Brand Differentiation—It’s An Inside Job

3 Ways to Maximize Competitive Advantage!

By Suzanne Tulien, Principal and co-Founder of The Brand Ascension Group

Business innovation never ceases to amaze me! Every day I see ads that blow me away when it comes to new ideas and state-of-the-art features and benefits of existing products. The problem, however, with differentiating your brand through product features and benefits is that those are easily copied by competitors. Once it catches on, ‘poof!’ — no longer a differentiator.

Brands that are highly product based can’t help but differentiate through features. I remember my jaw dropping when I saw an ad for the newest Maybelline mascara equipped with a tiny battery that causes the wand to vibrate! It’s the first of its kind, vibrates 7,000x a minute, and has a battery life of up to 130 applications. I had to think, well, ‘how else could they innovate mascara?’

 

Undercover Boss- Afraid of what you might find?

If you watched the new series ‘Undercover Boss’ that debuted right after the SuperBowl then you probably wondered what would be discovered if you did the same (assuming you are the boss reading this).

This series is a perfect display of an organization not being fully conscious of how their brand is lived and breathed from the inside out. A common oversight, but could be a fatal mistake in the long run.

Remember Larry O’Donnell’s (CEO of Waste Management) realization that some of the issues he experienced personally were mandates that came directly from him own office? Wow! What an eye opener for him and his leadership teams. I’ve searched their website and did not find a listing of core values per se, but a lot on their company governance, mission, and their THINK GREEN tenants: http://www.wm.com/wm/about/itged.asp

 

It’s Time To Think Differently About Brand Differentiation

As business owners, we know that differentiation is one of the key attributes that win and keep business. Unfortunately, many business look at their differentiators from a product feature standpoint; which means they are missing a huge component to true brand differentiation.

Remember, a brand is a perception. We all have a brand; good, bad or indifferent. So when we think about the perception that our brand brings to the minds of our customers (and employees), we must consider all the actions and behaviors that accompany our product or service.

Great brands see themselves as holistic in how they operate. Living their core values and brand style through every facet of their organization. The branding function doesn’t just live in the Marketing Director’s mind, but rather in every employee.  How many of you reading this have been officially oriented into the brand you are working for? I shiver at your answers.

 

CUSTOMER SERVICE MISHAPS – DO YOU HAVE A PROCESS FOR QUICK RECOVERY?

Service recovery is a big issue for many businesses. Service mishaps happen all the time, but how often do they happen in your business? Are you keeping track? When it does happen, you can’t mess around. Your employees need to be empowered to recover as quickly as possible, show the customer you care and make it right. When you recover quickly with concern, it will most definitely get the attention of your customers. They will understand you care and appreciate that you can deliver on what you promise and enhance their loyalty to your brand.

Here are five simple tips to implement that will enable your employees to recover from a service mishap quickly:

 

IT’S 2010 – Where is YOUR Brand Going?

I am watching an intriguing show on CNBC called ‘Keeping America Great’ featuring two prestigious American icons, Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, while a host facilitates a town hall-style meeting with students from Columbia University asking them thought-provoking questions. One of the questions from a third year student was directed at Mr. Gates and asked something like this “Considering your level of success, what do you attribute to just sheer luck?”  Bill Gates answered by stating that there were many incidences he attributed to his luck and success but the first two was being born in America and being born at this particular time in the world’s evolution.

After that, an insightful discussion began about the importance for business leaders to understand the context of the overall environment (economy, perceptions, technology, and trends to name a few) and having sound principles to see you and your stakeholders through the evolution of growth and innovation. Mr. Gates reminded the audience how exciting the times are right now in terms of innovation, evolution and transformation. Never before have we had such a level of speed, mass communication, transportation, mobility, convenience, research and technology at our fingertips to further our own evolution.

 

Branded Service Moments of Truth

By Carol Chapman, Principal & Co-founder, The Brand Ascension Group

Most people have heard the term Moments of Truth. These are those defining moments when customers evaluate whether or not you Walk your Talk as a brand and declare “This is great—I’ll be back” or “Nada – don’t’ think I’ll return”.

