Today marks the official launch of Tenet Partners, a brand innovation and marketing consultancy, which represents the combined entity of two established firms that joined forces earlier this year — Brandlogic and CoreBrand.

Yes, we are now presenting ourselves as one with a new name, logo, go-to-market strategy, brand voice and look and feel. We are expressing ourselves via a new personality through a verbal and visual expression that externally brings credibility and energy to our customer-centered growth strategies. But before any of this could even begin to take place, we had to take the time to evaluate the key internal components of the two separate entities that comprise what is oftentimes referred to as “the back room” or back operations of the firm and determine how to launch a successful integration process.

Any acquisition or merger regardless of how big or small requires that the daily operations continue to run seamlessly while, at the same time, a core team evaluates all operations closely to determine the best practices that will provide clients with an experience they not only expect, but deserve.

We know that how we are viewed externally is contingent upon how we operate internally. From our phone system to our email address and signature, from scoping, estimating and managing projects to billing and invoicing individually and collectively reflect upon what it is like to work with us every day. With four primary office locations from east to west that needed to be synchronized, we took a close look at a range of touchpoints that impact customer experience:

• Finance, including financial software, budgeting, forecasting, financial reporting, billing, and AP/AR to ensure compliance, accuracy, responsiveness and flexibility. We have successfully simplified the process for both our team and our clients.
• HR resources and competitive employee benefits/policies to ensure we retain and attract the best talent
• Facilities and technology such as office locations, phone, IT and CRM integration to enable constant connectivity among and between locations to successfully service clients around the globe
• Project management, tracking and scheduling to keep our team and our clients on track, on budget and on time
• Talent and areas of expertise to instill confidence that we can deliver against our value props and customer-centered positioning. This included assessing our talent across disciplines and identifying growth opportunities.
• Shaking up our corporate structure, transitioning from a “flat” structure to one that incorporates various levels of talent and career growth, providing our clients with expertise from vast backgrounds and branding experiences. Our new org chart fosters an interdisciplinary environment that supports a range of possibilities to help uncover unique opportunities for clients.
• Go-to-market strategy–ensuring that our own marketing and digital content and how it applies to messaging through our pitches, website, social media, blogs, books and white papers, public relations and speaking engagements instill confidence in our staff, clients and prospects that our knowledge, experience, know-how and innovative approach will result in solutions that will help make our clients think differently about their businesses.

All of this needed to be accomplished within a set time frame, while taking into consideration how to best blend two cultures. Our emphasis is on our first applying our customer-centered business strategy with our own customers–our team members. Achieving a successful balance between what we need to do in order to be effective day in and day out by putting our team at the center of our thought processes helped to ground us in many of our decisions. The key was communicating often, and there is no such thing as communicating too often when it comes to staff. While for many of us the acquisition brought feelings of excitement, optimism, renewed energy, career growth opportunities and endless possibilities, for others there were feelings of anxiety, fear and apprehension. Recognizing and balancing the two sets of emotions was critical to our achieving success in launching our new brand.

Being new to M+As, no one could have prepared me for how integral and challenging this process would be. It is after experiencing a company integration firsthand, that I have now come to understand and appreciate the core attributes for M+A success – optimism, patience, understanding, time (allow for double the amount of time you think will be required), realistic expectations, a dedicated and committed team with a “can do” attitude and making sure that you put one of your key principles for growth at the center of all you do – your employees. While the daily operations and processes that have been identified will help our firm run smoothly, we know that our team is a unique point-of-difference and makes Tenet Partners stand out from all others.

To say that we have all of this 100 percent figured out would not be 100 percent true; it is still evolving every day. What I do know is that we are confident that we’ve built a strong brand and marketing consultancy that is running smoothly and is comprised of a team of experts who work really well together and are ready to help our clients uncover and develop customer-centered growth strategies.

Digital is having a profound impact on business strategy, branding and customer experience. It’s clear that organizations need to take a fresh look at how to embrace the shift. But how to innovate successfully in this highly connected environment requires more focus than ever before.

Over the past two years, I have been steeped in a broad-based management program at Harvard Business School that focuses on innovation and entrepreneurship. The experience has left a permanent imprint on my thinking about how to drive success in a rapidly changing business landscape. The primary theme is focused on making choices. The argument, achieving strategic and executional clarity requires many tradeoffs. In the works of Michael Porter and Earl Sasser, the takeaway can be summarized in one thought. ‘Business strategy’ is about choosing what you won’t do and ‘service excellence’ is about choosing what you won’t do well. It took me a bit of time to grapple with that one, but once I wrapped my head around the idea, it’s a powerful way of thinking. And, let’s face it, making choices is the toughest part of business.

