the parent brand. If it is a matter of bringing in a new copy-style for communications, then it will not take much to bring the sub-brand into the fold of the parent brand.

At this point in the programme, you need to appreciate the fact that you have just told them that we are ‘taking their babies away’. In order to soften this blow, you want to re-build their confidence and remind them of all the achievements they have had in promoting these brands and ensure that we capture this valuable learning before we change the portfolio.

It sounds elementary but you want to focus mainly on the positive aspects of their experience with the creation and maintenance of their sub-brands. If you focus on the negative, or adopt a problem-solving approach, you run the risk of dampening their already bruised spirits. Furthermore, you will not learn about what has made these sub-brand team’s efforts a success. Often in change situations, a problem-solving approach will end up associating change with the confrontation of hurdles or problems that need to be reckoned with, but do not necessarily drive the success of the brand.

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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.

Appreciative inquiry is an approach to organisational development which enables positive change and brings an optimistic, structured and energising quality to the potentially intangible task of change (Cooperrider, et al. 2003). Changing core behaviors can be a challenging task to take on, but it is critical to the success of your brand. In addition, many potential employees are shown to be drawn to companies with strong brands, whose values they can relate to. Whether boosting current brand engagement or creating changes in your brand identity, people within your company will need to evaluate their contribution and make changes towards the brand. What better way to develop than to do it based on who you are, and what you do well, rather than trying to change fundamentally who you are.

The challenge is in moving from awareness raising initiatives (like brand training and promotions) to integrating the types of behaviour you want in daily practice. You need to create the environments (systems, structures, and approaches) that will allow brand engagement to be sustained. Our approach is one of facilitating a company’s best resources: its people. With our approach to change, we work with people from senior management and other key players to explore the best qualities and experiences of the organization and determine what will work in your company to help you achieve your brand vision.

The traditional approach to change in western business of analysing problems and finding ways of fixing them represents the antithesis of what AI brings to an organisation (Hammond, 1998, p.6). As opposed to starting with problems, we start by finding what is working well, finding the moments of experience which energised people, and experiences when people felt their actions were making a difference. More than an analysis of strengths; people are invited to reflect on and tell their positive experiences which help define the desired culture of the organisation and find solutions in the array of conditions, relationships, and actions within which their highpoints occurred. Our aim is to give people the means to find the conditions under which the brand can be realised.

Although our approaches do not involve problem solving, a consultant practicing in this way does not ignore problems. The consultant explores the contexts that define your company’s experience. It is by appreciating the context and listening to many views in the organisation, that the consultant and client develop an appreciation for the challenges that are present. It is not only the positive elements that are in focus, as this can in itself impose an artificial lens for change. The key in the consultation is to manage these challenges and confirm people’s common experiences, but not to remain bound by problems (Barge & Oliver, 2003). A problem focus will end up halting change and defeating you at the outset.

The foundation of AI is social constructionist theory, which states that our knowledge and perception of our world is constructed in social interaction. As the view of the world is constructed socially, we see that there are numerous possibilities for interpretation of the world each providing different opportunities for different kinds of actions. Wittgenstein (a 20^th century philosopher who inspires this theory) postulates that reality is created in language. As our reality is formed by language, our choices to act in this reality are dependent on our interpretations. The power lies in knowing that we can consciously determine our interpretations and use of language to create our organizational culture as we want it. Therefore, Wittgenstein leads us to recognize that language not only shapes our worlds, but influences how we go on constructing them (Cronen & Lang, 1994). The assumption that our perceptions of the world are co-created in language is pivotal to using AI. Within this social constructionist frame, the valuing of differences and hearing multiple views in the system becomes a foundation for the creation of change. Ethically, we facilitate in a manner which is appreciative, permits difference and multiple views, while inquiring into people’s experiences at the company. It is this social and collective dialogue which will provide the context from which development will occur.

Secondly, but equally as important to AI is the hypothesis, which states that social systems evolve toward positive self images (Cooperider, 2003; Bushe, 1998). David Cooperrider (one of the originators of AI) draws our attention to research such as the placebo affect (improvements in one’s medical condition when given an inert substance that is believed to be medicinal), and the Pygmalion affect (the positive projections from others of another’s performance) and the use of positive images of success in athletic training to support this view. Cooperider (2001) states that when presented with the option, organizations will move more rapidly and effectively in the direction of affirmative imagery (those images that are most bright, purposeful, and highly valued). It is not any positive image that will suffice, but a vision that is relevant, and meaningful.

The Social constructionist principle also links us to the organization’s inner dialogue. Inner dialogue refers to the stories told outside formal gatherings; the stories which create beliefs about what the organization is and what is possible there (Bushe, 1998 p. 45). These informal conversations are what sustain an image of an organization (Bushe, 1998 p.45). If decisions being arrived at for change occur in formal meetings, but no shift occurs in behind the scenes conversations, the changes will not become a reality (Bushe, 1998, p. 45). Often, people need more than instruction to make changes or to implement a brand promise. AI can facilitate people to generate and tell positive stories to create a shift in the inner dialogue and build confidence. External consultants and managers inside an organization direct attention to and propagate the stories of achievements and positive experience in order to create a productive balance of stories within the organization.

Dialogue is key to any change process. We use inquiry to begin creating that dialogue. This is where change begins, right at the start, when we begin our inquiry. We state here that Inquiry and change are not separate moments. The act of inquiring appreciatively creates increased awareness of aspects in view, enabling the client to make new connections between their actions and consequences in the context with others and create new interpretations of the situation from which to act. Through inquiry, change begins as the inquirer asks their first questions. So for change to permeate we need the right people in the room as we begin; usually a group of key decision makers who are committed to seeing the processes through. Inquiry is the change intervention, not merely an analysis that gets constructed by the consultants (Cooperrider, 2003).