I’ve recently come to believe (based on my experience) that there are very few brands that hire and train their employees for behaviors that reflect their brand. I think that most businesses just take it for granted that their employees know how to interact positively with their customers.

When an organization’s marketing messages promise something to their customers but the actual experience is short of living up to that promise, that’s when organizations need to be aware that this impacts how your brand is perceived –big time! Why are less and less organizations concerned about how their employees are showing up and behaving during service interactions? Consider the following scenarios that I experienced recently with a couple of online retailers:

 

What is the ‘One Word’ You Want to Own in the Minds of Your Market?

By Carol Chapman, Principal & Co-founder

Regardless of the size of your organization, has the question been asked, “What is the one word you want to own in the minds of your market??  Before you answer, first think about the following:

1. What is the overall feeling you want everyone (internally – your employees and externally – your customers) to experience ‘every step of the way’ with your brand?
2. What is your brand’s ‘leave-behind’ expressed in one word? Try asking your employees and customers. The answers will most certainly be very revealing and probably varying.

Owning that one word requires that you be conscious and fanatical about your brand and focused on delivering consistently to show up that way. If you really think about, your brand is much more than your logo, image or clever advertising campaign. It is the emotional connection that creates a bond with others. It is a PERCEPTION that is result of the experiences you create internally with your employees and externally with your customers and how you manage those perceptions.

 

DEMAND FOR YOUR BRAND

How to Create Customer Insistence through Internal Employee Brand Engagement!
By Carol Chapman, Principal & Co-founder, The Brand Ascension Group

Building a brand in today’s global market is very different from what it used to be. No longer can an organization expect marketing to do the work of branding. Marketing is important for communicating and spreading your brand’s message, piquing the interest of and acquiring new customers, however, the sheer effort of marketing doesn’t create a unique culture, systems and processes, nor deliver memorable brand experiences that keep customers coming back for more. That’s why the function of brand definition and development is critical prior to the creative efforts of marketing.

Branding is the process of defining and consistently living your brand’s message at the internal level through your employees to build the ever sought-after customer DEMAND FOR YOUR BRAND.

With the infusion of the internet into just about everything we do and social media connecting people across the globe, every business is highly exposed to anything and everything that is said about them.  Like it or not, all humans are emotional creatures. Everyone loves a good story whether positive or negative. Stories can spread like wildfire and make or break a brand’s reputation, empowering consumers to make snap decisions on whether to do business with you or your competitor. Talk about the creation of a new level of transparency for businesses. No longer can any business hide behind a clever marketing campaign to create DEMAND FOR YOUR BRAND.

Consider the following true story (that has been all over the internet for some time) about a musician, Dave Carroll on a flight from Nova Scotia to Nebraska, U.S. who claimed the airline broke his guitar that was valued around $3,500. He spent several months trying to get the airline to make the situation right, to no avail. So, Mr. Carroll and his band recorded a song about the incident and posted it on YouTube. Needless to say, once the airline caught wind of the post it immediately contacted Mr. Carroll to make the situation right.

According to buzzstudy.com, their analysis of the web chatter on this airline brand showed a dramatic spike for many days following the post; creating a flurry of negative press for this carrier which could have been avoided if they had made the situation right for the customer in the first place.  Situations like these can have a negative effect on any brand. In the airline industry, many of us have come to accept and expect bad experiences. It seems like the status quo, but it doesn’t have to be that way. Situations like these can easily be avoided by making sure your employees understand what your brand stands for and are empowered to deliver whatever it takes to deliver on it—including doing what it takes to make it right for the customer.

So, I think we can conclude that no longer are the days of companies buying their way through a clever marketing campaign to create DEMAND FOR THE BRAND. We’re living in an emotionally charged experience economy that’s moving at lightning speed. More often than not, marketing campaigns promise one thing, while the customer experiences something different. These campaigns are short-lived and a waste of a lot of time and money.

