Following the launch of the How-Do Top 100 North West Brands initiative, Andrew Stothert, the co-founder of Brand Vista, believes that for too many years too many businesses have struggled with the reality of delivering the brand promise they make to their customers.
The experiential element of the brands relationship, or its “actualisation” as an academic recently described it to me, is for many customers not only a disappointment but is often at odds with the promises the companies are making through their various communication channels and agencies.
The marketing services industry presents many apparent “solutions” to this client issue. Numerous brand consultancies have grown up out of the design and communications sector, so no prizes for guessing what their “solutions” might look like.
A whole new sector producing internal communications programmes has emerged and a plethora of newsletters, brand workshops even brand plays to help tell employees what they need to think about the brand, its values and personality have been developed.
And yet we still hear customers and employees telling us that companies and their brand so often say one thing and do another.
Our research indicates that customers and employees are behaving in very similar ways when it comes to the propositions that are presented to them. They have become a pretty cynical bunch and who can blame them after so many years of over promise and under delivery. Customers, old and new of course, were told by one company that they were going to “turn banking on its head” and nothing radical happened to achieve that promise. There are many more similar examples.
Employees receive internal newsletters, go to conferences, act out brand positioning in theatre workshops, are given mouse-mats with the company brand vision on them and they wait for things to change. Not surprisingly, nothing much happens as a result.
If we are to help organisations develop deliverable brand experiences we need to consider a new way of thinking and deliver as an industry.
Of course companies need brilliant insight into the real behaviours and attitudes of their customers and this must be based on an innovative research methodology that penetrates the highly educated and cynical minds of customers, and of course employees.
Such insight should naturally feed a genuine and clear differentiation through great brand strategy powered by a vision of how the brand can position itself in the ever more competitive markets organisations face today.
It is at this stage that so many of the traditional brand consultancies and communications agencies leave their clients at the altar, so to speak. They simply do not know how to align the brand to the vision and how to help their clients actually deliver it at all the points where the customer will touch the brand.
Not surprisingly it takes a whole different bunch of skills and tools to do this.
Aligning to the brand vision done properly is a trans-organisational activity that involves not just marketing expertise but also the people who deal with the customers; human resources, procurement, logistics, sales people – the whole organisation.
Without this the inevitable happens. Employees always spot the problems first, followed by the customers, followed by the financial department, followed by the City, by which time it is often either too late to fix or is massively expensive to put right, as M&S have found over the last few years.
Real brand alignment requires a deep understanding of and ability to rapidly influence the brand critical processes and behaviours of an organisation in order to help it, and its employees, to actually deliver the experience and expectations the brand strategy is creating in the minds of its customers and stakeholders.
After all it is as true today as it always has been that actions speak louder than words and real brand alignment is about ensuring organisations keep the promises their brands make to all of their stakeholders: be they customers, employees or shareholders.
So as an industry, we have to consider new capabilities and skills, recruiting people from different industries and sectors, and new techniques and processes to help us help the clients get results in this new era of branding.
The old “solutions” no longer get the clients the results they need.
Andrew Stothert is the co-founder of Brand Vista based in Cheshire and a former CEO of JWT Manchester
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