It’s All in the Planning: 5 Tips for Launching a Successful Brand Strategy Initiative
Aaah, the Fourth Quarter. The time for frantically spending every last dime of this year’s budget, while planning for what to do next year. If developing or revisiting your brand strategy is among your goals for 2007, following are five tips to consider during planning that can help you avoid making costly mistakes at launch.
1. Know what you’re trying to build
It seems that there are about 4,000 different ways that marketing professionals define the word “brand” in today’s business environment. Pick up 10 books on branding, and you’ll see 10 different descriptions of what a brand is. Some think of brand as the reputation your organization holds in the minds of your stakeholders, others define it as what people think of when they see your logo, and still others see it as an expression of the values you share with your customers. This can be very confusing as you begin your planning process—if there’s no agreed-upon definition of what you’re building, how do you build it? Essentially, all of the various definitions of branding can be boiled down to one simple idea:
A BRAND IS A PROMISE AN ORGANIZATION MAKES TO ITS CUSTOMERS, THAT MUST BE DELIVERED UPON CONSISTENTLY WITH EVERY SINGLE INTERACTION.
If you think of your brand as a promise, it puts the brand within your control, and doesn’t depend on the whims of your stakeholders. It also helps internal audiences understand the role and significance of the brand to the company’s success. And lastly, it deepens the bonds between your company and your customers—the strongest relationships are built on promises made and promises kept.
2. Assemble the right team
Gone are the days when branding was the exclusive domain of the marketing department. If we continue with our definition of a brand as a promise, the marketing department is made up of the promise-makers. They help formulate the positioning, develop the advertising, and generally tell customers: “this is what we promise we’ll do for you.” But that’s where the marketing department’s job stops.
Keeping the promise is the responsibility of everyone else in the company, especially those on the front lines. Sales, operations, customer service, product development—these are the people who are keeping your brand promise. So it is critical that when you bring together an internal team to work on defining or redefining your brand, it is made up of a cross-functional team representing both the promise-makers and the promise-keepers.
It is also critical that you have the endorsement of senior management. While they may not be on the team or attend all the meetings, they will be the ones ensuring that the promises are being kept by demonstrating, encouraging, and rewarding actions and behaviors that support the brand. Ultimately, your brand will not have traction if senior managers do not embrace and display its principles.
3. Research inside and out
When developing their brand promise, organizations often make one of two countervailing mistakes. They either make a promise that’s “all about me” or “whatever you want.”
You can recognize the “all about me” promise by the absence of language about the customer—usually these promises are about things like “providing the highest quality product,” or “leading the industry for 125 years.” Generally, consumers respond to these promises by wondering, “So what does that mean to me?” At best, it’s irrelevant. At worst, it’s a chest-beating turn-off.
Conversely, the “whatever you want” promise attaches itself to consumer mindsets with little regard to what’s actually true about the organization. These promises are generally developed in response to focus group research. Your research might tell you that consumers really value friendly service in your category, so you develop a promise that’s about “providing the friendliest service in the industry” even though your service team is widely regarded as surly, and you compensate them by how fast they can get customers off the phone, rather than how well they solve customers’ problems. You can see how this would lead to customer disaffection.
It is imperative that your promise address both the truth about your organization AND the greatest needs of your customers. Marketers are very familiar with the tactics for understanding customer needs—focus groups, surveys, market studies, etc.—and this kind of research is regularly included in a brand strategy plan. But you should also be sure to plan for internal research—this can usually involve in-depth interviews, employee focus groups, and surveys that explore the inside view of what you’re best at and what you value. Interestingly, when the internal dialogue is honest and open, the feedback from employees often directly mirrors what is heard from customers. Your employees really can be the voice of the customer if you simply allow them to be heard.
4. Start keeping the promise before you make it
Historically, brand strategy plans have included both development of the strategy and communication of it to external audiences. Recently, most companies have also started to consider internal communications as part of their launch plans. But communicating to employees about the brand is only the first step—what is much more important is to make sure that employees know how to deliver on the brand promise, and that they are empowered to do so.
This requires looking at the customer’s experience of your organization through their eyes. It is amazing how few companies do this. Even the savviest companies, those with some kind of customer process map, have usually developed the map from the standpoint of how the company interacts with the customer, not how the customer experiences the company. For instance, the company may have “background” functions, such as order processing, that affect the customer experience but that the customer does not see the mechanics of these actions. If we look at the customer experience through the company’s eyes, delays in order processing make sense because of all the complicated steps we have to go through. But if we look at it through the customer’s eyes, delays are simply a sign that the company doesn’t have its act together, because they don’t see what’s going on behind the scenes.
Mapping the customer’s experience and then assessing (qualitatively or quantitatively) how well you are delivering on your promise at each step is the true foundation for an internal launch—not emails and company newsletters. From these maps, you can then begin to focus on the high-priority touchpoints and ensure that employees who manage those touchpoints are trained in the brand, understand how to deliver it, and most importantly, have no obstacles in place that would prevent them from delivering. Think about the “friendly” service team mentioned above. Even if they didn’t have surly dispositions and they really did want to try to provide the friendliest service, they are incentivized to get off the phone quickly. As long as this what they are compensated for, this is what they’ll do, no matter how much brand training they’re exposed to. The key is to remove the obstacle and align compensation with desired brand-behaviors in order to keep the promises you’re making to customers.
When you are prepared to keep your brand promises at your highest priority touchpoints, only then should you start making the promise to the marketplace.
5. Develop a 5-year plan
Marketers often ask, “How long does it take to create a new brand?” The true answer is, if your strategy is bold enough (which it should be), it takes about three months to develop the strategy, and then it takes 3-5 years to implement it. Your plans need to consider the long haul—including aligning all of your touchpoints to deliver on the promise.
This means you have to find employees who share your brand values, recruit them, hire them, train them in a way that they know what is expected of them, and remove obstacles to their performance. It also means that you may have to redesign products or processes. You may have to create or dismantle certain infrastructures. You may have to eliminate and replace certain cultural norms within the organization. All of these things take time.
You will also need to measure your progress. You should be benchmarking and annually assessing whether your company is being increasingly associated with your brand promise, and whether that is driving preference and loyalty among your consumers. You should also benchmark and annually assess progress in delivering on the promise at key touchpoints—and then work with internal teams to develop methods to close the gap.
And lastly, you will need to continually evolve your brand to keep it fresh and relevant. This evolution may take the form of brand extensions, or fresh advertising campaigns, or an online experience that employs all the latest technology.
The reality is: Sustaining your brand is more important—and can be more challenging—than building it in the first place.
Starting a brand strategy project is an exciting time, full of potential for transforming a company. Considering that a brand is a promise that must be kept at each interaction provides a framework not only for developing the brand, but for assembling the right internal team. The brand promise must be true to your organization, and thus both internal and external points of view need to be explored and considered. You should not plan to launch the brand externally until you have fully prepared the organization to deliver on it at key touchpoints, and you should consider that the program doesn’t end after launch. It may take five years to fully align the organization to deliver on the promise. But doing all these things will ensure that your company is relevant to your customers, that they understand and experience the unique value that you provide, and that they will continue coming back to your company long after your 2007 brand strategy plan is a distant memory.