Creating demand for your brand is about forming a strong emotional bond with your customers. As emotional creatures your customers are forming impressions of your brand at every touch point. The best way to create customer demand is to engage your employees to get behind your brand and establish that emotional connection by delivering positively memorable experiences that delight your customers.

You’ve got to wow your customers at every possible opportunity. Your employees are the life-blood of the business and are crucial to its success. All the money spent on marketing messages cannot create insistence for your brand without the internal brand strategies to back up those messages. Marketing won’t create a culture of engaged employees that live and breathe the essence of your brand consistently. You have to start internally to get your employees behind your brand and cultivate the culture that will behave in ways that affirm and continue to reaffirm your brand.

So how do you create DEMAND FOR YOUR BRAND through a culture of committed and engaged employees? Here are four simple steps:

1.    Define the Essence of Your Brand—your unique Brand DNA.

Engaged employees understand the essence of the brand. By understanding the essence of your brand and being empowered through a set of shared values and standards to deliver on that essence, they will instinctively know how to act on those values, despite any procedures manual you may have. Procedures are guidelines but they shouldn’t take the place of using common sense to delight customers. Let’s take for example a Brand Essence expressed in 3-5 highly descriptive words (like a mantra) that every employee can immediately comprehend. Take a look at these examples of some our clients to illustrate the point. We refer to these as Brand Platforms. See the clarity and emotionally charged feeling they convey:

• Excellence, Simply Mind-blowing Experience
• E3 – Entertain, Engage, Excel!
• D2D – Driven to Deliver!
• ESP – Extraordinary Solutions + Partnerships
• C.A.R.E.S – Community, Accountability, Respect, Empowerment, Service

Each of these examples can give employees a clear focus on what these brands stand for. It’s important to dig deep to uncover your unique Brand DNA—your values, your style or personality as a brand, your differentiators, and your standards of performance, your Brand Platform and Promise. However, it doesn’t stop there; your Brand DNA is the blueprint that needs to be embedded into every facet of your organization. There needs to be some teeth behind how you and your employees deliver on what the brand stands for through distinctive and consistent behaviors.

2.    Ensure Effective On-going Communication

Leverage every opportunity to communicate the essence of your brand and reaffirm the message. There are a variety of ways to do so—through your orientation or on-boarding process, your employee handbook, town hall meetings, daily interactions and team meetings. If you are a larger organization, bring together Marketing, HR and Communications to develop a well-thought out process for communicating your brand through all the internal vehicles available.

Be creative, leverage your internal newsletter, your website or intranet to speak about what you stand for; consider developing a brand-relevant DVD that explains the attributes of your brand for employees or a branded mascot that serves to champion and express the essence of the brand. Get the information out there on what your brand stands for and do it continually. Repetition is golden.

One of our clients has created a cartoon character named Elena E3! Based on their Brand Platform: Entertain, Engage, Excel!  She is the official brand champion representative and even has her own email address. She acts as the ‘cheerleader’ for the brand and regularly sends out messages, appears on videos and through emails reminding and empowering the employees to live the brand. So far, this has been a very successful internal campaign to keep the essence of the brand top of mind.

Communication should always be two-way. Give your employees opportunities to ask questions and express ideas in a proactive and productive manner, and provide feedback.

3.    Develop and Implement Branded Service Training to Deliver on the Brand Experience

Develop a fun, experiential and highly interactive training process for all employees to better understand, embrace and deliver a branded service experience both internally and externally that reflects the essence of the brand.  Convey the importance of how you can differentiate your brand behaviorally at every touch point.

