The Origin of Ideas

The Strength Of A Brand Begins From Within.

I know we have all seen it, many times, the organization that prides itself on delivering a great product or service to market and extols the virtues of understanding their brand.  But they have no idea why the market is confused by their brand and why they cannot gain market share from the 1000lb goliath brand.

You have to wonder why organizations that require 1-3% annual growth want to pick a fight with an organization that has out branded them at every point.

That is a topic for another blog.

The true strength of a brand starts from within the walls of your own organization. Because by definition, a brand is the proprietary visual, emotional, rational and cultural image that you associate with a company, product or service, one should be cognoscente of the fact that this applies to everyone and everything.  Who you are internally is what you become externally.

Here are 10 items you should consider:

1.    How many true brand champions are in and among the ranks of your company? For that matter, how many brand champions do you have in the C-suite?

2.    Does everyone in the organization understand the company’s true objectives? (Being profitable and selling more is a given).

3.    Do all of the divisions understand the value their counterparts bring to the organization? And do they communicate?

4.    Do employees look at each other as a potential resource or as an impediment or worse yet, an adversary?

5.    Do I, hire wisely by looking for people who believe in brand.

6.    Do I, as an executive in this company, promote and foster a culture conducive to developing brand believers or does everyone come to work and think of this place as a job?

7.    Does everybody I work with understand WHY we exist as a company?

8.    Do I understand that the most successful companies are managed as brands?

9.    How often do I use the word “We” and not “I”?

10.  Am I a brand champion?

It is our job as a CMO to help them reach their highest potential.

Make it so.

Ray

Looking Inside In Order To Manifest The Brand Outside.

Many times we have been asked, “What can you do for our brand, we need some help” That question opens up a waterfall of questions and opportunities. Many times highly talented and very astute brand champions ask us that question. These people have the skill set to push any brand anywhere they would like it to go.

In our industry we live in a world of intangible and most people in the C-Suite come from backgrounds as contrary to ours as black is to white. As marketing professionals we can sit in a room and develop brilliant strategies, but getting complete by in, that is another question. Where it all falls apart is in our ability to do two things:

1. Communicate with our coworkers in the C-suite in a fashion they are accustom, in a vernacular they can understand, one that is outside the world of abstraction.

2. Build a consensus, a baseline understanding of the brand within the entire organization before moving forward to solve any problems. Many times organizations become so involved with what they do on a day-to-day basis that they forget the core goal or philosophy of the company. It is our job, our responsibility, to keep the entire organization in touch with the brand. We understand brand management that is what we do. While others are doing what they do best, it is our responsibility to manage, defend, and migrate our brand internally before we can ever give flight to the external brand, let alone a migration. Take time to develop a communication bridge with all the people in your company who need to better understand what you do and why you do it. Make sure they see value in what you do by showing them how it brings greater value to what they do. Create an environment of passive collaboration allowing everyone to feel they can contribute and thus obtaining ongoing buy-in from the team.

The more the C-Suite understands the power of what marketing can do for them the more value they will see in the power of you.  After all we are the masters of communications.

Authenticity As A Reason For “WHY”

I just completed reading an article written for the current McKinsey Quarterly.

http://bit.ly/cpEqEo

It concluded with the following:
Word-of-mouth marketing through social networks could emerge as an important tool in the marketer’s arsenal. That will depend on whether marketers can tame the fundamentally unpredictable and serendipitous nature of word of mouth without losing what makes it so valuable in the first place—its authenticity.

The single most important word in the entire paragraph is “authenticity”

Social Media is all-the-buzz, I get that. But if you listen carefully and tune out the buzz you will hear something very important. The voices of the consumer. The marketing and advertising industry could be learning something about the new age of consumers. Consumers have spoken, and will continue to speak. What they have said is, find a better way to communicate with us using less hype and more authenticity. Tell us the core reason why we should buy a product or service from one of your clients.

If the consumer is asking companies to be more authentic then maybe we need to apply our skills as communication professionals and inspire our clients to better understand their “Why”. The real reason a company exists is rarely articulated, or for that matter is rarely known. If a company does not understand their “Why” then how will they ever offer a genuine reason for a consumer to truly believe they are engaged in an authentic relationship.

A Tactical Tool in Our Quiver of Expertise.

A point of contact is a point of influence. How we choose to help others manage that is our responsibility.

In a time when resources are scarce for many companies, I have found many organizations looking for the perfect solution to marketing and communications, the one source that will lead the consumer to their product or service. Right or wrong this is what companies are thinking. Where as, Social Media is a new venue that allows clients to reach a vertical client base, it should not be considered as the end-all tactic. I fully believe in Social Media as one of many tactics that are necessary when appropriately filtering a brand through the marketplace. What makes Social Media so attractive? It is a fresh idea/medium with a low cost threshold to implement and manage AND companies are looking for new solutions. Once all the hype over Social Media dies down, it will remain an essential tool in the vast realm of marketing and communications.

Most importantly, we are experiencing a shift in how people communicate and how they share information. Social Media is marketing communications by the people for the people. So, be sure your marketing communications platform looks at the seismic shift in consumer behavior before casting final judgment on the tactic of Social Media.

What are your thoughts?

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