I continue to evolve the model originally presented in Brand & Talent – (P)urpose, (A)mbition, (Strategy) and (Proposition). The biggest shift is seeing this model as a Venn diagram, where you can focus on the areas where the big circles overlap in order to identify opportunities and challenges. Here’s the original model from Brand & Talent:

My evolved thinking explores the areas of overlap in more detail:

If you think about applying a simple lens as a way to apply and activate your brand against any of these elements – for example, determining audience, channel, message, experience – you’ll quickly discover why such a carefully integrated, consistent platform is needed. Even in this simplified view, there is plenty of complexity and potential conflict to navigate.

In most organizations, the conversation surrounding branding in itself can pose significant challenges and often takes at least three months and typically longer in a larger, complex global enterprise. Getting a leadership team from functions to go to market units to recruitment teams to corporate communications all aligned is no small feat. But once the framework has been populated, that’s actually only the beginning.

The next requirement is equally if not more challenging: Getting everyone in the organization with a role relating to delivering the talent or customer experience, and communicating and engaging with stakeholders internally and externally, to help co-create and then actually follow it.

Delivering your brand is as much about what you don’t do and say as it is about what you do say and do.

This means, more often than not, undertaking a ‘stop, continue/evolve, start’ exercise across critical business and communication processes and functions.

Friction Points

One of the key friction points in the exercise is, as you probably have guessed, is the overlap between brand and marketing activities (which are traditionally seen as customer and external stakeholder facing), and human resources activities (which are traditionally seen as future and present talent facing – both internal and external). It’s often a lack of clarity around the core idea, a culture of separating these activities or, at best working cross-functionally to align them. However, such activities typically solve short-term brand and talent marketing and communication requirements over a relatively short term. Over the longer-term, this separation almost inevitably leads to increasing fragmentation of messaging – creating legacy issues that can entrench perspectives and constrain your ability to build and defend brand value in the aggregate. Not to mention making management of your online assets a veritable nightmare.

It’s a difficult challenge for both functional marketing and HR perspectives. Typically, brand and marketing is seen to lack the expertise in talent management and the employee engagement insights and technical processes to be able to drive the best results. At the same time, human resources and talent acquisition and management experts are often seen to lack the clarity and business pragmatism required to simplify – or at least synthesize – external imperatives and strategic business drivers. This all-too-often often creates a stand off where each perspective struggles to find a common ground. This can lead to sub-optimizing the end result for both stakeholders: All too often the result is a compromise.

What also complicates the situation is that an industry has grown up around human resources and talent acquisition: “Employer branding” as a solution that provides an avenue for the talent side of the equation to create its own sub-set of rules, models, terms and both internal and external engagement efforts. It is an idea that is seductive and attractive, not least because it acts as a pressure valve to mitigate the friction between HR and marketing. With fast-moving, dynamic business environments and time pressure, it is not surprising that organizations “throw in the towel” and avoid conflict in order to get on with the job at hand – running a successful, sustainable operation.

Is Employer Branding The Right Approach Anymore?

The “employer branding” approach has served an important purpose during the previous decade; mitigating the tensions among functions and allowing a more thoughtful and robust approach to the increasingly critical challenge of attracting, recruiting, engaging, developing, retaining and eventually exiting the best possible talent for an organization. And it is still critical to be crystal clear on the employment (talent) value proposition aligned to the external value proposition and the core brand.

The risk is, despite the importance of having a clear, compelling, relevant, authentic and differentiating talent proposition, that is has too little connection or a clear line of sight to the overall brand. In some cases, the employment proposition can actually compete with, or even contradict, key elements of the customer brand positioning!

One Brand

Ultimately, an organization has only one brand. This is its reputation, in the aggregate, across all stakeholders.

For some stakeholders – in particular the ones who provide the investment for the organization to sustain itself, and the ones it needs to attract, motivate and retain in order to do that – there might be variations on the messaging, and slightly different perceptions of what the organization is, what it does, and what it stands for. And while there will be a degree of variation between, for example, the reputation of a fast-moving consumer goods company vs. an energy company vs. a professional services firm, there must be an overarching alignment of the brand for all stakeholders.

As someone who has been a long-time practitioner and proponent of employer branding, it strikes me that the evolution of employer branding has come full circle. It no longer seems that “traditional” employer branding approaches that have entered mainstream practice will advance the brand agenda, the talent agenda, or drive sustainable business growth at the pace and complexity of the disruptive, technology enabled world we live in.