An effective branded service training program incorporates a variety of activities by applying the different modalities for adult learning (i.e., visual, auditory, intellectual and kinesthetic) to help employees understand what it takes to deliver the desired branded experience, such as:

• Role playing training/scenarios at key touch points to help employees learn behaviors that reflect the brand.
• Developing a distinctive ‘brand speak’ that can be incorporated into daily interactions with other employees and customers.
• Communications etiquette both in oral and written form.
• Emotional intelligence understanding/training to help your employees enhance their self-awareness and self-management, as well as develop more social awareness and relationship management skills when interacting with one another and customers.
• Understanding/reading body language.
• Personal image and professional presence that reflect the brand.
• How to interpret and adapt individual style that complements your brand’s overall style.

Training in these areas can go a long way in channeling employees’ energies and how they manage their behaviors with one another and your customers—creating that ever coveted DEMAND FOR YOUR BRAND.

4.    Reinforce the Desired Brand Behaviors

Recognition can go a long way. Make sure you have a recognition program that is highly brand-relevant. A well-designed and effectively administered recognition program can have many positive results such as:

• More proactive, fully engaged employees
• Fosters channels of communication
• Increases productivity
• Motivates employees to believe in the brand and achieve more
• Reinforces your brand’s attributes (i.e., values, style, culture, brand essence, etc.)
• Creates camaraderie
• Builds a culture of trust, confidence and appreciation
• Acknowledges positive behaviors that support the brand
• Builds mutual commitments and relationships
• Improves employee and customer satisfaction
• Boosts sales and bottom-line performance

A recognition program doesn’t have to be solely financially focused. In fact, recognition can take a variety of forms.

Identify and establish the right mix and array of creative vehicles. Best practices suggest as much personalization as possible.

Get your employees involved in developing the program. Consider a variety of fun awards, celebrations, ‘kudos’, parties, personalized gifts, thank you notes, simple praises, regular internal press releases, external customer press releases, certificates. You’ll be amazed at the how creative you can get.

Following these simple steps will enable you create and sustain DEMAND FOR YOUR BRAND!

Contact Details
Phone: +1 719.748.2290
Email: Info@BrandAscension.com
Website: www.BrandAscension.com

 

Employee Team Motivation in Tough Times

There are sure fire ways to motivate your employee team and keep them highly focused. The key piece to this is undergoing a internal brand-defining initiative. This process will awake and re-energize your team to take ownership in the brand they represent. We have seen amazing paradigm shifts in employee cultures when they begin to truly understand and CONTRIBUTE to what the brand stands for.

Too many businesses, unfortunately, do not take the time to create the brand foundation and provide an clear definition of its own Brand DNA. How can employees truly embrace an employer, especially when times are tough, when they don’t clearly understand what the brand stands for? Through our proprietary, step-by-step, online course you can engage your employee team through powerful experiential brand-defining activities that not only build teams, but help them get crystal clear on the brand and take ownership of its success. This process re-ignites the meaning and depth of your brand and re-energizes it through unique behaviors and actions that help you create more consistency and distinction in your marketplace.

I highly encourage you to check out this comprehensive MISSING PIECE in small business growth. http://www.BrandAscension.com – Would love to speak to you personally, you can reach me at Suzanne@BrandAscension.com.

 

THE ROI OF INTERNAL BRAND ALIGNMENT: A SYMPHONIC MASTERPIECE

Learn to profit from the synchronicity of brand harmony
and rhythm within your organization.
By Suzanne Tulien, Principal & Co-Founder

They say that music is a universal language. That all humans can relate to rhythms, beats, and tones and pace at an emotional level. We all know that music can cause an eruption of tears, build heightened states of energy, slow things down, and relax even the most wound up children. Why is this important and how does it relate to your brand? Good question.

The music concept is important in the creation of a highly relevant analogy that will creatively explain the underlying value of conscious, strategic internal brand strategies within your business. It relates to your brand because everything you do in your business contributes too, or takes away from the value of your brand.

