Category: Take5

The corporate brand is probably the least understood asset in most companies, yet it can be one of the greatest tools to building value. Tracking brand health and understanding your brand’s contribution to financial performance are critical in uncovering opportunities for growth, understanding ROI, determining brand strategy, and focusing marketing investments.

Although it is classified as an intangible asset, the corporate brand can be consistently measured and valued and therefore should be held to the same demands of performance as any other business asset. Yet as hard as it can be to get budgets approved for brand and marketing activities, it can be even harder to get budgets for brand health measurement and tracking.

To help you build your case, here are five reasons brand valuation matters:

1. Identify competitive advantage and opportunity.

Understanding brand value relative to competitors can inspire change in growth strategies. It’s not enough to simply be different from other providers; you must stand out in ways that drive value to achieve business success. The only way to do this is to understand the full context of the market and how it impacts your organization. Identifying shifts and trends in your brand’s strengths uncovers opportunities to advance through product / service adjacencies, geographical growth, and M&A activity. The proper brand intelligence also gives you insight into where the market is going before your competitors do. When you ask the right questions and maintain a continuous pulse on the dynamics around you, you can predict market shifts and adjust accordingly.

2. Legitimize and optimize investments.

By understanding and defining the value brand creates, questions about brand-building investment change from whether to invest to how much to invest. If you have a solid benchmark of brand health, when you take on new activities such as sponsorship or social media – whether at the corporate or product level – you will be able to understand exactly the impact your efforts have on corporate value. You can model the impact of a projected lift in brand to determine expected financial results and compare outcomes with associated costs and identify optimal investment levels.

Companies that understand this manage their brand investment to maintain and maximize brand value. Coca-Cola, American Express and FedEx are consistently among the companies with the highest brand equity. They are each characterized as a company that communicates aggressively, shaping the landscape of its markets. This kind of presence has helped frame their markets to their own strengths and helped them reap the related benefits.

3. Enhance portfolio decisions.

Often businesses are managing a network of brands: enterprise brands, sub-brands, lines of business, and products / service brands. Consistently tracking and monitoring the health of each entity’s brand allows you to fully understand the entire ecosystem of your brand portfolio. You can understand the connections, influences and the “halo effect” that occurs between the master brand and sub-brands and vice-versa. Knowing this enables investment decisions that truly balance and streamline your portfolio.

4. Inform M&A, strategic alliances and licensing opportunities.

Understanding the value of all business assets informs negotiations in mergers, acquisitions and partnerships. M&A can be tricky, and emotional attachment to pre-existing entities can be strong. But by objectively assessing the value and dimension of all brands involved, leadership can strategically deploy those brands for maximum impact. Also, knowing the value your brand brings – and where its weaknesses may lie – helps identify opportunities for partnerships and acquisitions that may not have otherwise been obvious.

Tracking brand value can also open doors to turning your brand into a product itself. Knowing the brand’s value permits predictable revenue growth through licensing efforts. A brand on the move creates momentum that can be leveraged. Licensing is a great way to make significant income from the brand itself.

5. Validate the efforts of your team.

Measurement and metrics add science to the art of creative brand building. By utilizing a tangible measure of impact, leadership and marketing teams can be objectively evaluated for their stewardship and management of the brand asset over the long term. Creating a common vocabulary between brand and finance strengthens marketing’s position at the management table. Because the return for branding can be identified and tracked over time, the effort and results for all departments are visible. This permits all senior managers to work together for the optimum total return on investment throughout the company. When finance and marketing cooperate and work toward defined goals, everyone wins.

It seems like it was just yesterday that you launched your new positioning, tagline, logo, website, signage and advertising campaign. Now your team is telling you that it might be time to give it all an update. What do you do?

First thing is to remember that a brand is much more than just a logo. It encompasses everything that contributes toward customer experience, including culture and how you deliver your product or service.

Even if, subjectively, some are unhappy with your brand expression, you have to evaluate it objectively. Rebranding is an expensive endeavor; you should only do it to solve a strategic issue. Due to the time it takes to build familiarity and positive perceptions, it is often when the internal team begins to tire of your current messaging that external audiences are just beginning to catch on. Just because you feel like you need a change doesn’t necessarily mean you do.

Nonetheless, your brand is an essential business tool. If it is not helping you achieve your strategic goals, no matter how attached you are to your brand promise or your current campaigns, it may be time to take a fresh look at them.

Here are five signs it’s time to reevaluate your brand strategy.

1. Your brand scores are slipping

Akin to servicing a car, you need to keep tabs on the functioning of your brand. If you regularly research your brand’s relevance with key audiences and periodically fine tune your messaging then you will get a lot more miles out of the brand than if you drive it off the showroom floor and never get it serviced. At a minimum, annual brand health surveys with external and internal audiences can keep you from suffering any major brand breakdowns. At best, you can solicit feedback in real-time from your customers, employees, and constituencies so you can respond quickly and efficiently.