Having helped to develop and drive successful employment value propositions for some of the world’s leading companies across sectors under the employer branding banner, that might come as a surprise. As a pioneer of connecting employer branding efforts to internal employee engagement and culture transformation efforts as well, however, it has become clear that the “cottage industry” of employer branding could now well be doing as much damage to brand equity as it is helping to create awareness and differentiation in various talent markets.

In short, market leaders have stopped thinking about “brand” as a marketing priority and “employer brand” as an HR and talent priority. They are of equal importance, they need to be aligned, and it should no longer be a sense of an uneasy alliance as it can often seem to be

The degree to which an employment value proposition aligns to the consumer brand and the corporate brand can be debated. For example, you wouldn’t dream of aligning the employment value proposition for someone working for a consumer packaged goods company selling chewing gum to the product brand proposition. However, you would certainly want the product brand proposition to be supportive of the corporate Purpose, Ambition, Strategy and Positioning. And you would want the employment value proposition aligned to the same thing. For a service organization – whether in hospitality or professional services – it is even more important for the employment value proposition to be closely aligned, since the brand experience is by and large delivered by people.

Looking at it from the opposite angle, how strange would it be for a company reliant on its people to deliver the brand experience to have radically different sets of values, attributes, and communications in the talent market?

You see it all the time, unfortunately; often because a new leader and/or agency has been called in to address a challenge. Before you know it, your people are juggling 20 different imperatives ranging from values to attributes to competencies to principles. It’s no wonder some of this stuff has earned a bad name with business leaders.

The conclusion is that it’s time to rethink the degree to which you invest resource in employer branding as a separate and distinct activity to customer branding. There is a distinction to be made between creating an impactful employment value proposition that can drive short, medium and long-term recruitment media (marketing and communications) campaigns – and creating what many might say is a “competing” brand due to functional silos. You want your employer brand to be woven into your brand; your reputation as an employer should be a core element of your reputation as an organization – not a separate set of attributes.

In short: you have one brand. Your future, current and past talent are a stakeholder group to a greater or lesser degree of comparable importance to your customer audience.

While you certainly want to modulate the messaging and engagement methodology for both audiences, it would be very inefficient to develop separate brand positionings and equity in different ‘brands’ for customer and talent audiences. Fewer brands are always less expensive and more efficient to build and defend than multiple brands.

In other words, maybe it’s time to “zag” while everyone else “zigs” as they hop merrily aboard the employer brandwaggon.

The Integrated Approach

The integrated model proposed here should demonstrate that its power lies in its overlapping nature. If properly developed, it should render “rogue” communications difficult to justify in both the brand/marketing and the HR/talent spaces, since both will have clearly marked propositions that are aligned to the Purpose, Ambition and Strategy.

As you can imagine, changing a small part of the Purpose, Ambition, Strategy or Proposition will force changes in other parts of the model – it is an adaptive system. So, for example, if the Strategy is amended to account for “Ensuring attraction and development of the best talent in the sector,” then:

• The Ambition may need to be amended to reflect the desire to become the most favorable employer
• The employment value proposition will need to ensure that it makes clear that only top-tier talent are suitable
• The Purpose will need to be considered in terms of its attractiveness to the best talent in the market.

The benefit of operating this model as a set of integrated moving parts is that if forces executives and leaders to ensure that the interests and objectives of the organization and its market – not specific elements within it – are at the heart of decisions.

Testing The Approach

If the overall process introduced via this evolved model is followed, it should prove relatively easy to test whether any communications and processes – in whole or in individual elements – are aligned to it as a core platform.

• You will have internal leadership, management and employee insight
• Customer and other stakeholder insight
• An audit of your own communication ecosystem – messages and channels – internally and externally
• A competitive analysis of both customer and talent markets
• A Purpose, Ambition, Strategy and Proposition set that has been tested and, ideally, co-created with these stakeholders
• Core message frameworks including proof points and reasons to believe for your key constituent groups
• A decision on positioning that is reflected in Customer and Employment value propositions

Any existing or new communication or process should be measured against and aligned to the P-A-S-P model. If there is not a fit or poor alignment, whether to proceed with the communication or process should be seriously debated.

