People Create The Brand

A few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of working with my president, of Critical Mass, on a presentation around internal branding. I felt it was such an essential topic, especially since the people behind the brand create the brand, that I thought I should write a post on it!

I have referred to the importance of having a strong internal understanding and belief in the organization’s brand in a few of my previous posts. However, I have never gone into depth of what this entails.

All great brands are centered around a guiding purpose, which is an audacious idea/dream/goal. Take for example MGM, whose purpose is to be the hub of entertainment and buzz, or Google, whose goal is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and usable, or Unilever who aims to add vitality to everyone’s life, and the list could go on! But the point is having a strong and meaningful purpose gives the organization a compass to focus its efforts on accomplishing its audacious idea/dream/goal on a daily basis.

However, I read, awhile back, in the Harvard Business Review, that a whopping 95% of company’s employees don’t understand or know their organization’s strategy! This indicates that many organizations have a hard time communicating its purpose throughout the organization, which is devastating considering that the people are the one’s who drive the organization forward and, therefore, influence the market’s perceptions of the brand. And when I refer to “the people of the organization”, I mean everyone - finance, marketing, operations, you name it - everyone in an organization should reflect the brand!

So, I have put together 5 key principles for internal branding

1. The brand must be meaningful to its employees:

If the employees are not inspired by the brand’s purpose, they will have a hard time making the brand a reality for its customers. What I mean by this, is the products, services and any other actions taken by the organization won’t accurately represent the brand as it had intended.

So, the brand purpose should be stated in a motivational tone that inspires and excites its employees, so they feel they are contributing to the greater good, rather than just the bottom line.

2. Make the brand purpose tangible

This means the brand must be communicated internally in a way that employees can easily apply it to their everyday work. It’s one thing to communicate a highly motivational purpose to get everyone excited about what they are doing, but it’s equally important to put it into terms of what this means on a daily basis.

Google’s 10 Things is a great example of this. It communicates what their employees should take into consideration when working at Google - i.e. “Focus on the user and all else will follow”, etc. This helps employees know when they are on the right track with satisfying the overall brand purpose!

3. Avoid prescribing the brand

If the brand feels too forced, employees will resist it. So, instead, show employees how they are responsible for the brand & let them interpret the purpose as they see it.

Southwest Airlines empowers its managers and front-line staff to act as problem solvers to satisfy the customer on the spot if an issue arises.

The same goes for Nordstrom, who communicates its #1 goal, to provide outstanding service, to new employees, followed by its one and only rule - use your good judgment in all situations. This empowers its customers to do the right thing and interpret outstanding service as they see fit

4. Reward those who live the brand

It’s important to build the brand into key performance indicators that employees are measured on. This provides an extra incentive to act according to the brand. In fact, when people have done an outstanding job of living the brand, it’s essential to reward them publicly, so others can learn what it takes to live the brand from the top performers.

3M, whose purpose is to create innovative solutions to real human problems, has a number of programs designed to encourage staff to innovate, such as the “Golden Step” awards which are granted to those responsible for a successful new business venture. This is designed to help stimulate internal entrepreneurship & risk taking. They also have the “Carlton Society” whose members are selected in recognition for their outstanding and original contributions to 3M. This program helps encourage further development and innovation for the organization.

5. Living the brand starts at recruitment

Internal branding, although exemplified by top management, it should be grounded in recruitment, on-boarding & training. This ensures the brand hires those who are easily motivated by the brand purpose and who share common values, along with retaining those who continually live up to the brand and deliver on its promise.

Southwest Airlines does a great job at this. In fact, during recruitment, they have potential employees role play to help them find people with the right “spirit”. They hire for attitude and train for skills. This allows them to quickly spot those who will positively add to their reputation and long-term success.

Southwest also promotes from within. This ensures that those who move up through the organization have a thorough understanding of the brand’s purpose and know how to deliver it. In fact, they ensure everyone understands the role of each employee and how it contributes to the company.

These 5 principles are a great start to building a strong internal brand! So now, let’s start reducing that percentage of employees who don’t understand or know the organization’s goals!

Rebranding Done Right & Wrong

Over the last little while 2 rebrand initiatives caught my attention. One impressed me & the other left me with questions.

The one that impressed me was Reebok! For so long, Reebok seemed to be struggling to find its place among the heavy hitters, like Nike & Adidas. In fact, prior to this rebrand, or shall I say reebrand, Reebok was competing on price offering steep discounts to retailers impacting their revenue and cheapening the brand!

