Whose Brand is it Anyway?

Top Brand Myths:

  • Brand is a Marketing job.
  • Brand is about your “look” – your logo,
    your colors, etc.
  • You build your Brand by advertising it
    (and spending lots of money)
  • A good Brand = a logo you see all the time

Top Brand Truths:

  • Behaviors communicate Brand.
  • Consistent behaviors develop Brand Value.
  • Brand Value builds Shareholder Value

An example:  Brand = Customer Care

If you want your company to be known for providing excellent customer service – having marketing do an advertising campaign with inspiring examples of great customer care will backfire if:

  • You have bottomless voice menus instead of people answering phones
  • You have sales reps or support staff that are not trained well enough to know how to serve customers
  • You have support processes which are hard to navigate, or punish the customer
  • You have a website that is slow, confusing, or does not easily accept feedback
  • You do not respond to customer feedback
  • You have annoying, complex, internally focused contract/licensing processes

Brand is not just a Marketing Job.

Another example: Brand = Innovation

If you want your company to be known for innovation, and you have marketing produce an exciting video that plays in your lobby, it will backfire if you:

  • Make people sit in old, ugly, or generally beige furniture, to watch the video.
  • Have an archaic process to greet and manage visitors to your company.
  • Do not make room in your budget for new initiatives and ideas that may or may not pay off.
  • Are not demonstrating new thinking in customer service, and communication processes.
  • Are not using the latest technologies and social media to gather the best thoughts & feedback from the rest of the world.
  • Do not have development programs in place to motivate your most talented and creative  employees.

Brand is not just a Marketing Job.

So what should you do?

CEO’s/Companies who want a strong Brand need to:

1. Make it a priority.  Realize it is the only thing your competition can’t eventually copy, and that it’s your most effective insurance for the execution of your strategy.

2. Explicitly connect your Brand and your strategy.  How you execute your strategy is as important and valuable as what you do.

3. Galvanize your team to stand for something – decide/define what the company really stands for.

4. Develop and commit to “brandable behaviors” to support it, for every function in the company, particularly those that touch the outside world in any way.

5. You need to involve employees across the company, and make sure you can sell it “inside” too – or you will never get the consistent behaviors necessary to build the Brand.

6. Incent and measure the whole organization to reinforce those behaviors, so they are consistent.

7. Remember it doesn’t need to cost a lot of money to build a strong Brand. (behaviors are free)

Don’t just delegate it to Marketing (and Marketing is not free!)

Marketing is just one voice in chorus across the whole company who needs to do its part to promote the Brand once it’s defined and committed.

But you can’t just market yourself into a strong brand, you need to behave it.

And you need to behave it consistently across the whole company.

  • Behaviors communicate Brand.
  • Consistent behaviors develop Brand value.
  • Brand value builds Shareholder value

Did I mention that Brand is not just a Marketing job?

More:

Building Your Company’s Brand

Building Your Personal Brand

If you’d like to receive updates from this blog in your email or RSS subscribe here.

You can find Patty at www.AzzarelloGroup.com, follow her on twitter or Facebook, or read her books RISE and MOVE.


Should I stay or should I go?
Don't Bury the Lead
© 2023 ALL MATERIALS COPYRIGHT AZZARELLO GROUP, INC. | CONTACT | PRIVACY