Summary

Like any model, this proposed construct is only as good as the engagement that surrounds it and the intention of all participants to arrive at the best result for the organization.

In my experience, the model has proven to be immensely valuable as a framework for the conversation and debate — a “terminology neutral” container for a lot of existing content, and a strong tool for gaining leadership, management, employee and stakeholder buy in relating to a significant strategic refresh or repositioning exercise.

Contributed to Branding Strategy Insider by: Kevin Keohane, adapted from his book Brand and Talent 

The Blake Project Can Help: Please email us for more about our purpose, mission, vision and values and brand culture workshops.

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If you forget your audience, and if your audience – their desires, needs and preferences – are not at the heart of everything you communicate, your organization will never reach its full potential. It’s time to ask the hard (easy) questions, like:

• Do we really know what gets people out of bed in the morning?
• Do we know who people trust, where and to whom they turn to for the most up-to-date information?

It’s important to have intelligence about your audience – things you know, things you can assume, things you don’t know, things about similar audiences in similar situations. While we can talk a lot more about measurement, it’s important to note that audience intelligence isn’t just about employee surveys and focus groups. It’s OK to follow instincts and experience as well.

Data is necessary, but what makes it useful is what you do with it. Insight and judgement also matter (which can exist without data).

School Leavers, Graduates and Experiences Hires

How do you hire the best people who will deliver great results? There is no one size fits all solution, because these audiences are at different life stages and have different needs, requirements and priorities. There are also cultural factors that can have a tremendous impact; what South Americans seek in their careers is different from Europeans. We also now have three generations (soon to be four) in our workplaces, and while generational theory has its limitations, it’s still something we need to take into account.

With school leavers and graduates, what appeals is likely to be a combination of things: egalitarian culture, prestige, rapid career development, work-life balance, and “meaningful” work. With experienced hires, it’s likely to be seeing the results of their work and providing challenges and opportunities for personal development.

What motivates somebody to join your organization isn’t necessarily what will motivate them to stay. People’s needs and ambitions change over time, so you’ll need to take that into account.

Most research says the same thing. What people seek is:

• Following their passion,
• Making an impact,
• Doing interesting work with autonomy,
• Working with interesting people,
• Getting recognition, and
• Being rewarded.

If you are in a sector that is perceived as less attractive (say, retail) you’ll need to work hard to ensure that what you say brings to life what is, in reality, a challenging, fast-paced career where sharp people move ahead quickly. Many of the people who might thrive in your organization might never consider working in it; find out who and where they are.

Remember too that these people are human beings who consume a variety of media to find out information about you and your organization.

So don’t just rely on your careers site (although it is critically important), or job boards, or recruitment agencies. You’ll need to make sure you’re working PR channels, social media, word of mouth and other ways of enhancing your reputation as a place to work for all these audiences. Hiring head hunters, agencies and recruitment advertising might not be the only solution, either.

Key Audience: Leaders

Leaders are interested in delivering results. Not only improvements in business performance (objective), but also in how they are perceived (subjective/personal). Make sure that they can see how effective communication delivers both.

Clearly, leaders are a critical audience. They are often the public face of the organization externally. Internally, they set the tone in terms of attitude, performance and behavior for the entire organization. It’s a cliché, but a good one – great leaders walk the talk.

While it’s often assumed that good communication skills are a requirement to progress from management to leadership, in reality this is often not the case. (Some very successful leaders are appallingly poor communicators, usually because of this very assumption). Leaders need to be equipped to perform their employee communication roles, just as they need to be equipped to perform their many other roles (including external communication).

Make the case – critical to success with this audience is, of course, making the business case. It’s essential to ensure that leaders see employee communication as a value-creating investment, and not an optional expense. Be sure you are always equipped with the facts and data you need to support your communication efforts.

Employee engagement is about value creation both by and for employees.

Educate And Engage – another key approach is to ensure that leaders are engaged in crafting the communications within the organization. Given most leaders’ limited time, this can be extremely challenging. On the other hand, great leaders in some leading organizations typically dedicate 20 percent of their time (one day per week) to internal and employee communications.

Get Upstream – communication and engagement strategy can help shape and improve business, HR, change, and brand performance. The further downstream communicators are, the less likely they’ll be able to make an impact. This ensures communication creates value for the business, and doesn’t just move information around.