2. The business strategy changes

Brand strategy always follows business strategy. Perhaps the leadership team has decided that doubling revenues by acquisition is the goal for the next five years. Or maybe an IPO is in the not-so-distant future. Or the opportunity has arisen to enter a new international market. As a critical tool for rationalizing your portfolio and building market appeal, your brand needs to align with, support, and reflect your business strategy. It is the story that holds your business together and it must be told clearly and consistently to have proper impact.

3. Competitive pressures have increased

Whether there are new entrants in your industry or a groundbreaking technological advance, when the dynamics of your industry shift, you need to make sure you aren’t being left behind. “Clear, relevant, believable and distinct” is the mantra we use to keep us on track when developing a brand positioning. When market dynamics change, so can your ability to stand out from the crowd and be unique. If a “me too” provider pops up with a vociferous awareness campaign, you run the danger of becoming a referential brand: “Yeah, we’re just like X only we’ve been around longer.” You need to retool your messages to stand apart, even if it is as simple as being sure to include your years of expertise in your outreach.

4. Your brand expression looks dated

Ideally your original brand strategy was both cutting edge and sustainable. But sometimes market tastes shift beneath you. Just look at all of the companies out there with the word “cyber” in their name, or, more recently, how many logos have all lowercase, san-serif, colorful fonts. Whether it’s an elegant refinement of your current logo or starting from scratch, your brand expression needs to match your cultural personality in tone and manner. You can’t credibly claim to be innovative if your logo is stuck in the 1980s.

##5. You want to signal change Sometimes you just need an opportunity to tell a new story. It could be because you have a change in business strategy, or new leadership, or you have identified a sizeable shift in your core audiences. Perhaps you have merged with another firm and together have more to offer than the sum of your two parts. A refreshed look and feel, a new tagline – even a new name – may be what you need to attract attention, build awareness and capture the market share you desire.

Whatever the reason is for reevaluating your brand, whenever possible, existing brand equity should be retained. Just as when you’re building your brand, whatever strategic and tactical plan you take on should be fact-based and built to achieve specific goals. Change should never be made simply for change sake.

You’ve created a clear and compelling brand. Now what? If your brand isn’t properly implemented and maintained, even the best strategy will fail, wasting the time, resources and money you’ve invested. Consistency across all touch points reinforces and turns up the volume on your brand promise. Alignment in everything you say and do is essential to building awareness and nurturing positive impressions of your organization. Flawless execution is critical not just at launch, but throughout the entire life of your brand.

While underlying strategy will shape your visual and verbal expression, it is your brand management program that ensures the integrity of your brand image. Yet many companies jeopardize their investment by undervaluing the impact of proper brand guidelines, filing them away in a drawer, never to look at them again.

Here are five tips for getting the most out of your brand guidelines:

1. Embrace brand management

Although the creation and launch of a brand can be the most thrilling part, brand management is what delivers ultimate success. You have to invest in implementation as an integral part of rebranding. We’ve seen too many companies be penny-wise and pound-foolish when it comes to saving a few dollars by scaling back guidelines and training only to have their brand become distorted and disorganized over time. Don’t cut yourself short. If you have the business directive to update, evolve or redo your brand: do it right. Allot enough time and funds to guarantee proper execution now and into the future.

2.Train up

Learning the do’s and don’ts of your refreshed brand is neither a one time deal nor something everyone can easily grasp simply by reading a document. Don’t rely on your own memory of the strategy development or depend on your employees to readily absorb the guidelines just from print. Bring in the brand development team, including your agency, to train you and all of the communicators on the brand guidelines from strategy to usage. Have your agency meet with your internal team across all functions to train them on using templates. Many times they can share short cuts and advice that will ultimately save your team time. Furthermore, to fully guarantee maximum impact and a measurable difference in your brand, an employee engagement program should be implemented to enhance on-brand behaviors.

3. Know all the shapes and sizes

Brand guidelines can come in many different formats. Pick the ones that work best for your culture. Large, complex and global companies will benefit from having an online brand center such as Brand Ensemble, which provides a central, always-up-to-date resource for brand asset management, brand FAQ and collateral creation and approval. These types of tools are also the easiest to update and expand as brand elements are created and the system evolves. For companies where a static document is sufficient, a PDF or online flipbook can be easily distributed as well as accessed from a variety of places such as your computer desktop, tablet, or even phone for quick reference.

4. Give them the spotlight

Understanding the importance of the brand guidelines begins at the top of every organization. The CEO and CMO must endorse the brand guidelines to ensure they have the impact they should. Distribution and a cover letter should come from the CEO / CMO as a top-down endorsement of the new brand. And no one should be exempt from following the rules, especially senior management.

