WELCOME TO LIVING THE BRAND
The Urban dictionary has a rather tongue in cheek way of defining Living as “That's what you do after you are born and before you die.” But we all know that it is the experiences we have in life that make living worthwhile!Is your Brand worthwhile living? Do potential supporters walk away from your launches with a burning fire to associate with your Brand ? And how long does the fire burn for? Do you give them tangible concepts that are real in their day to day lives? How do you do this and sustain the momentum?
Many brands start answering these questions by looking within their own teams, and begin a time consuming and often costly process that yields little result. It also often steals away the tangible opportunity that exists if they were just able to take the view that there is always the requirement to provide a better experience for customers. Brands should rather start by looking at how they are able to transform to create a memorable customer experience. Making changes from this perspective lends itself not only to the credibility required, but also to the focus and substance that will be needed to make this leap.
While there are a host of brands worldwide that are well recognised through their ad campaigns and logos, it takes more than a stylish logo to be considered global leaders in this field. The differentiator is the extraordinary and pertinent experiences that they offer to customers across all contacts points, through all product and service offerings – and it is this facet that creates a powerful brand! READ MORE
BRING LIVING TO THE BRAND!
It is without doubt that it’s the members of your teams that deliver on brand promises, and any serious branding initiative must engage employees as a priority. Ultimately, this is about putting the brand at the heart of your business, and then ensuring that everything you do and say delivers on it, while keeping your customers steadfastly at the head of your decisions.
The brand promise has to become a filter for all decision-making to do this successfully and your team members must understand how to use it. If a brand is focused around 'the personal touch,' a media manager may elect to align with stores that offer handmade products rather than with chain store offering mass produced products and the HR department may adopt an interview process though job specs designed to ensure that only friendly and likeable individuals are considered as feasible candidates.
Whatever you may call - internal branding, brand assimilation, brand alignment, employer branding - brand engagement programmes need to capture employees' hearts and minds so that customers can have a brand-distinguished encounter. Successful brand engagement programmes aim to enthuse, coach and empower employees to deliver the brand in their routine roles. They move the brand to the heart of the organisation, where it becomes the concentration of everything the company and its employees think about and do.
With this new conviction, brand becomes not only a medium of communication with the outside world but also a driver of internal 'on brand' choices and decisions. The result is a revolution in the way business is conducted throughout an organisation - and more importantly, the delivery of a distinguishable customer experience.
But this is no overnight fix. Positioning brand at the heart of a business is indeed a long-term effort with many systems that may need to be revisited, such as operational processes, organisational structure, training, key performance indicators and employee rewards.
The art to making your brand engagement programme work lies in providing a capturing and stimulating element as well as a practical factor that builds the brand into day-to-day activities.
In order to deliver a distinguishable customer experience, a brand engagement programme must accomplish three things. Primarily, it must aid people to understand their role in delivering the brand through the customer experience. Second, it must help people to comprehend and be fanatical about the brand so they are inspired to do what's required. And finally, it must provide ways for people to engross themselves in and experiment with the brand.
BIND YOURSELF TO THE BUYER
Each time your brand touches a customer, an opportunity is created for the company to build a relationship, elicit an emotional attachment, earn trust and engender loyalty. Employees are often busy with the operational aspects of the business and forget to think about their customers' perspective. They need to be reminded to do so.
A customer journey framework is a useful way to help employees understand the connections they build with people through their brands. By mapping each instance that a customer touches your brand, it helps employees visualise the way their specific roles within the firm influence brand delivery. For example, people in charge of a company's user interface or network services need to realise that they may have an even larger role to play in delivering the brand promise than do customer service representatives and sales associates.
The framework of the customer journey can be used by management and employees alike to focus on important touch points, identify on and off-brand delivery, benchmark areas for improvement, and find places where they can create a "brand spike," a wow moment that delivers the brand story to customers in a memorable way. For management, the customer journey helps them define the strategic imperatives they must commit to in order to deliver on the brand promise. As noted, these imperatives often include organisational and process changes. For employees, it is a useful working tool for determining specific actions they can take to improve the customer experience and deliver the brand more powerfully.
CEMENT THE CONCEPT
People remember the things that excite them, and you want your brand to be one of them. A new brand should stick in the minds of employees long after they leave the launch presentation. This is no easy task; it requires a certain familiarity with employees and a dose of ingenuity.
Painting a portrait of the future can be a powerful way to make a brand real and to generate excitement. Lacklustre attempts at this are sometimes made in brand films by using swelling sound effects and footage of soaring eagles. But a tangible illustration that captures the potential of a brand is much more effective. One accounting firm used a 30-minute play to gain buy-in of the new brand by 300 senior partners. The play began by depicting current life at the company and its difficulty functioning as a global entity, then fast forwarded three years to show what things might be like for employees and clients once the new brand becomes fully embedded in the company. The play made such an impact that participants ranked it highest among all events at the three-day conference. Not only this, but they unanimously endorsed the global internal roll-out of the new brand.
Symbols and stories also help make a brand memorable and keep it fresh. One seemingly small but effective touch that energy giant BP uses is placing potted Aloe Vera plants in the lobby of its headquarters. Of all the green plants, Aloe Vera converts the most carbon dioxide to oxygen. As such, it embodies a core value of the BP brand: to be "green." Every day as employees walk into the office, the plants remind them of their shared corporate vision - to go beyond petroleum - and the imperative to develop renewable energy.
REPETITION CREATES REALISATION
The best way to learn something is to be absorbed and stimulated by it. You don't learn to speak Spanish by taking a class once a week. You do learn it by living in Spain for a while, surrounded by Spanish with every opportunity to practice it.
Similarly, to turn a brand concept into reality, it must be brought to life for employees. One of the ways to do this is to establish what we call a brand lab - a physical place where your employees can actively "experiment" with the brand. Make it a place where people can experience the brand in much the same way it might be experienced by the customer. As an interactive environment full of brand and customer stimulus, this is a practical, hands-on way of letting people learn about the brand and its delivery to customers. To be effective, it should be a place where employees and outside partners can practice what they do day-to-day, be it marketing, product development, business planning, or customer service. Think of a brand lab as a learning-by-doing centre, an on-going brand-training experience for everyone who touches your brand.
INVOLVE TO CONVERT
Brand engagement isn't about bombarding people with tyrannical orders; instead, it gives them the vision, structure and confidence to turn brand into action. When people are engaged with your brand's promise, they become active participants in its delivery, in all aspects of your business.
By uniting your people around your brand promise, you don't just help them to 'live the brand', they can help you to transform your business. Your people become your most powerful asset for delivering the brand. And that is powerful change.