Systems Thinking – conventional wisdom seems to suggest specialization and a competence-driven approach to employee communications is essential. Nothing could be further from the truth. The emergence and gathering momentum of design thinking amply demonstrates that every other strategic and creative profession is moving in exactly the opposite direction.

We have entered an age of multi-specialism that has reduced the traditional technical skills of professional communicators to a hygiene factor. An increasingly complex and fast-moving world poses leadership challenges that deep functional communication expertise alone is ill-equipped to deal with. You need to be able to connect the dots.

In an increasingly complex, ambiguous, diverse, and unstable world, what counts is the ability to connect the dots. It’s not about becoming incrementally better at things you already do. It is about trying new approaches and employing a wider range of problem solving skills with reference to The whole system – not just the microcosm called internal communications.

So, while it has become a truism that leaders must walk the talk and practice what they preach, what is equally important is that they buy into and not only understand, but actively demonstrate and champion, your engagement effort.

If your leaders are saying one thing and doing another, your engagement effort will suffer.

Key Audience: Functional Heads

Even if it doesn’t go perfectly, there will be a lot less mess to clean up if you’ve worked across silos. (Plus, leaders love it when people consult each other without being told to.)

Few books on the topic address the importance of a key management and leadership group – functional leaders. Whether finance, marketing, HR, IT, facilities, corporate communications, while these people are “leaders” and “managers” they also need special consideration regarding their part of the organization.

It’s important to make sure that any communication with employees past, present and future takes into account what the input, effect and likely output might be on different parts of the organization. Since organizations are complex systems, it can be hard to precisely predict outcomes, but doing a bit of homework and engaging with the wider functional network is often the difference between success and embarrassment.

Don’t Assume They Aren’t Affected – it’s possible that what you plan to communicate about brand, HR, change or whatever, might have an impact on what the function is doing. It could be as simple as timing things to avoid information overload, or as complicated as re-thinking your approach based on valuable input from functional leads.

Educate And Engage – it never hurts to involve people in other Kingdoms to share ideas, approaches and information. You might learn something, and they might learn something (or even flatter you and steal your ideas).

Score Points – leadership loves it when people consult each other without being told to.

It seems blindingly obvious, but important programs can fail before launch because someone in a remote part of the organization wasn’t involved or consulted. Just ask.

Key Audience: Line Managers

Who is best placed to connect organizational and individual goals? Line managers. Who is least empowered, equipped and rewarded for communicating well? 

Clearly, line managers are a critical audience, too. They are often (though not always) the most trusted source of information to employees about the organization and what is happening in it. Like leaders, line managers need to be equipped to perform their employee communication and engagement role – from attraction and recruitment, through to career development and managing exits effectively. In high-performing organizations, line managers are typically equipped with regular training and materials to help them fulfill their role as key communicators and culture carriers within the organization.

Make It Easy – time-starved line managers know they need to communicate; often they don’t know what, when, why and how. Make it easy by providing consistent, credible, easy to use materials and content.

Empower Face-To-Face Approaches – line managers have the most face-to-face opportunities with employees, so make the maximum possible use of this approach with this audience.

Join It Up – help line managers understand, and equip them to articulate, how different strands in the organization’s strategy, from brand to vision to change to HR, fit into their day-to-day jobs. If they get it, chances are their people will also get it.

Most current communication research demonstrates that the most important and trusted communicator to employees is the line manager. Engagement efforts should include this group not only as an audience to inform, but a group to equip and empower with the tools to ensure employees can make the engagement effort relevant to their part of the business and their day-to-day jobs.

Equip, empower, recognize and reward good communication by managers.

Key Audience: Employees

Do yourself a favor: forget push vs. pull, top-down vs. bottom-up vs. peer-to-peer models of communication. What should you be doing? All of them.

Getting employee communication right is part art and part science. It’s easy to do it very badly. With painstaking effort, it can be done in a depressingly average way.

It’s also easy to do it really well. But it still takes effort. If you remember what gets people out of bed in the morning, you’re half way there.

Someone once said, “People want to do a good job. They don’t go to work to be disengaged and have a bad attitude. That’s something we do to them, day after day, in the way me manage them and communicate with them.”

A lot of lip service is given to “two-way communication” versus “top-down” communication versus “bottom-up” communication. Guess what? All three are needed.

