Evaluating Brand Strategy (Chapter 2/5)

All done? Nope. In fact, you are never done. But at some point you will have to set it all down for a while and work the strategy as best you can.

However, now it would be good to see how some of your best customers feel about what you have done. I would pick four or five of your best customers, organizations who buy from you regularly and seem to best understand what you are trying to do and like your original game plan. However, these people also need to be smart business people who will be candid with you.

You can take them through this process or show them the result of the work of your management teams. However you do it, I recommend having these discussions with each client separately in a one-on-one discussion to get the most from each participant. Importantly, expose the strategy as if it is work in progress so they are comfortable articulating concerns they may have with your brand strategy.

Is the strategy relevant?

As part of this exercise, ask them (and yourself) these six questions:

1. Can we deliver on the promises made in this brand strategy?
2. Does the strategy meet the needs of a significant segment of customers in the marketplace?
3. Is the strategy and its brand promise relevant to customers?
4. Is the strategy also differentiating vs. competitors?
5. Can a competitor easily transition to this strategy if it becomes well-known that our strategy is working?
6. Will this strategy deliver short-term sales, but more importantly, long-term brand growth?

Obviously, you and your clients will need to have some business facts available to you to truly answer these questions. But, if your strategy stands up to the test of these questions, you probably have something to work with. If it does not, you need to stay at the process. In truth, the best brand strategies evolve over time but do so in subtle ways that consumers do not recognize easily. And that is a good thing since a brand strategy that appears to change constantly suggests a schizophrenic company.

If it sounds like all this strategy development is hard work, it is. But, once the strategy is executed in the marketplace and shows signs of gaining traction, you will be glad you made the effort!

Much more to come. Thanks so much for reading.

SWOTting the Brand (Chapter 2/4)

If you really want to know what your employees think, it would be best to hire an outside researcher to probe for strengths and weaknesses in your brand. However, it can be done by the owner if s/he has the openness to hear things that may not be flattering. What I am recommending is qualitative research that will not only yield opinions but can also serve as a brainstorming session for new ideas. Regardless if you do the research or hire an outside moderator, you must make it very clear that candor will lead the day and that you will welcome, perhaps even reward, negative comments that are truthful. What I will discuss here is a very abbreviated version of what should happen but you will get the idea of what type of discussions need to take place.

Your first dialog is with your top tier management. Let's say of your 25 employees, you have five direct reports who each have four or five people reporting to them. Get your management in a room with blank sheets of paper on the table or poster board on the wall. The goal is to generate a brand SWOT analysis. I am sure you know the SWOT format: Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats. Strengths and weaknesses are internal. Opportunities and threats are external. So, what are the strengths of your brand reputation? What are its weaknesses? It is critical that the data generated focus on brand image and perceptions about your brand. This is not a strategic assessment of everything about your company. It is about your brand reputation only. Optimally, you will generate no more than four or five strengths and fewer weaknesses, but candor is critical so list all you generate. Set those aside for now.

Next, tackle opportunities. What are the opportunities for your brand reputation? What can it be that it is not now? What preferred associations and perceptions are there available to you? What weaknesses are there for your brand? Weaknesses might be other brands that are close in positioning/strategy to your brand. If the claim you generate is already being used by a competitor and they have been banging that way for five years, that is a weakness that you cannot work around. That will not be your positioning. It would be good if you end with about four or five brand image opportunities/weaknesses total. If you generate more than that, prioritize the opportunities and threats.

What should be developing through this discussion and debate is a short list of brand strengths and perhaps some opportunities for the brand in terms of extending perceptions about the brand. The threats/weaknesses are important as "reality checks" as you build a brand strategy with the strengths and opportunities. Will the strengths and opportunities stand up to your weaknesses and threats? They better or you need another strategy.

Your emerging brand strategy should be two or three strengths with an opportunity thrown in. The strengths may be category entrance requirements (the price of entry in terms of features/benefits) and the opportunity may be a claim/promise that you can make with a small or significant change in the way you do business. The less you have as strengths, the more work you have to do in implementing your opportunities. Strengths are what you have already in your brand reputation. Opportunities are strengths you can have in the future with some amount of work beforehand. Mathematically, it may look like this:

Strength + Strength + Opportunity = Brand Strategy

What this process allows is both brainstorming and evaluation. You need both if are to achieve the result of clarification of the brand's true attributes. This will help with how you position the brand later.