AI opens a space for a positive collective future vision to emerge in conversation (Cooperrider, 2003). The appreciative focus is critical, as people have more confidence to journey into the future, when they carry forward the best parts of the past (Hammond, 1998).

Using AI:

AI can be used from the first steps in developing a brand strategy through to internal branding. As I have been developing AI into our practice, I have used it as a tool for designing and facilitating specific workshops, as the case study below demonstrates.

The case study:

Brandinstinct was approached by a large, multi-national, technology company, sited in 12 countries and consisting of 25,000 members of staff to help them integrate the brand into their normal working day. In order for the brand to have success, the company rightly felt that the organization’s staff needed to act with the brand values in mind.

To bring the brand ‘alive’, we discovered that the client wanted others in the organization to see the brand as a guide for setting up processes, and systems which would generate a shift in the culture of the organization. The alternative culture was seen as one which would promote their values and provide a hold for more positive and ‘on brand’ behaviors, such as cross-team communicating, or exploring customers needs and ensuring they were addressed. The purpose is to create an improved customer experience through generating a more optimistic, friendly, and customer-focused culture.

The brand vision was developed from within the organization by its global marketing team. Our commissioners for this project were the marketing team, however we recommended that other key players in the organization were involved, such as internal communications and HR who play a critical role for this type of change.

The key factors that attracted the client to our approach were building on what is working well in relation to the vision now, connecting the vision with the wider organization and facilitating the staff to design specific steps to get there. It was important for the vision not to be seen as just a marketing position, but a company wide position; a vision which would shape their working practices.

We introduced AI as a method for facilitating employee’s connection to the brand, but further to generate the behaviors and actions that would best articulate the brand and develop a more cohesive culture and brand. We recommended a series of workshops targeting key people from across departments and countries working together. Twenty groups were created in total, each group receiving two to three days of workshops; with the exception of the brand implementation team receiving 5 workshops spread over 10 months. We can create structures for triggering and cascading the change which best fit an organizations structure, regardless of their size. Although workshops can be used in isolation, we also recommend internal communications and events to disseminate messages widely.

We incorporated with the AI process the client’s new brand vision, the values and the articulations which define it. Senior management plays an active role in discussing the meaning of the vision with the workshop participants and engaging in conversations together about what it means here. We expand on these conversations by inquiring into people’s experience of the values and eventually to how they feel they enact or can enact these values. For example, when exploring the value of inclusiveness, an employee related to internal networking conferences and talks, which helped her, understand other people’s roles in the company and know more about what other departments do. She related to how she felt part of something larger and more meaningful than just her job as a result of her attendance. She then related her experience to behavior. She was able to approach others in the company when she had ideas or needed support in finding solutions to issues in her area of responsibility. Some of the most meaningful moments are those when people realize it is these seemingly simple day to day actions which make the difference to the organizations culture and ultimately to its brand.

Consultations:

Our consultation process begins well before the workshops begin. It is important to have access to a group of relevant senior decision makers throughout the project, as our process of change begins from our first inquiry. The project is not one that can be managed by a project manager alone. There needs to be regular and consistent group meetings with the right people in the room to ensure that as change progresses, the right people are brought along.

The workshops:

It is key for our exercises to match what is acceptable for the group we are dealing with. We use small groups and pairs to break out larger teams of participants to work in depth with one another. We use activities like interviews, focused discussion and observational exercises to engage people in thinking and creating dialogue. We take attendees through a cycle beginning with:

1) Discovery – exploring what is working well, what are the high points here?

2) Envision- what does it look like where you want to go, what is the vision.

3) Design – how are we going to get there? How are we going to have the high points become regular every day occurrences?

4) Deliver – do it, adapt actions and sustain.

Matching language is a key issue in the success of workshops. We were particularly aware that people from across Europe were involved and some people are therefore using English as their second language. Although we work mainly in English, we connect with members of staff who are fluent in English and the other languages to assist the process. In addition, we are also aware that much of consultant language can be inaccessible to clients. We are open for continual exploration of our processes and concepts to help the client understand what it is we are bringing to the fore. The work is based on providing processes; processes which are much like therapy, while the clients are bringing the content of who they are and where they want to go. We do not tell others what they must do to be successful, but we explore what actions will be right for them given their unique context. We try to make the process tangible, while trying to maintain the integrity of the process.

Conclusion:

Our work with this client is still on going. The achievements towards their vision have been marked. As time goes on they have behaved in some new ways and maintained some old ways but ultimately brought themselves closer to an organization whose values have relevance. As one employee said, we have done a remarkable thing, by even beginning to talk together and work together in this way. The workshops have helped them explore their culture and vision in a collaborative way; a collaboration which in itself is changing the organizations culture.

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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.

The most common, and most misguided, reason we hear for justifying the development of a new sub-brand is for generating a level of excitement or interest in a new offer. Once the initial promotion is complete, the necessary resources for maintaining awareness on the new brand are rarely ever justified.

The best reason for creating a new brand is to accelerate take-up of a product by promoting specific rational and emotional attributes to the target group that the parent brand cannot emulate with the same success. This is especially true in creating new markets for new products as exemplified when mobile telephone products were introduced or when internet banking was developed. Lastly, a good reason to create a new brand is to limit the degree of risk when launching a new offer to the market. If it is a possible that the launch of the product may harm the image of the parent brand, it may be wise to distance the offer by creating a new and/or separate brand. While more expensive in the short term, if the offer is a success, the brand can be folded back into the parent at a later date.

The chart above illustrates three main brand portfolio models. The vast majority of companies should adopt the ‘Corporate Dominant’ bias for their brand portfolio. While there are other models and other reasons for creating sub-brands, they are rare and should be treated with a high degree of scrutiny.

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