• How employees interact with each other and with your stakeholders has a massive impact on the performance of your organization.
• How you engage and communicate effectively with employees is driven by their needs, not your needs.
• It’s never been easier to talk with employees and get them talking.

Employees want to do a good job. It’s usually a matter of making sure you are getting the right information to them in the right way at the right time. This means thinking about what’s important to them, not what’s important to you.

Most research in employee engagement indicates that at any given time, only about 1/3 of employees are actively “engaged” in their jobs and their organizations.

The remaining 2/3 are either not actively engaged, or worse, could even be actively pissed off at you and say mean things to their friends about you whenever they can. Not good for your reputation.

Making sure that the engagement effort provides a clear and compelling case is important, but equally important is making sure that employees understand what the effort means to the organization, their part of the organization, their team and their own role on a very real, day to day basis. It’s also about what is provided in return, too.

Engaging people happens within a complex system. A change in one part of the system has effects on other parts. Make sure they are interconnected.

Contributed to Branding Strategy Insider by: Kevin Keohane, adapted from his book Brand and Talent 

The Blake Project Can Help: Please email us for more about our purpose, mission, vision and values and brand culture workshops.

Branding Strategy Insider is a service of The Blake Project: A strategic brand consultancy specializing in Brand Research, Brand Strategy, Brand Growth and Brand Education

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So of course, most smart marketers ensure that any product, service or experience that their organizations deliver to their markets has been thoroughly filtered through the brand lens. The goal is that not only is it visually and verbally in lockstep with the brand standards, but the attributes of the brand are also woven in to all communications and every moment of interaction with a customer, employee or candidate, partner, supplier or other stakeholder.

This is done using brand as a core tool informing answers to some fundamental, critical questions about products and services.

And this is where the structural elements of go-to-market strategy might well be a smart set of ideas to bring into your brand development, strategy and application portfolio of tools.

Flipping The Lens Of Brand And Go-To-Market Strategy

Often, go-to-market strategy is a technical exercise rooted in the sales organization, aiming to ensure that a range of key considerations and issues have been addressed in bringing a value proposition to customers and creating the right experience. Go-to-market strategy typically addresses some key questions:

• What markets do we pursue?
• Which customers do we target?
• Which channels fit with how our customers buy?
• How do our offerings fit with our markets and channels?
• What is our unique value proposition to each target customer?

Those are the basics; a robust go-to-market approach can go much deeper. Bain proposes 65 best practices across commercial system design, sales and channel effectiveness, product / portfolio, marketing effectiveness, commercial operating model and pricing.

Clearly, these issues go beyond the purview of marketing and into sales, operating model, and other areas of your business.

But regardless of how well a brand (and its management practice) is ingrained into the organization, brand tends to live at a level above specific go-to-market strategies and product / service messaging. In practice, this means that brand shapes and defines how the product and service is experienced in the marketplace. An organization will define its market and customer segments to ensure that it is exploiting the right operational and communication channels to match customer behaviors and best express the value proposition for a product / service. Brand can and should play a role in helping a leadership team define what markets should be served with what products and services; but significantly it should also be a tool to make sure that the product and service is expressed in line with a broader belief system, informing the kinds of experiences created around the product / service.

In other words, typically speaking, a business has a product or service that it believes can win in the marketplace based on its go-to-market strategy, and the brand provides a lens through which the product or service is best positioned and projected into the marketplace across all touch points and customer moments.

As brand strategy and business strategy start working together, the resulting practices begin to bring brand managers closer to and deeper into workflow and planning around innovation, service development, business model and operations. It’s therefore worth thinking about bringing go-to-market efforts into the brand strategy, development and activation realm — or at least bringing some go-to-market thinking into the brand world.

What if we were to look at a brand as a product / service rather than the more common approach of branding a product / service? Today the type of structured discipline I’m talking about is often applied only to the visual side of a brand launch. (A new logo means new business cards and truck decals across the company, etc.) But how often do you see companies reviewing and refreshing every piece of existing website content, every office space, every legacy pricing model, and every recruitment and onboarding asset based on a new verbal brand platform? And how often is a brand launch tied to specific KPI goals across business units?

So as brand strategy and business strategy become more tightly intertwined and mutually dependent — and the resulting practices begin to bring brand managers closer to and deeper into workflow and planning around innovation, service development, business model and operations — I believe that a more formal go-to-market approach will become crucial to the successful development and activation of brand strategy.

