by Richard Schreuer and John Martin
Recently, we worked with a client company that
had been spending much time and effort building its brand and doing
quite well at it, or so they thought. It was an Internet company that
had been running "brand building" marketing campaigns, and traffic
at the website was high, suggesting brand awareness was up there as
well. Our job was to merely look for and recommend ways to improve
on its successful brand-building campaign.
Once in there, however, we uncovered a surprising
fact: The company’s brand seemed in fact to be no stronger among its
target audience than even before the successful campaign had begun.
Upon closer examination, we encountered a statistic even more startling:
More than 30 percent of those who had visited our client’s site within
the previous 30 days couldn't even remember having been there. Though
very effective in generating traffic and raising initial brand awareness,
the actual experience of interacting with the company had made virtually
no lasting brand impression. Worse yet, the company had no idea of
the extent to which customer experiences wesre undermining the millions
they were spending on marketing their brand.
While making the case for senior managers to take
explicit responsibility for the company’s brand, an article in Harvard
Business Review last year (July/August 1999) suggested the reason
why. Preceding many of its recommendations with the word TRY, it implied
the difficulty companies face in identifying effective methods for
understanding how operations impact the brand and subsequent customer
behaviors. However, as is unfortunately the state of thinking on this
matter in general, it offered up this point almost as an aside while,
in our view, it is THE key critical issue to brand-building success.
An integrated understanding of the brand is a vital component, not
an elective. Without attacking this challenge full-force, management
teams will always have trouble ensuring their brand building and management
efforts meet objectives.
This matter of integrating brand thinking throughout
the organization is complex, requiring the linking of external measures
of brand and customer feedback with internal measurements of organizational
performance. Yet only when senior managers see how their particular
areas of responsibility support or undermine the brand will progress
be made. Basically, you can't effectively manage brand performance
until you develop the capability of measuring the impact of all areas
of your organization on your brand.
Most companies are aware of this. In fact, they
almost all understand that everything that touches a customer is a
brand communication with the capacity to support or undermine the
brand. The problem is that very few organizations are in fact doing
the work of measuring their brands in a way that acknowledges that
fact.
But some companies are achieving it, implementing
brand performance information systems that drive resource allocation
and prioritize improvement decisions for the purpose of maintaining
brand-based competitive advantage. They apply a concept of "value
drivers," i.e., distinctive elements of value that create competitive
distinctiveness and directly drive revenue-generating market behaviors
they want their customers to take (initial purchase, re-purchase,
willingness to pay a price premium, etc.) to both their marketing
communications and their operations, thus establishing a platform
to consistently deliver competitive value and fostering customer loyalty
and trust. By doing so, they also create customers who will advocate
for the company and its products enthusiastically over the long term,
spreading the word again and again.
The key to effective integrated brand management,
then, lies in linking customer, operational, and financial information
into a system of brand performance information. We have developed
three steps a company can take to make such a model work:
Objectively understand the key elements of your
competitive value. This means doing solid research to see your brand
through the eyes of your marketplace, untarnished by personal or internal
biases, and basing your evaluation upon customer (and potential customer)
needs and goals.
Make sure there is a solid brand information base
to work from and that it takes a holistic view, doing more than just
identifying your value drivers. It must also show how those elements
are re-enforced or undermined throughout all areas of the organization,
as well as the impact of each on the bottom line.
Deploy the information in all areas so that brand
management responsibility can be directly linked to specific responsibilities
throughout the organization. Managers can then incorporate measurable
elements of the brand information system into their fundamental management
activities of goal setting, individual performance evaluation and
resource allocation.
This use of integrated brand information will drive
responsibility for brand management throughout the organization, making
the concept that "everyone is responsible for the brand" tangible
in a focused, systematic, and measurable way. Providing a blueprint
for truly understanding the kinds of customer behavior the company
wants to drive, true integrated brand thinking allows management teams
to accept appropriate responsibility for managing the brand and join
with marcom in making it reality.
Richard Schreuer (senior vice-president) and John Martin (chairman)
are consultants with Chadwick Martin Bailey, Inc., a Boston-based
market research and consulting firm that uses advanced, proprietary
research and measurement to help its clients identify and penetrate
markets, develop products, improve service delivery, and build brand
value. They can be reached by calling 617.350.892 or by visiting chadwickmartinbailey.com.
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