But you are far from done. After this session has generated ideas about the brand from your managers, the process needs to be repeated with the teams that report to each manager, having each one follow this process. Let them work through the SWOT analysis on their own, ending with their own brand strategy.

Where did they end up? Probably not exactly where the management team did and that is fine. The people in the trenches probably see things differently than owners and managers. That is to be expected. But you must resolve as much of this as possible.

The threats/weaknesses are important as "reality checks" as you build a brand strategy.

Once each team has made their suggestions regarding strategy, the management team needs to meet again to refine what each manager's team developed. Unless a company has a serious disconnect with its employees, there will be more similarities than dissimilarities. The management team will then come to some decision about what the brand strategy needs to be. Once that is resolved, they must meet with employees as a whole and inform them of where they ended up. They may not end exactly where everyone wanted, but everyone will know they had input into the brand strategy and this will be important in building consensus for future implementation of that brand strategy.

A critical part of this process is to also keep track of named weaknesses and threats as these serve to tell management what to worry about. There is always something to worry about. And what may need fixing. It is a natural phenomenon of business that believes in continuous improvement.

I encourage small business owners to try this process so that everyone who is representing the brand at your company (your brand reps) has input into what the brand is that they represent. As I mentioned above, the real process is more complicated that described above but if the small business owner is committed to building a strong brand, following this process to the extent possible, will yield some progress in meeting that important objective.

Thanks for reading. More to come.

Reconciling the Brand Between Owner and Employees (2/3)

The title of this chapter section may surprise you. If you are the owner of a small business, you might assume that your employees will accept the brand just as you have presented it to them. Maybe, but I doubt it.

Unfortunately, you probably don't present the brand consistently any day of the week and you are not unlike any small business. In fact, it is darn hard to present any brand consistently. And if you think it is hard to be consistent in how your brand is presented, imagine the impossible problem that major corporations have. Every employee they have (and every customer contact each of those employees have) offers a huge opportunity to present the brand in sharp contrast to how the company would like it presented. But that is life in business. Advertising can influence perceptions about the brand, but an unpleasant experience with one of your employees will undermine all that advertising quickly.

Let's say you have a small service business with 25 employees. If you asked each one of them to pick three words that best describe your company, how many different words would you get? 75? I hope not but I also bet you would get more than 50. And if they could submit those words anonymously, would all of the attribute words be positive? Would any be positive? Now, remember, these are the people who represent your brand each and every day. Scary, huh?

If you are not sure how your brand would be described, I hope you realize that you need to have this discussion soon with your employees. Very soon. No telling how many customers and prospective customers they may each speak with tomorrow and miss an opportunity to represent your brand more consistently.

After all, your brand is not just what YOU say it is.

If you want to have this dialog with your employees, they must be able to respond without fear of reprisal. That means that their responses must be completely anonymous. At some point, employees may feel that they can be candid without fear of hurting their career prospects but, at first, you need to take care not to make them feel threatened in any way. Because you need their honesty! The whole process is futile if they are fearful of losing their jobs. You need them thinking, not worrying.

Understand, this is not an evaluation. Instead, you are beginning the process of rebuilding your brand. More than anything else, it is a reconciliation. After all, your brand is not just what YOU say it is. Rather, it is what everyone who represents your brand says it is. And who represents your brand? A whole lot of folks. And that can be very good news if that group grows at a nice pace.

Think about this dialog. It needs to happen and happen regularly -- not just once. I will tell you more about the reconciliation process in the next post.

Thanks for checking in. More to come!

The Authentic Brand (2/2)

Much of modern marketing over the last few decades tried to create facades around brands. Unfortunately, sometimes it wasn't that the brand offered a benefit that was truly unique but that the brand was only positioned that way.