5. It takes a village

Your brand police should be more than just an internal contact person. Build a team that is responsible for the integrity of your brand globally. Assign staff throughout your operating footprint to monitor, approve and correct branded elements. Extend the team beyond the internal, and include your agency and your vendors in the policing process. You can even engage your entire staff by incorporating evaluation of on-brand behaviors in personnel reviews of all employees around the world. While bringing a brand to life may initially be the responsibility of a core team, sustaining it in the long term is a full-company job.

It’s a simple equation: great clients plus a great agency relationship results in great work. Why? A unique alchemy that happens when a branding or marketing client chooses to work with a consulting firm that shares the same sensibilities. Can you get great work from your consultants if it’s not a true partnership? Let’s just say, it’s a lot harder. Too often, the devils of corporate uncertainty, lack of clarity, and poor communications can derail the process.

If you want to give yourself a better than fighting chance to get great work, here are five ways to get the most out of your agency relationship.

1. Start with the right chemistry.

While some companies might be dazzled by an agency’s big name clients, what really matters is how well you’ll jive with your consultant’s day-to-day team. Make sure you meet the folks you’ll be interacting with most, and especially those who will be doing the big thinking for you.

2. Know your own organization.

Great clients can be dependable guides through their organizations’ minefields. You can help your consulting partner navigate your levels of approval by inviting your company’s decision-makers into the process early on. Knowing who your gatekeepers are and helping your consultants to win them over can eliminate costly roadblocks on a project.

3. Understand what you’re buying.

When it comes to working with your consultants, remember that you’re purchasing their talent and their time. While a project may deliver a new strategy or design, you’re actually paying for the process to get there. Sure, there may be changes along the way. But if you acknowledge what’s in scope and what’s out, then you can negotiate fairly should more work be required.**

4. Be an excellent editor.

Your consultants want to deliver exactly what you need. If it’s off the mark, then being an excellent editor means being straight-up honest. Offer specific reasons why it’s not working. Your consultants can take it; they’re professionals. The more detail you can give, the better revisions you’ll get back.

5. Trust the experts.

By putting the time into choosing your consulting partner, you’ve already shown that you consider them experts. If something doesn’t resonate, ask questions first and open up the dialogue. Trust is a bridge that is anchored on both sides. Being a good client will earn you the respect of your consultants who will want to give you the best work they can. Greatness begets greatness.

Recently, two of the biggest names in advertising announced they would merge to form the world’s largest ad firm. Under this umbrella will live a host of creative capabilities from advertising to public relations, branding to direct marketing, and media services to digital strategy. Consolidation seems to be the name of the game in the industry, as the large firms get even larger.

Interestingly, the impetus for this particular merger was less to compete with traditional creative firms, but rather to take on the mammoth technology firm, Google. The business goal of the merger is sensible and likely advantageous for the agencies. But does it benefit you, the client?

We propose a different way of thinking: Choose mid-sized instead of super-sized. Here are five reasons why.

1. Be a big fish.

Mid-sized firms have Fortune 100 accounts. They are built to service those accounts efficiently and smartly. However, mid-sized firms often have fewer of these global accounts, making you a big fish in a smaller pond. The result is dedicated attention from a team of experts whose primary goal is your success. As a result, you benefit from their heritage of having worked with clients in your space without having to worry about conflicts of interest or divided attention.

2. Secure senior attention.

Most professionals at mid-sized firms have come from larger firms. They have blue-chip expertise, but have made the conscious choice to leave the super-sized world. And with smaller staffs of experts, even the most senior professionals are active in account work every day. The team you meet at the pitch will be your primary account team. You never have to worry about bait and switch — at mid-sized firms there is no “B” and “C”, only the “A” team.

3. Pursue independent thought.

The majority of mid-sized firms remain independent. Independent status leads to independent thought, less restricted by the reins of a parent company or shareholder interests. Mid-sized firms enable themselves to stand out by developing unique perspectives, proprietary models and nimble solutions. The result is often cutting-edge, distinctive and quick thinking that will help propel you to the forefront.

4. Tailor the process (or results).

Mid-sized firms have processes in place to ensure predictable and beneficial results. However, they are also willing to tailor those processes to meet specific needs and outcomes. For instance, Discovery is a necessary part of any fruitful creative project, but the traditional process can be curtailed if you already have a great deal of relevant data. Or perhaps you have strong creative talent in house. They can be given the tools necessary to execute the visual components of the brand themselves. Ultimately, the goal of a mid-sized firm is to make you successfully self-sufficient.

5. Play well in the sandbox.

Mid-sized agencies tend to be focused experts. They know their fields intimately well, and readily communicate their self-imposed boundaries. For instance, a strategic branding firm likely won’t undertake a national advertising campaign. However, they will gamely work with your choice advertising partner – or recommend a non-affiliated agency they believe will serve you well. Mid-sized agencies play well with others.