I started thinking about this analogy when a prospective client asked a simple question regarding one of our proposed approaches to defining and aligning his internal brand with his external marketing promises. He asked, “What is my return on investment?” It was then I realized I had to put it into simpler terms and get them beyond thinking about just the bottom-line, at any given snapshot in time, and more about the organization as a whole. So I started thinking…

The very next day, while I was flipping through our XM channels trying to get a sense for what genre I was in the mood for, I came across a station playing popular symphonies. I happen to tune in during a live interview being broadcast from a music hall with the highly recognizable sounds of musicians individually tuning and rehearsing for the next set. You know, that random collection of various instruments practicing from a different area of the sheet music all at the same time.  That’s when it struck me!

THE POWER OF THE COLLECTIVE.

When I thought about the internal operations, the culture, the systems and processes of many of business brands, I realized I could liken them to the individual musicians tuning and rehearsing their own instruments prior to joining the orchestra. You see, each musician has their own part they play, their own expertise they provide, and their own sound contribution. Like a business with several departments, areas of expertise, and a variety of functions each employee plays, they are each responsible for providing their own contribution to the overall brand.  But what brings these employees together to function efficiently, productively, and energetically tuned specifically for the overall benefit of the brand?

When the orchestra musicians are satisfied with their tuning, they come together, each to the same page of music, and eagerly await the maestro’s masterful guidance in aligning them to play in perfect unison, creating a symphonic masterpiece, such as in Beethoven’s No. 9. The outputs result in an amazing experience for the audience, often taking their breath away and leaving them with an explosive and beautiful auditory and visual experience.

Who within your Business Brand is your maestro? Are your employees constantly tuning their own areas of expertise or are they working in unison to compose and deliver an unforgettable customer experience?

WALKING YOUR BRAND TALK.

Steve Mckee, President of McKee Wallwork Cleveland Advertising, recently wrote an article stating the seven key reasons ‘Why Your Advertising Isn’t Working.’ In the seventh reason he hit one of the most common, but least attended to issues of dissonance customers have with a brand…

7. “It’s not an advertising problem. A common mistake many companies make is trying to use advertising to fix another problem. It may be faulty or outdated product design, an uncompetitive cost structure, customer service letdowns, or any number of other things. It’s not as if they do so intentionally; it’s just that it’s a whole lot easier to put on a new coat of paint than it is to fix the foundation that’s causing the drywall to crack. No company executes flawlessly, but until you can maintain a solid track record of excellence, spend your money on internal improvements rather than advertising. Paint may mask the problem for a short time, but soon new cracks will begin to appear.”

 
His point is powerful and clearly stated, but unfortunately sorely attended to within organizations generally because it is difficult to know where to begin within the brand to bring the ‘orchestra of employees’ together to create the masterpiece experience for the customer, consistently.

We see this all the time. Advertising and marketing dollars are continuously used in efforts to mitigate a growth problem and it becomes a never-ending game of customer acquisition. Instead we ask that you consider the alternative; by focusing on customer retention techniques through internal brand definition and strategic implementation throughout all facets of the organization. An action such as this will engage your employees, provide a crystal clear branded ‘symphony’ to play from, and create positive, beautiful outputs that move your customers to buy more, return more often and tell their friends. What is our learning point? Stop marketing, for now, start BRANDING…from the inside out. Build a branded foundational masterpiece that will increase your marketing ROI by aligning its operations and behaviors to empower your brand to walk its talk.

Remember, 94% of your customers WANT TO BE LOYAL. Enhance their reasons to.

Here are a few things you can do now to kick-start the process:

1. Implement a customer ‘touch-point’ audit and discover all the areas and stages your brand reaches the customer (e.g., phone, invoice, on-site environment, employees, follow-up, referral programs, special events, transactional experiences, etc.)
2. Get your leadership team together and ask the question: ‘What ONE WORD do we want to own in the minds of our market?’
3. Get creative! Use that word as your basis for creating relevant behaviors and actions that express and elevate it through each of those ‘touch-point’ areas you listed in your touch-point audit.

IT DOESN’T HAVE TO BE OVER WHEN THE FAT LADY SINGS, IT COULD BE JUST THE BEGINNING.