Positioning is merely creating a frame of reference for the consumer so they can more easily understand what a brand stands for. The term was coined by Jack Trout and Al Ries in their book, Positioning: The Battle For Your Mind, in 1981. Truly, it is the best book ever written about branding. It is sad that too many marketers used the concept to create facades for brands that only discussed less-than-significant brand differences rather that trying to create a brand that was actually superior to other brands in the marketplace. But organizations are lazy and risk averse and they play it safe far to often. Few will swing for the fences in an effort to offer a blockbuster brand that consumers will rave about.

All this change will not be good for every business.

All that being said, everything in this e-Book is about building an authentic brand, a brand that is refreshingly candid about what it will and will not do. Or, if it is trying something that might work but is not sure yet that it can do it, that it will inform customers of this so that they are not persuaded to buy something that is not yet proven. If your plan is to create a facade or to only build a brand that will be at parity with others in the marketplace and will not seek to be truly distinctive because of a real benefit, stop reading right now. You have wasted your time thus far and I hate for you to waste any more of it. The approach of Your Brand Reps demands authenticity and you will be easily found out if brand authenticity is not in your plan. This is not simply an ethical issue, but the approach we will discuss can only be achieved if small business owners are completely candid about their brand's value in the marketplace. Only then can a successful and authentic brand be enhanced.

Soon after September 11, 2001, I began hearing "authenticity" mentioned as a driving force in Americans' lives and their relationships. I am an avid reader of business publications, both periodicals and books, and don't recall hearing much of authenticity as it relates to business and marketing discussed before that fateful event that challenged much of what Americans appreciated and valued in their lives.

I am far from the only marketer talking about authenticity. Last year, Time magazine labeled authenticity of the "10 ideas that are changing the world." Writer John Cloud attributed this movement to consumers' "longing" for things real in a world of pretenders and shams.
Strategic Horizons' Joe Pine and Jim Gilmore, who wrote The Experience Economy, encouraged companies to think about the experiences customers had with their brands and how they could actually create favorable and memorable brand experiences. They recently followed up that best seller with Authenticity:What Consumers Really Want. In their book, Pine and Gilmore actually offer a process for achieving authenticity.

Suffice it to say that marketing is changing, changing quickly and, for the most part, changing for the good of consumers. However, all this change will not be good for every business. I hope your small business heeds the call and realizes that marketing in the future will not be "business as usual." Consumers will increasingly demand authenticity from you and your brand.

What does this mean for small businesses? It means under-promising in your marketing communications and over-delivering in your customer service. It means staying in touch with your customers when it is good for them, not just to your benefit. It means pricing your brands fairly and not trying some promotional stunt that makes your customers worry about what your brand is really worth. It means making your brand available to your customers in ways that really make their lives more convenient.

In short, get real and stay that way because authenticity is a hard thing to fake.

Thanks for checking in. More to come!

The Vertical Relationship Channel (Ch. 2)

Some time back I asked a teaching colleague, Marty Flynn, what book he thought was the best book he had read or taught from on customer service. Without hesitation, Marty recommended, The Service Edge by Ron Zemke and Dick Schaaf. It is a great book and I can understand Marty's support of it. By nature of the fact that it was published in 1989 and is still considered by some to be the bible of customer service may be a comment in itself on the value of some of the books written more recently to provide business guidance. My big issue with so many authors is that to sell their books, they have to disparage any book written over ten years ago. However, I have made that point before and will not dwell on it here... at least not right now.

Now, you may be asking, what does a book (even the best book ever written) on customer service have to do with branding? Everything. Simply everything. And let me tell you why.

Remember in Chapter 1/3 (http://yourbrandreps.blogspot.com/2009/08/chapter-1-part-3.html) we talked about the top 10 strongest brands in the world? What did they have in common? One thing they each had in common was that their employees simply loved working there. Many of these companies consider their own employees as the first group that needs convincing of their value as a company and brand. These companies (Google, Ritz-Carlton, Netflix, Costco) know the value of treating their employees well. And when employees are treated well, they treat every customer they come in contact with well also. Makes sense.

What's customer service got to do with branding? Simply everything.