Recently, CoreBrand has released our annual Top 100 Most Powerful Brands report. In reviewing our rankings – and the data that supports them – we’ve discovered some consistencies among those brands in the top 100. We find it’s not about doing one thing well, but about finding a way to do implement an integrated plan that addresses awareness, reputation, confidence in management and performance.

From those that are doing it well, here are some tips for how to build (and maintain) a powerful brand.

1. Spend more

Great brands spend more on advertising and more aggressively market in general. According to a recent report from Kantar Media, while advertising expenditures declined overall in 2013, spending among the ten largest advertisers for the first nine months of 2013 increased by 6.4 percent. While not a stand-alone strategy, advertising more is a way to help increase a brand’s power.

With advertising, a brand is able to control the message and therefore has the ability to drive toward more distinctive, emotional benefits. While other companies may be able to mimic product/service attributes, the combination of an organization’s culture, personality and approach inform how those products/services are delivered – and create an inimitable differentiation. As the foundation of an advertising messaging, this more emotionally-driven messaging helps create favorability and lock-in.

2. Say less

After suggesting you spend more on advertising, simultaneously suggesting that you say less may seem counter intuitive to building a powerful brand. But bear with us for a moment to explain. Increased advertising helps you speak in more places – in magazines, on billboards, and online. But saying less enables you to focus what you are saying in those places on the pure essence of your message. Hone your communications to just a few clear, simple and believable statements. And repeat them consistently and with frequency in all outreach.

Strong brands have high familiarity, meaning stakeholders understand what a company does in totality. Consider PepsiCo as an example. Currently #7 on the Top 100 Most Powerful brands, PepsiCo was for a long time perceived as purely a beverage company, an easy mistake as the word Pepsi is in the corporate PepsiCo name. However, recent communications have made a concerted effort to communicate the company’s better-for-you strategy that in part, includes its very successful snacks division. Clearly, this powerful brand understands that familiarity must go beyond name recognition to achieve more comprehensive understanding of the organization as a whole.

3. Build trust

Our most recent Top 100 Most Powerful brands notes that while distrust in brands is “lessening,” trust has been slower to recover. This is especially true when it comes to trusting management, a key factor in helping to build and maintain the favorability necessary to becoming a powerful brand.

Nowhere is this trend more apparent that within the financial services sector. Financial services buyers indicate that what’s most important to them when making a purchasing decision are softer variables, such as trust, transparency and accountability. In an industry crippled by controversy and distrust, there has been a keen understanding of this buyer tendency and a collective effort by the industry to rebuild the trust of consumers through communications. Perhaps as a result, companies including Morgan Stanley, Charles Schwab, JP Morgan Chase, Merrill Lynch and American Express all saw advances this year in terms of their brands’ power.

4. Perform well

Here, we speak not only of your financial performance, which most certainly comprises a large component of the favorability required to being a powerful brand, but also your operational performance. Strong brands are about more than communication; they are about follow-through and building the internal processes and culture that enable your employees to live the brand and to deliver it consistently to your customers. Are your employees empowered to perform well?

New to the top 100 list and improving 25 positions to rank #91, Amazon was the highest gainer in part because the company understands performance. Always known for its superior customer service and for giving employees the freedom to make the right decisions for customers, Amazon has recently topped itself. Take for example, the company’s “Mayday” feature incorporated in its latest Kindles. With the press of one button, customers can access a real person, in real time with real answers. It doesn’t get much more powerful than that.

5. Be transparent

In the absence of a proactive message, customers will create their own based on experience and in many instances, based on hearsay. In today’s age of social and viral media, arming your customers as brand ambassadors has become alarmingly more important. Delivering consistent and pervasive messages is the first step. Taking responsibility and offering up a track record of honesty increases trust and favorability among stakeholders – and is yet another means of building a powerful brand.

For instance, consider how Unilever’s Ben & Jerry’s has approached the increasingly prevalent GMO labeling discussion. On the company’s website, customers can easily find the following statement: “Ben & Jerry’s is proud to stand with the growing consumer movement for transparency and the right to know what’s in our food supply by supporting mandatory GMO labeling legislation.” Yet, the company goes on to state that this is a process and it will take time. They will not be able to source all non-GMO ingredients immediately, but they are committed to doing so. The ultimate result is that consumers feel heard and valued, and Ben & Jerry’s has generated brand power (and respect) through transparency.

Another of Unilever’s brands, Dove, also exemplifies the power of transparency in its advertising. The company’s Real Beauty campaign eschews model perfection for the physical and emotional beauty of real women. It’s a transparent look at the company and its customers – and a powerful statement from a strong brand.