Brand As Product / Service

Admittedly, in theory this idea might appear to be pretty nebulous. In practice, however, brand fundamentals can benefit by being better informed by the more robust, tangible and operational “nuts and bolts” criteria and questions that typical go-to-market development offers.

Interestingly enough, in researching this article the vast majority of online resources focus on highly operational and tangible aspects of go-to-market: highly technical segmentation, features and benefits, pricing decisions, operating models, sales and distribution channels. It was on Wikipedia where we found the broadest, most holistic perspective on go-to-market strategy. Wikipedia suggests seven Ps of go-to-market success (augmenting the 4 Ps some of us were steeped in at school):

• Product — including design, technology, usability, usefulness, value, quality, brand and warranty.
• Place — including retail, wholesale, local-export and internet.
• Price — including penetration strategy, cost-plus, loss leader, premium and opex vs. capex (e.g., XaaS).
• Promotion — including advertising, recommendations, special offers / trial, gifts and user testing.
• People — including founders, employees, culture and customer service.
• Process — including service delivery, complaints and response time.
• Physical evidence — including user stories, recommendations, office premises and performance / results.

“Brand” appears as a single point under “product” in this model. But I’d argue that your brand should touch and inform all of these decisions and many more (including the 65 best practices from Bain) as you bring a product or service to market.

Moreover, you could use all of these lenses as a way to help ensure that your brand itself is brought to market in a consistent, clear, impactful and sustainable manner, and that it drives tangible results across your suite of offerings and your business as a whole. What if your brand development process addresses each of these factors, making them explicitly referenced parts of your guidelines, standards and overall brand management operation?

What Next?

Many advanced brand practitioners already bring this thinking to the table. Just the same, here are three suggestions for where to take this thinking next:

1. Chicken, Or Egg?
Ask yourself (and be honest): “Does brand play a role in every one of my go-to-market conversations and processes, or is it brought in at a later stage to make sure everything is ‘aligned’? Would my company’s performance and competitiveness be improved if brand thinking were present earlier?”

2. Incubator
Can your brand as a go-to-market asset actually act as the starting point for R&D, innovation and product / service development conversations? For strategy reviews? HR transformations? A robust go-to-marketesque process operated through the brand lens might well be a way to unleash disruptive thinking and breakthrough ideas for innovation and improvement.

3. Permeable Membranes
Brand, marketing, sales, service: typically these operate in distinct silos. Many organizations struggle to cross-fertilize and integrate thinking, practices and ideas across these business units in ways that deliver seamlessly in the market. Could go-to-market thinking help dissolve barriers in ways that bring your brand promise to reality both internally and externally? And could it be a useful discipline to apply to other aspects of organizational design and development, business model evolution, and operations?

At The Blake Project we are helping clients from around the world, in all stages of development, redefine and articulate what makes them competitive at critical moments of change with our Go To Market Operating System. Please email us to learn how we can help you compete differently.

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… Where another customer support person promptly asks you for the exact same information. Again.

This scenario plays out in similar ways millions of times every day, and it is arguably destroying brand value almost as fast — or faster — than that value is being created. Bots might be picking up some of the load (and doing a fine job of it, in many instances). But today’s consumers increasingly expect consistency from the brands they trust and are loyal to, based on their experiences with brands who do it best.

Conventional wisdom has always been that the stronger the customer’s loyalty, the greater the relationship’s resilience to a service failure. But those buffers are growing thinner by the minute. If I can get my smartphone, tablet and desktop to share my data seamlessly with my house in a few clicks (from my music streaming to my thermostat to my coffee maker), I’m expecting your enterprise-level IT investment to manage the same kind of experience securely, protecting my privacy too.

Andy Main, head of Deloitte Digital, makes the point that brands need to think about moments (“touchpoints” in the old currency) rather than traditional customer journeys, and that feels like a smart lens to apply here. In today’s always-connected, instant-gratification consumer landscape, brands can’t act like Dr. Jekyll during “the sale” and then behave like Mr. Hyde when it’s “customer service” fix-the-problem time.

I’d argue that an intimate understanding of customer experience scenarios across a raft of personas and brand interactions is incredibly valuable for any business as it seeks to better align the experience it delivers.