The other characteristic each of these strong brands have in common is that their employees are empowered to solve customer problems as they surface. Three out of four service issues are solved by the person who initially hears the problem. There is very little "Let me speak with my supervisor" or "I'm sorry our policy..." In short, the large majority of issues that can detract from the brand reputation are handled immediately by the first employee who hears of the problem. Smooth, huh?

So, how do organizations that work this well in brand-building by providing extraordinary customer service accomplish this task? Zemke and Schaaf noted five factors present in organizations with exceptional customer service:

* They listen to, comprehend and act on the evolving needs and changing expectations of their customers.

* They establish a clear vision of what great customer service is, communicate if to all of their employees and ensure that the quality of service is personally important to everyone who works there.

* They establish firm standards of customer service and regularly measure themselves against those standards.

* They hire good people, train them adequately and then empower them to work for their customers.

* They acknowledge and reward customer service "wins" when they happen, ensuring that everyone in the organization understands the priority that customer service has in the organization.

That's commitment, isn't it? Does your small business follow this 'best practices' model? As I have detailed in Chapter 1, most organizations do not or the state of customer service would not be in such sad shape. You better just hope that your competition isn't using this model, either.

In this chapter we will talk a lot about how your employees can build your brand in powerful ways.

Thanks so much for reading. More to come.

The American Business Train Wreck (Chapter 1/7)

So, where is all this leading? This discussion about customer service, brand loyalty and brand communities? You probably don't want to know. But read on, Brave of Heart.

By the most recent numbers I can find (a US State Department report published in April 2008), our US economy's make-up is 67.8% services, 19.8% good producing, and 12.4% local/state/federal government. That means that over two-thirds of our economy is in the service sector and the ratio of service-producing jobs as compared to goods-producing jobs is more than 3 to 1. Thus, if you leave government out of the equation, what service-producers contribute to the US economy is more than three times what goods-producers contribute. If anyone still has any doubt about the importance of services to our overall economy, think about these numbers. I am not saying that the production of goods in not important to our economy but, clearly, services are more than three times as important to our financial health as a nation, as defined by gross domestic product (GDP).

Over two-thirds of our economy is in the service sector.

We have been reading for decades that the US is quickly evolving into a service economy, with the strongest areas in real estate, banking, insurance and investment. Other significant areas of growth are wholesale and retail sales, transportation, health care, legal services, scientific and management services, education, arts, entertainment recreation, hotels and other accommodations, restaurants, bars and other food/beverage services. Not a lot of surprises here, right? I am sure the large majority of us work in one of these industries.

Nothing wrong with that, right? Weeellllll, maybe.

At a time when America becomes more reliant on services to provide income to its citizens, it seems that the quality of those services in the minds of the Americans who buy these services deteriorates dramatically. Remember the research cited earlier in this book about how bad customer service has gotten? Well, if those statistics were not enough, I have more.

Dr. Claes Fornell, a professor at the University of Michigan's business school, has developed the American Customer Service Satisfaction Index (ACSI) and this index is based on regular interviews with 16,000 customers of some 200 companies in 33 industries. Everything Dr. Fornell has found suggests that customer service continues to decline in America at an alarming rate. In fact, the overall "grade" of American business' ability to provide good service is now 70.7 out of 100. That is down from 74.5 in 1994. Some specific industries look even worse. Hospitals have dropped from 74 to 67 in that time period. Airlines are down from 72 to 67 in terms of satisfaction with their services. The local phone companies are a bit higher having dropped from 79 to 75. Not exactly something to write home about. (Source: Daniel Pedersen, "Why the Service is Missing form America's Service Economy")

To make matters a bit worse, in the same article Dr. Fornell makes the point that poor customer service gives a false impression of our economy. Even if prices do not rise significantly, the huge decline in customer services suggests that inflation may be much worse than our economists would have us believe. If we are getting less but paying the same thing for it, we do have a problem with the devaluation of our dollar, don't we?

