How to do a Brand Practices and Brand Engagement in an Organization?

   


      Brand Portfolio: The mono brands are only one customer type. But, the house of brands that not only serve the different customers and has the architecture serving the different bands in each segments. All brands or the portfolio of products that can not all be delivered in same way and has lot of complexity in the organizations. So, how do you conceive portfolio of brands and deliver to the brand in internal focus. There is different value proposition for the same group of customer. Brands face different competitors in each segment( eg., refreshment, fun, value, gap fill energy, treat, socialization, indulgence etc.,). If you think about the refreshment segment in Icecream, We might bought the Magnum brand and now looking to refresh with the brand Solero in that segment. So, If you think about the brand architecture, the master brand that enters the sub brands which needs the segments that they service.
      In an organizational perspective, there could be mono culture or multiple culture that drives the different brands. You need to drive the culture of innovation for small improvements in packaging and quality. It includes the systems, KPIs, HR that needs to suits all of the products. There are different brand name, different offerings, different promise to the customer. Then, the customer ultimately accepted your offering. For the mapping your brand inside the organization, you need to think about what role to be played strategically to different customers or same customer, the nature of promise,  and profit driver etc., The brand architecture will overlay on that promise and create the clarity within the organization so that you can adopt systems and processes.
       Synchronized Organization:  Customer journey is the brand differentiation. The consumer journey cuts across all business silos. The organizational complexity is the discrete functions exists as organizational silos that serve those touch points. The command and control structure resulted to silos driven approach to the market place. But, the Customer Experiences are the touch points. For ex, the KPI of the call center is number of calls handled per hour. There is real misalignment in functional, silos or geographic footprint of the organization. So, We need to manage the brand across the different geographic silos in order to give a consistent customer experience.
         In B2B, there is key account management structure for managing the best clients.The Enabling functions in the organization are supporting in the frontline. It is all about enabling, engaging and empowering the employees. The CEO led organizations change these processes and it is his primary focus. This creates value zone in the customer interface with the front-line employees at the top and this 360 degree feedback is essential for thinking about the collaboration across functional silos. They need to understand how well to collaborate with all the touch points at customers. Because, all of them involved in providing the solutions and this becomes the open communication channel across the organization.

Global Alignment:  The research shows that 65% of global company wants to execute the global strategy. We are thinking about building the global strategy because economies are scaled or scoped in order to reduce the cost across the world in terms of media buying. In B2B, the customers are many locations, executive travelers or tourists(B2C) are really need a consistent approach across the world. One thing to remember is that the optimal global strategy is not equal to sum of optimal local strategies. In the internal perspective, you really have to adopt the mindset, change approach to get the trust of the local management, cultural competence, time orientation to work etc., First, you need to build the global brand before to deliver the global brand. It is the delivery of the organization and not the design.
Do's of Global Alignment:
   * Launch based on customer insights or universal truth, that is really the starting point in the global brand (Global Mindset)
   * To get the team on board, the brand purpose will connect the relevant customer. If the brand purpose inspires your customer, it will motivates or inspires your own people.
   * Cross Cultural Competencies - It helps to win trust and inspire, support, learn and share them. It is not a command and control.
   * Global Capability, Structure and Process - You need to have a simple and clear message of what the brand is about. For ex, the global brand benchmark study, global brand team, workshops etc.,

Brand Practices:  Brand practices is an organizational level to internal process especially HR. Brand engagement is at individual level to deliver the brand promise. The customer satisfaction can be defined as the expectations (the traditional branding tends to raise these via brand promise) minus experiences (the people across the organization deliver these directly or indirectly across moments that matter). Satisfaction may go down when the delivery or customer experience is same and raising the expectation. There is a process that a broad concept of the brand to be cheerful is thinking about the key touch points and the key behaviors. HR has numerous processes like attracting the talents, developing, accessing, rewarding, redeploying and exiting. Each and every aspect of the HR processes has been fine tuned to deliver the brand to make and reward people more cheerful. Here, We are not making the promise to the customer. But, we are making promise to the employees. There are lot of companies makes the great place to work by flexible hours, benefits, etc., It is all about the efficiency. The 4 P's of marketing are Product, Price, Place, Promotion. It is to see how the values are linked to the brand promise.

Brand Engagement: When you think about executing the strategy, we can't pay same kind of attention in design, implementation and execution. Strategy is the outcome of the thousands of actions. if you improve those actions, ultimately, you improve the strategy. Brand Engagement is almost same as sales funnel(awareness, desire and action). The internal brand engagement is thinking about own employees in terms of will they pay attention to the brand? are they aware of what we trying to achieve? will they accept our strategy? will they become advocate or motivate them? do they know what kind of action they actually engage? then to perform the behavior of adherence that actually supports the action and become the habits. Brand engagement focuses on the delivery side and doing things right.
        Attention is about the problem and opportunity. The brand is more about the solutions of the problems and opportunity it represents. The CEO will address the entire company at once in a cement with passion. Awareness is that you are trying to achieve. Brand is the articulation of business strategy that gives the direction to go. It is about the clarity of understanding where the brand is going and engage people through workshops where they broaden the customers before the brand is launched. If you think about the acceptance in a situation to bring the third party from outside, there is often a leaning back of resistance. But, the Brand ambassadors in the organization are not only the believers of the message and personally motivated by it. If you design a better
strategy, immediately, you may buy-in to the message. Across the organization, there is pocket of resistance and support as signal light. Advocacy is your engagement in the organization(eg., Gallup Q12 survey). They will ask the bunch of 12 questions and trying to find your engagement with the organization. This will be useful to decide which way to go. For ex, In the love-respect axis, First you need to gain the respect. If you don't have the respect or quality of the product, it is very hard to love your product even if you are doing best for your customer(brand purpose), it is very hard to get the advocacy of your brand. Actually, the brand purpose motivates the people. Action is knowing about how to bring the brand to life. It is the habit in the long-term. Habits are replicated. It means the same type of actions can be performed in different domains. The key habits will create the organizational change of going forward. Adherence is the rewards that you get or consequences or feedback. The feedback could be the customer satisfaction or the brand image that we build. So, What are my actions that add up to the feedback. For ex, In the call center, how are the peoples are rewarded? How many calls resolved first time by the customer calls? There is specific metric for different functions. So, it is aligning to incentives. Here, We want to reward the behavior and not the outcome. The simple mantra in the organization is better for customer, simpler for employees and cheaper for operation are all important when the customer comes first.

Brand Valuation: You need to value the brand for driving the business and managerial decision making. So, you need to understand where does the brand provides leverage within that business model. Then, you need to allocate the effort. There is no such thing of 'A' value for the brand. The value has different brands, different contexts, and different players in the industry. It is to understand how much value the brand brings the business overall or rest of the world so that you can recognize the value creation in that domain. The brand can be valued as intangible asset in the acquisition or merger (the value can be recognized on the balance sheet, not if developed in-house) or the purpose of licensing and taxation.
    One of the valuation approach is income-based approach. Basically, it is the price premium or volume premium. The another approach is cost-based approach. If you are startup company, Think about how much you need to invest in marketing to build this brand or to think about the license to the brand and pay royalties for owning the brand. Finally, the market-based approach, it is to look at the comparable transactions in the past. It is a kind of guidelines or benchmark to adhere. The value of the brand to the business happens in many different ways across different parts of the enterprise. Strong brands tend to increase revenue and lower the costs across business stakeholder. The power of the Brand depends on the business model where it provides value and the period of time.

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