And at the same time, it’s worth remembering that customers don’t see themselves as intrepid voyagers in some carefully curated expedition called a “customer journey.” They have needs to fulfill and problems to solve at any given moment. And while Main’s “moments” are certainly a more evolved version of the traditional touchpoint, the key point is that the consumer should not be victim to your brand’s internal silos and workflows.

Regardless of internal ownership of particular customer interactions, if your organization is not set up to deliver a consistent, credible, on-brand experience, someone else will find a way to do so.

It’s All About The Silos

For similar reasons, I wrote about the dreaded silo in “The Talent Journey” (2010) and “Brand & Talent” (2014) in relation to both the candidate / employee experience and the customer experience. We come back to the principle that your brand and how you manage it goes far beyond the purview of the CMO and your “head of brand.” You may think about your operations in terms of the discreet processes and challenges of supply chain management, human resources, finance, IT, sales, marketing, support and so on. But from the customer perspective, if any of those seams are visible — and especially if any of those internal organizational lines become bumps in the customer’s road — your silo(s) has a brand problem that your entire organization shares.

Recent research from Inviqa, a digital agency, supports this. Its 2017 study found that 68 percent of digital managers and 42 percent of executives believe silos are the biggest internal barrier to the transformation needed to deliver effective customer experiences.

McKinsey closes the loop with findings that suggest consistency across the entire customer journey (including emotional and communication consistency) is “35 percent more predictive of customer satisfaction and 32 percent more predictive of customer churn than how a business performs at specific touchpoints.” That’s probably why organizations that are more agile than their competitors seem to thrive. Their silos are inherently more pliable, able to react and even more able to predict how and what to change with an alacrity that more traditional and inflexible structures can’t emulate.

What To Do About It

One the one hand, all of this is really as simple as foundational customer-centric thinking that most of us are familiar with and that many other commentators have expressed eloquently elsewhere. On the other hand, the convergence of technology, automation, data, analytics and consumer expectations is taking customer experience-led brand delivery out of the “design thinking” hothouse and planting it squarely in the penthouse boardroom.

There’s no better time to start addressing this than now — and with haste. To do so, Lynn Hunsaker of ClearAction identifies ten types of silos to consider:

• Organization silos
• System silos
• Channel silos
• Data silos
• Process silos
• Vision silos
• Assumption silos
• Goal silos
• Metrics silos
• Handoff silos

Wherever your business does not have a shared way to align data, process, technology, goals, metrics and KPIs — and an explicitly shared vision of what the brand experience should be — you create the potential for customer service and brand experience failures that cost you customers, reputation and money.

The key? Prioritize the silos that have the biggest impact on the customer at critical moments. You likely can’t address them all at once. By picking the low-hanging fruit first you can not only have an immediate impact, you can in the process begin to shift mindsets within your organization, preparing your teams for the more vexing silo-busting challenges that lie ahead.

Tech consultancy Accenture recommends four focus areas for CMOs to consider in order to create the cross-C-suite collaboration needed to answer the customer experience consistency riddle:

• Emphasize customer obsession instead of campaign creation.
• Lead the collaboration that unites brand and experience.
• Align your tech strategy with your customer outcomes.
• Be an innovation incubator.

Some of this might sound like so much consultant-speak. But again, you probably can look back to your own experiences as a customer to see the truth in it. The brands that seem to “get” our needs right from our first engagements are often the ones that focused on the customer and innovated past the structural hurdles that we see plaguing their competition. And the brands that (appear to) “get us” are the ones that earn our instant affinity.

The Bottom Line

Essentially, all of this adds up to a simple truth: You have a brand whether you like it or not, and every aspect of your organization plays some role in growing that brand or diminishing that brand. If ever there’s been a time where brand management should be seen as living outside the marketing department, it’s now.

I’d love to hear your thoughts. Let’s continue the conversation.

Contributed to Branding Strategy Insider by: Kevin Keohane, director of brand and talent strategy, PartnersCreative

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“If this business were split up, I would give you the land and bricks and mortar, and I would take the brands and trademarks, and I would fare better than you.” ~ John Stuart, Chairman of the Quaker Oats Company

While great brands are often household names with substantial brand-building budgets — and score high in “sex appeal” —the real secret behind a great brand is that it does something very simple. Great brands are single-minded and clear about what they promise. Great brands then deliver on that promise.