So, picture this. We are moving quickly toward an economy that relies more and more on American business being able to deliver valued services to its customers. At the same time, our delivery of all those services is in a terrible state of decline. This is not a train wreck in the making: the train wreck has already happened and the bodies are strewn all over America. You can blame some of it on the recession we are facing but, the truth is, many of those businesses were sick and dying before the recession even began. It just took this recession to topple already unstable organizations. Most were crumbling at a slow rate because, as the figures suggest, we have a customer service crisis in American business right now. That customer service problem erodes brand loyalty and that is what brought them down, not the recession.

Anybody afraid? I am. For this country, for businesses small and large, for what my family gets (or doesn't get) for the dollars we spend on all those services.

This is not a train wreck in the making: the train wreck has already happened and the bodies are strewn all over America.

It is a sad state of affairs, really. If your business is in trouble right now, do some research about your level of customer service. I will bet you that if that research is truly legitimate, you will see a problem. And if you have a problem with customer service, how strong can your brand be?

In Chapter 2, we will examine what can be done in the aftermath of this train wreck. Because there is a lot that can be done. But we need to get started. You can build a strong brand community around your brand but it takes work. Your customers can help you.

Thanks for reading! More to come.

What does all this mean for small businesses? (Chapter 1/6)

So, what can small businesses take away from this academic white paper? This was not discussed in Muniz and O'Guinn's work, but my perspective on their research is that each brand has a past, a present and a future.

The past is marked by rituals and traditions that have evolved to be part of the brand but that are celebrated in the present. This "past" comes from the brand's history and the stories about the brand that surface from the brand's past. Thus, brand owners would do well to consider their brand's past and determine what in the brand's history will make the brand more relevant to brand users today who might want to become part of the brand's community. And from this brand history, what specific stories detail the brand's importance to current users? Why would current users care about those stories as they use the brand today? Importantly, today's consumers want to feel a part of something bigger than themselves and part of something that is more important than their current problems and challenges.

The "consciousness of kind" marker can be viewed as the brand's present time perspective. In truth, what consciousness of kind says is "there are some of us here and now that are more alike than others of us (who are here and now)." And from this idea, brand communities develop their legitimacy filters and oppositional brand loyalties. The present is all about 1) "those who are as committed (here and now) as we are" and 2) "what brands threaten our 'here and now' because they oppose the brand (and brand community) to which we are committed."

That brings us to the future, right? And what better way for a brand to have meaning in people's lives than through moral responsibility? No one wants to be associated with a brand that has no moral responsibility for the future. I am not saying that every brand must be associated with a popular cause, but it must be thought of as morally responsible if it is to garner a large number of people who seek a strong association with it.

In their book, Creating Customer Evangelists, Jackie Huba and Ben McConnell discuss the importance of organizations being committed to something larger than themselves. They suggest organizations define some cause that allows them to rise above just pursuing profitability and growth. In essence, the most successful brand communities will grow because they are part of some idea much bigger than even their brand.

Moral responsibility says that the brand cares about the future.

Now this idea may seem a bit scary to the average small business because one must wonder how fragmented a marketing communications budget might be if it is trying to do too much. But Huba and McConnell are not talking about affinity programs that were the rage in the late 1980s and have continued to some extent until now: "Buy some of our product and we will donate money to..." No, that is not what the authors recommend. That is superficial and most customers see right through that one and the brand may end up looking worse than before it initiated the affinity program.

Instead, what organizations must do is figure out what problems facing the world is their organization tackling? What does the organization really want to stand for because no one wants to be part of an organization that is merely trying to make more money for its shareholders. The good news is that our world has lots of problems and every organization can help make the world a better place in its own way. Without evident moral responsibility, how can a brand build a community of loyal users? It can't.

Muniz and O'Guinn found two benefits of moral responsibility: integrating/retaining members and assisting in the use of the brand. Depending on the exact nature of each brand, one can see how brand communities are strengthened when there is a clear role of moral responsibility. No one wants to be associated with a brand that does not care. Moral responsibility says that the brand cares about the future.

So, what is your brand's past and how can you leverage that to build a brand community around it? What are the "here and now" aspects of your brand and its user base? Can these help make your brand less vulnerable to your competition? Finally, what moral responsibility does your brand take for the future? Said another way, what does your brand hope for the future?

Thanks for reading. More to come!