Brands Should Go Back to School

Earlier this week, I sat at the back of my daughter's school hall while her principal extolled the performance of the 2009 cohort of the Singapore Chinese Girls' School's secondary 4 students in the GCE 'O' level examinations.

It was a remarkable performance by the girls (the best 'O' level results in the school's storied history) ... and a memorable experience for the proud parents in attendance.

But what struck me -- apart from the collective standout achievement of this batch of confident young ladies -- was the palpable support and team spirit demonstrated by the entire school. They cheered when slides flashed the names of the girls who'd scored six A1s or more. They screamed even louder when 20 students who had faced significant challenges through the school year were named and commended. And they brought the house down when the top two girls who scored nine A1s were named. Teachers were beaming as they were mobbed and hugged by appreciative students for their year-long gifts of insight and inspiration. The whole school celebrated as one.

It got me thinking: What is it about girls that makes them work and play together better than boys? Why didn't I feel that same sense of camaraderie, that esprit de corps, when I collected my 'O' level results? (Well, besides the fact that my results were decidedly mediocre.) And -- more to the point of this blog post -- how can companies nurture this same kind of culture?

Now, why is that important? Because organizations don't act; individuals do. What organizations do, is create cultures. Culture is the organizational equivalent of a person's character. Ingrain a character, and you'll establish a pattern of action. The behaviour that is modelled becomes the behaviour that is followed.

If we accept that the primary vehicle for delivering brand identity -- especially for a service brand -- is a company's employee workforce, then the company's culture provides the framework and the propulsion for its brand image to be kept consistent and visible in the jungle out there.

Imagine the benefits: No more 'off-the-reservation' forays into dodgy sponsorships. No misinterpretation of core brand values by employees at various customer touchpoints. No more 'silo thinking'; no more secret budgets siphoning funds away from global brand initiatives. Just a single, integrated go-to-market strategy executed by teams across the region or around the world with the Power of One.

Brands go further when brand champions work together.

Quick! Spot the Brand Saboteur.

Can you tell from the photo here? Not easy, huh?

Employees of every stripe walk down the hallways of your company every day. Each with their own perspective of your company's brand, and differing degrees of willingness to do something to champion it.

How do you identify the supporters and put them to work on behalf of your brand and your business? (They are intertwined -- but more of that in a future post.)

And how do you isolate the detractors so that they do no harm?

In a previous life as a brand marketer, I used to conduct brand overview sessions as part of my company's employee orientation program. With each batch of newbies, it was easy to pick out potential allies. They were the ones who asked the most questions, who weren't thumbing their crackberries or multi-tasking on their laptops (this must be one of the most insiduous diseases of corporate life). I would recruit the most promising brand champions from each business function, and appoint them as group leaders during annual brand rallies when we'd break out by function to draft brand marketing action plans. One of our most heartening rallies was in Korea when the whole office shut down for the day to rally around brand planning. (Thank you Gina & Jae-Yong!)

As for the detractors, well, they're harder to spot. To be fair, I believe no one deliberately sets out to destroy their company brand. They're just not that passionate about it. They view any investment in brand-building as taking away from what could have been used to expand the sales force, incentivise the channel, or put into the discretionary bonus pool. They're inclined to focus relentlessly on the current quarter, protesting (with some justification) that "there's no use investing in long-term brand-building if we don't hit enough targets to still be around for the long-term!" They're the ones who insist that demand-generation ads be focused 100% on precisely that -- with no leeway for brand-building.

And what of the ones in the middle -- who are neither brand-led nor brand-dead, but simply brand-neutral? While that may be the dominant mindset in most companies, there is no corresponding middle ground in terms of effect on the brand. Everything we say or do either adds to or subtracts from the brand -- everything. Every day, whether they realize it or not, employees are making deposits to or withdrawals from their brand-equity piggybank. The employees behind the world's most valuable brands simply put in much more than they take out.

Why is all of this important? Because all employees are potential brand ambassadors. And a company's workforce is its primary vehicle to deliver its brand promise. People truly are an organization's best assets.

Classic brand management theory categorizes employees into four groups:
Brand Champions -- storytellers who proactively spread the brand idea

Brand Agnostics -- those who are interested in but not yet committed to the brand story

Brand Cynics -- employees who are not involved with, and not open to be engaged by the brand idea

Brand Saboteurs -- detractors who actively or indirectly stand in the path of advancing the brand strategy, within and outside the organization

The exact proportion of these groups within a company varies across companies and industries; but the spread typically follows a Bell curve.

Brand marketers, take note: Your job is to keep the Saboteurs away from the Agnostics.

Because in work, as in the rest of life: Some people quit and leave. (They're not whom we should worry about.) But there are heaps of others who quit, and stay.

A Brand Marketer's New Year Resolution

A new decade brings with it a blank canvas on which to inscribe the building-blocks of your future success. (You are going to be successful and ace that next performance appraisal, aren't you?)

In order to do so, you're going to need to spring-clean your mind and methods. ("Insanity", according to Albert Einstein, "is doing exactly the same things you did before, and expecting a different result.") Because the market is changing while you're reading this post. The goalposts have been moved. What served you well before won't necessarily do your bidding again.

That said, some fundamental principles remain unchanged. The trick is to preserve the best, while reinventing the rest.

An ex-colleague remarked last week that he was struggling to lay down a personal manifesto in 2010 for himself, as a leader and team manager. So in the spirit of the season, may I offer some thought-starters to crank up the brain-cells -- or provoke some dialogue:

1. Bring in a new breed. Not confirming types who will succumb to the awesome power of the existing culture.

2. Seize control of the schools. Put your money where your mouth is, take a deep breath, and invest in training the young (as well as the not-so-young who've missed out on training all these years). They are tomorrow's leaders. Don't mortgage your future just to meet your targets for the quarter.

3. Keep score. Inspect what you expect. What gets measured gets attention. People are smart. They're going to focus on the things that count. (Well, most of them, at least.)

4. Change the reward system. Re-examine who you hold up as heroes. Take special care to commend calculated and measured risk (not the kind that brought down our global financial systems). By that I mean, embed a 'safe-fail' culture. Encourage your team to 'fail-forward', pick themselves up fast, learn from their mistakes, and move on.

5. Crank up the communications. You probably belong, in these tumultous times, to a small, select group of talented but anxious and confused people. Be proactive, be transparent, be out there, accessible to your team.

6. Celebrate success. There's something attractive about the magnetism of momentum. Mark your successes, and use them as slingshots to propel your team onward.

7. Free the people. To win in the marketplace, you're going to need radicals, rebels, people who'll howl at the moon. How you're going to manage them, well, that's the subject of another post.

Once you build a team of brand champions with the right mindset, then you can build a champion brand.

So go on. Pull out that notepad or position that cursor. May your resolutions spark a revolution.