The implication is that any organization can create a great brand, regardless of its size and its resources. In fact, the larger, more complex and global an organization is, the harder it becomes to stay true to knowing what that promise is, and ensuring its delivery.

When you look at a list of “great brands” that have significant emotional and financial value, invariably you will see businesses that are crystal clear on delivering on their promise and unwavering in their focus on it. The phrase “ruthless consistency” applies. When these brands falter, it is almost always when they lose focus on their promise and ensuring its delivery.

If brands that stand the test of time establish emotional and financial value, how can they assess and measure that value? And if the following could be seen as some foundation, the question is—to what degree have recent advances in analytics, AI, and social media been accounted for in the quest for getting an accurate and relevant read on the value of a brand?

Here is a brief “brand valuation 101” primer:

Brands have financial value — depending on your industry, anywhere from 10 percent to upward of 50 percent or more of the value of the enterprise. The London Stock Exchange endorsed the concept of brand valuation in 1989 by allowing the inclusion of intangible assets when seeking shareholder approval in acquisitions. Brands will be major drivers of corporate value in the 21st century — investors and business leaders have recognized this. Financial managers and planners are increasingly using brand equity tracking models to facilitate business planning.

There are many approaches to brand valuation, here are 6:

1. Assessing Attributes

This subjective means of assessment assigns values to attributes such as satisfaction, loyalty, awareness and market share that are either tracked separately or weighted according to industry. Young & Rubicam has also developed a “Brand Asset Valuator” — an attribute assessment approach based on differentiation, relevance, esteem and knowledge. Other approaches no doubt exist, but the concept remains the same. Such methods often use an assigned value, rather than a measured value, and thus are subject to challenge.

2. Brand Equity

This approach combines three elements — effective market share, the sum of market shares in all segments, weighted by each segment’s proportion of total sales; relative price, a ratio of the price of goods sold under a given brand, divided by the average price of comparable goods in the market; and durability, the percentage of customers who will buy that brand in the following year.

3. Brand Valuation

Brand valuation methods seek to take the most robust financial data available to the model in order to arrive at a plausible valuation of a brand. While these methods are also subject to challenge, they at least strive to create an objective-as-possible marker or view of a brand’s strength.

4. Algorithmic

WPP performs an annual valuation published as “The Brand Z Top 100 Most Valuable Brands” report. This uses a company’s financial data as well as market dynamics and an assessment of the role of a brand in income generation, and then forecasts the future on the basis of brand strength and risk. There are other similar “blended” formulas that can be developed or used to assess what is, through a particular lens, most important in a brand.

5. Royalty Relief

Brand Finance publishes its own Global 500 study annually using a “royalty relief” approach that calculates the net present value of the hypothetical royalty payments an organization would receive if it licensed its brand to a third party.

6. Net Promoter Score

A popular measure is “net promoter score” or NPS. NPS is a metric developed by Fred Reichheld, Bain & Company, and Satmetrix. Its power is its simplicity. Customers are asked “How likely are you to recommend company/brand/product X to a friend/colleague/relative?” and score their response from 0 to 10. “Promoters” give a 9 or 10 score, “passives” a 7 or 8, and “detractors” a 0 to 6 score. The NPS score is the percentage of promoters less the percentage of detractors, and ranges from −100 to +100.

All of these methods have strengths and weaknesses, but the important thing is to establish an organization’s brand as an intangible asset that is worth a significant amount of money — and it should be respected and managed accordingly.

What’s Next?

This is a high-level summary, but as measurability continues to emerge, it’s interesting to think about how brand value can be assessed in the age of a “fourth industrial revolution.” I’d suggest that in addition to the above approaches, brand value may need to reflect social media sentiment, online reviews and customer experience sentiment — perhaps measured and reported in near real time.

Where is brand valuation headed? Does data, AI, automation, analytics, social media have a role to play? I believe this topic has not had ample discussion. What do you think? Let’s continue the conversation.

Contributed to Branding Strategy Insider by: Kevin Keohane, director of brand and talent strategy, PartnersCreative

The Blake Project Can Help: Discover Your Competitive Advantage With Brand Equity Measurement

Branding Strategy Insider is a service of The Blake Project: A strategic brand consultancy specializing in Brand Research, Brand Strategy, Brand Growth and Brand Education

FREE Publications And Resources For Marketers