But, I think they have finally found their place!

With Nike owning authentic athletic performance (if you have a body you're an athlete) and Adidas representing reaching & smashing your goals, there's no one owning the fun of sports.

The new positioning allows Reebok to stand tall, differentiated from the rest as the athletic brand that stands for the fun of sports!

I love it! It's purposeful, simple, unique and motivating. Plus it's a place Nike & Adidas will never go, and if they did, it would be so off brand that it would be a short-sighted mistake on their part! This new positioning really gives something consumers can connect with!

Best of all, Reebok is innovating new products, like the Easytone, which helps you tone your butt while doing everyday activities, and ZigTech (pictured above), which is an innovative shoe technology that transfers energy from the heel to the front of the foot. It is products like these that begin to substantiate Reebok's new positioning! I mean what's the point of rebranding if you have nothing to show for it and prove that you are changing like the repositioning implies!

To top it off, it's working! Sales rose 4% in North America as a response to this rebranding effort. This is Reebok's largest sales increase in 4 years! It has even been able to capture a 1.1 point increase, to 3.7%, in market share in the last quarter since its low of 2.6%.

I'm excited to see what else Reebok does with their new positioning to set it in stone and really own the fun of sports!

Ok, so the brand that threw me through a loop was Comcast! They have decided to rename all their services Xfinity, while keeping the company named Comcast. Best of all they are not, and I repeat NOT, launching any improvements/changes/etc. to their services except for the name.

In fact, I read on the Comcast blog that "XFINITY represents the future of our company and it’s a promise to customers that we’ll keep innovating". It's a promise - with this launch it seems like an empty promise. Where are the plans for innovation, if there are none coming out with the name? And more channels don't count.

Why change the name at all if people already know who Comcast is? Sure there may have been some hiccups with a viral video of a Comcast technician napping on a customer's couch, but now with changing the name it seems like Comcast is trying to hide something, which only weakens the brand value further leaving customers questioning their trust for Comcast.

When you go to rebrand your organization/product/service, make sure you have a good reason! Reebok had a good reason - our brand is not driving demand which is impacting our margins - okay time for a rebrand! But they didn't go as far as Comcast by renaming all its existing shoes with the promise they will get better in the future! Rather, they invested in innovation and developed new porducts that substantiate its new brand purpose.

Xfinity doesn't even have a purpose guiding it other than innovation - does this mean Comcast wasn't already innovating? They should have considered the rationale behind the new name, how will it improve the business, and how will they change their service offering to make that improvement?

In fact, when I was looking for an Xfinity logo for this post, I came across this consumer generated Xfinity "ad":

This is very telling of the consumer response of this pitiful and meaningless rebrand. Even Verizon is making a point to acknowledge how silly this undertaking by Comcast is:

So, I recommend that if you are thinking of rebranding, do like Reebok. Have purpose behind your rebrand. Make it meaningful and relevant to your customers through innovation and/or improvement. This begins to prove your commitment to the rebrand establishing trust. Don't just do it for the sake of change, or you risk confusing consumers resulting in a devalued brand!

Proud To Be Canadian!

Note: Image from Flickr

Back in 2003, the summer before I started university, I went to Spain to continue studying Spanish. For some reason, on this trip more than any other I had been on before, every time I mentioned I was from Canada someone would ask me a crazy question like, “Do you have a dog sled?” or “You use the American Dollar, right?”. I had heard rumors about these obscure questions before, but never was I asked one directly until this point.

It was on this trip, I started thinking about branding, not directly of course, but I couldn’t help but think, “Wow - no one knows anything about my country, other than we’re not American”. But then I couldn’t help but think, we, Canadians, don’t really know who we are either.

Most people in Canada are new to the country, or their parents and/or grandparents were born somewhere else. In fact, I have met few people whose families have been in Canada for generations. So with shallow roots, comes a shallow understanding of what it means to be Canadian.

It has felt like for years Canada has defined itself on what it is not! In fact, the first product brand to truly represent Canada was started by a couple of Americans. That brand was Roots. The apparel chain whose iconic beaver adorns its logo. So not even a Canadian was able to personify Canada, rather it came from two guys south of the border!