So, how do leaders build better business strategies and deliver powerful customer experiences? I believe the answer is brand-led innovation.

For our firm, brand embodies key elements of business strategy, especially the articulation of competitive advantage. Every business has a strategy, whether planned or unplanned, that which at its core is a set of attributes and activities that you have decided to pursue to create distinctive value in the market. If you understand what those activities are, you have made the first step to understanding how to achieve differentiation with your brand. If you understand why customers choose you and how they think of you, you have made the second step to building and managing brand perceptions around your competitive advantage. Unfortunately, and all too often, companies are unclear about their business strategy, their brand, and how to deliver a great customer experience to the right customer. Usually, no one has stopped to look at the big picture and to do the hard job of making choices.

A central theme of innovation is how to incrementally improve or create new products or services, business processes or new employee behaviors. Increasingly, innovations come through new ways of connecting and communicating with customers using digital and related technologies. For example, something as simple as a mobile app for travelers is using a suite of digital and technology elements to redefine the customer experience. This can have a big impact on the bottom line or fall flat due to a lack of alignment to your strategy and brand.

If the innovation does not create value for the customer, it will surely be a miss. Again, more often than not, companies pursue innovations for the sake of chasing a fad, and as a result are having a hard time finding the return on those investments. The outcomes don’t produce as much value as possible because the innovations are not intrinsically or extrinsically aligned.

Enter brand-led innovation. Leaders can create strategic clarity and enhance value by creating alignment with a comprehensive branding program. Brands help people see what a company stands for, their unique capabilities and how they deliver value to customers. Most importantly, an organization gains a better understanding of what customers want, need and value through the branding process. Developing and managing a brand requires companies to look at their business strategy, study their competition and dive deep into the needs of customers. That journey ultimately involves making choices that inform strategy, defines the brand, identifies opportunities for real innovations, and drives value creation. Powerful stuff.

Organizations that are crystal clear about their strategy, their brand and their customer have the basis to ignite growth.

Brand is a set of experiences delivered, not just promises communicated. When you embark on a strategic rethink of your company’s brand it is critical to keep this in mind from the outset. It isn’t just about capturing the language of repositioning; it’s about engaging your organization to deliver a set of intended, distinctive experiences across customer touch points. This has never been more true than it is in today’s environment.

Technology is opening up new opportunities to both differentiate customer experiences and establish new or additional incentives for trial, selection and loyalty across nearly every industry. It is accepted that these changes should become factors of business strategy, but they must also be reflected in the definition of brand strategy, experience design and even corporate purpose.

Mastering the interplay of customer experience and brand strategy is becoming a crucial test for marketers. With brands built more and more through orchestrated experiences, an omni-channel review of customer experience as part of discovery is vital. Without it, no brand team can provide guidance that unifies the direction for brand communications and service delivery in ways that heighten relevance, attraction and the loyalty of customers.

Integration is the key. Only when you rise above historic patterns to integrate disciplines and processes can you create new value through a customer-experience-centered brand. In today’s digital world, isn’t it time to stop thinking about brand strategy, customer experience, and corporate purpose as related but separate disciplines?

Let me know what you think.

Recently I drove by a billboard advertising a pharmaceutical and swore I recognized the woman in the ad. I can’t remember the name of the advertised drug, but I certainly remember the handsome, gray-haired woman. I couldn’t instantly place her, but I knew I’d seen her before. And then it finally dawned on me. I recognized her from many hours of searching for royalty-free stock images. I’d seen her in all sorts of situations—from boardroom meetings to intense one-on-one conversations with coworkers. And now here she was walking on the beach!

A great deal of time, effort and money is spent on building powerful, unique brands. From research and strategy to logos and websites, companies clearly understand the value in creating memorable experiences for customers. So, it makes me wonder why bland, generic stock images are becoming the norm.

As I continued to think about photography and its role in brand building, I started exploring companies that are clearly investing in creative photography and companies that are clearly NOT. I think we can learn a lot from looking at two very different brands that are certainly getting it right when it comes to their photography style.

The first is charity: water, a non-profit organization dedicated to bringing clean, safe drinking water to people in developing countries. With a truly distinctive tone, the photography charity: water uses to tell its story is authentic, captivating and always emotional. With far too many non-profits relying on user generated photos that tend to lack consistency and quality, charity: water stands out in a bold and memorable way.

The second is John Deere, an iconic brand with a long history of using photography that perfectly captures its personality. The quality of the light, the expansiveness of the landscapes and the scale of the machinery is instantly recognizable. The John Deere style is just what it should be: Strong, filled with pride and thoroughly American.

All brands should be impactful, memorable and distinctive. The right photography can certainly help get you there.