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Strengthen Your Brand
Posted in Growth
By Oren Harari, Ph.D, originally posted on ‘Oren’s Blog’, January, 2006 (This article was published in the January 2006 issue of Sales and Service Excellence Magazine. It was adapted from an earlier article that I wrote for Association Management)
Does your organization have a strong brand that both identifies and differentiates you in the marketplace? A good brand tells the marketplace how reliably, efficiently, authentically, and quickly your company delivers what it promises.
Most organizations don’t approach branding in a disciplined, strategic way. Rather, they approach it from a narrow marketing perspective: They focus on logos, slogans, color schemes, online sales tools, PR campaigns, and ad rollouts. These will help any branding efforts, but on their own they add little sustainable value. Consider Kodak, Levi Strauss, AT&T, and even Coca-Cola. Great logos, great ads, great identities—and poor returns. Even the most recognizable brand identities, like the McDonald’s arches and the Nike swoosh, could not prevent their downward slides over the past few years.
“Recognizability” does not equal great branding. The goal of great branding is not just to be recognized, but to be successful— in terms of building customer loyalty and profitable growth.
Seven Paths to Great Branding
There are seven strategic paths to building a great brand.
1. Discrimination
Define what space you want to fill. Make explicit choices about what your business is, and isn’t; who your “customers” are, and aren’t; and what business you will pursue, and what you won’t. You will never fill all spaces effectively. The moment you try to be all things to all people, the focus in innovation and delivery blurs, identity and priorities become confusing, and efficiencies plummet. Branding involves choosing the specific terrains you will compete in, and avoiding or exiting the others.
2. Domination
Selectively choose areas you can dominate. Organizations that offer a diversified menu of mediocre or commodity products and services are not in a value mode. Dominating doesn’t mean being biggest; it means being exceptional, distinctly better, bold, compelling, and exciting— as recognized by customers and investors. You must ask: What products and services am I committed to doing state-of-the-art, better-than-anyone-else, beyond-conventional-wisdom work in?
3. Startling value
When customer service delivery generates a “wow!” reaction, you’re creating startling value—a great brand builder. Here are two of the best ways to create startling value:
- Personalization. Build a reputation of delivering unique excellence in customer care, and you build strong brand equity. When someone believes that “this company truly cares about me, knows my problems, knows what I might need even before I can articulate it, and presents me with innovative products and services that meets those requirements—I’m hooked.” Creating personalization requires care, empathy, a rich database on each customer, and a customer-obsessed culture.
- Turbo-speed. Reduce customers’ waiting time through effective use of talent, systems, IT, and customer partnership, and you create strong brand value. You also stay lean, flexible and cost-efficient.
4. Deep reservoirs of knowledge
Great branding occurs when your company (and website) is seen as “the” place to visit for state-of-the-art data and information, white papers, data bases, reports, links, experts, and practical advice. When outsiders can count on seeing talented individuals who are affiliated with your organization regularly writing columns in reputable publications and speaking as experts at meetings, and media interviews, then you have further branded its status as a reservoir of the best knowledge. In today’s “knowledge economy,”
5. Intimate relationship
The strength and quality of your relationships with valued constituents is as important as the strength and quality of your products and services. Trust, authenticity, and intimacy of relationship often trump other, more “rational,” considerations (like price or location) when customers make decisions. An individual’s belief that your organization is a strong, reliable advocate, protector, confidante, partner, and helper is an excellent predictor of brand loyalty. The more intimate the relationship, the stronger that belief. People hunger for intimacy and love, and if you can build those into your relationships with your customers, that translates into profitable branding. Consumers hunger for “lovemarks”: emotional connections far beyond actual “products” or “services.”
6. Community
A branded community is a growing eco-system of participants who come together for common purposes. When a company can create a genuine feeling of community among its customers and partners, those constituencies want to keep the community successful, and willingly take on responsibilities to do just that. To create a community, you must keep your customers continually informed, up-to-date, in the loop, engaged, cared for and connected to “the right people.” Create a “hub” for seamlessly connecting individuals, companies and information to each other.
7. Legacy
Legacy is the mark your organization leaves behind. Legacy for branding is about striving to achieve a noble cause that will profoundly impact the market you deal with, if not the world itself, for the better. Going the route of legacy binds employees to a common cause. It inspires and mobilizes people to achieve extraordinary goals. As Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer says: “What makes morale good or bad is the sense of the future. Are we working on something important? Is that an opportunity to benefit financially? Those things make a difference to people.” Making a difference is the core of branding for legacy. A company ups the ante and says: “We’re more than discrete products and services. We’re here to change the world.”
Branding institutionalizes these seven paths as critical and consistent drivers of the organization’s work and its relationship with its customers.