Maybe much of what Canada has stood for: Royal Mounted Police, Beavers, Maple, Smoked Salmon, Moose, Poutine, Beer, Plaid, etc. became too much of a cliche and rather then embracing who we are, we entered in an identity crisis hoping we could find something ‘cooler’ to be. But as we all know being cool is an elusive thing that can’t be attained, rather it just happens. Therefore, being authentic and honest about who you are is so much more important when growing brand perceptions.

So that’s why I was so impressed with the effect the Vancouver 2010 Olympics had on the Canadian brand as a whole! Finally, we embraced who we are: fun loving people, who like to wear plaid & jeans while eating poutine and enjoying a beer with friends, never taking ourselves too seriously!

For the first time, I saw our country express strong pride for our quirkiness, our ability too apologize too much and our hidden love for plaid (ok - maybe that one is just me)!

Note: Image from Aritzia.com

All the Canadian retailers, like Aritzia, Lululemon & The Bay, really pulled out all the stops and began to define Canadian style, and what’s best about it, everyone wanted a piece of it! Proving that people wanted to advertise their national pride - and to be clear we are not the type of country were people normally express their pride for fear of being rude or too obnoxious! But at this olympics we managed to show our pride in our way!

In all the television segments being broadcasted, stories of our athletes & pictures of the people in Vancouver, I finally saw a country come together and be Canadian for what it is rather than what it isn’t!

I hope this pride and understanding of what it means to be Canadian doesn’t disappear, because, as the first criteria in Saffron’s City Brand Criteria mentions, the pride & personality of the local people affect everything about the visitor’s experience in that place. Meaning, if Canadians are proud to be Canadian, the local atmosphere will be much more uplifting and exciting for visitors, because the locals will be excited to share their culture and country with others. It’s very similar to thinking about an organization - if the employees don’t believe in the product they are creating or selling, how can anyone else!

So, thank you Vancouver for a wonderful Olympics, and to all the countries who came and helped make the event what it was!

Note: Image from Flickr

Here's a great video essay by Stephen Brunt that captures the rise in Canadian pride:

Delivering Brand Value When Your Customers Need It Most

Note: Image from Apple.com

Recently, I read an Accenture report on post-recession consumer behavior, called The Road to Recovery. Overall, the report found consumers to be unsatisfied, with low brand loyalty, demanding brands to meet steep expectations for less.

Delivering on your brand promise couldn’t be more important than it is today!

Consumers are more mindful of their spending & are allocating dollars to items with the most perceived value - items they feel are special to them. For instance, I will save on toothpaste, and spend money on a good camera because capturing memories is essential to me OR I will buy a mac, which may cost more, over a PC because I trust the brand and want to be associated with it.

Today, brands need to create, reconfirm or prove their value to consumers to maintain demand. In addition, they must be consistent & transparent with their actions, when proving value, to earn or maintain loyalty.

An interesting trend that is emerging, mostly from the explosion of mobile app popularity, is the idea of Brand Utility – meaning a brand is providing additional experiences/touch points to aid consumers in a time of need that is relevant to the brand’s skills and purpose!
Take for example ING, who created a mobile app last January that helps customers find the closest ING ATM. This uses something called augmented reality, where it uses your camera phone and GPS to show you where you are, and where you need to go to find an ATM. Very helpful when travelling and need to find a bank. Similarly, last year, we developed an Ale finder to help Budweiser fans find its latest beer: Budweiser American Ale.

We’re also seeing other versions of brand utility with companies like Air Canada, who launched an app that allows you to check-in while you’re on the go. It also sends you updates regarding if your flight is on time or not!

Even New York City held an Apps contest to develop mobile apps that helped people in the city utilize municipal data in a relevant way to their daily activities. The winners included:

1. WayFinder NYC, which helps people find subway entrances through augmented reality
2. Taxihack, which allows people to view & post reviews of individual taxis & their drivers Big
3. Apple Ed, which offers detailed profiles, reviews & info on the city’s public schools

Brand utility enables brands to create meaningful touch points to engage with its customers when they genuinely need help with something related to the brand’s skill set. Users will appreciate the added-value, and according to Trendwatching, “A customer who is made to feel grateful most likely becomes enduringly loyal as a result. Gratitude can ‘increase purchase intentions, sales growth and share of wallet.’” This is just one more way the brand can create reasons for people to believe in its purpose!

This post can also be viewed on Experience Matters, where I will be contributing more regularly!