Knowledge management

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Question - what is the link between knowledge management and brand management?

Answer - Brand management is a critical aspect of knowledge management, and vice-versa. Brand management is about integrating:

• your knowledge of your customers and of your stakeholders

• their knowledge of you

• your knowledge of yourself and of your own brand marketing activities throughout your entire organisation

Key points

The value of knowledge

It is not unusual today for companies to be worth ten, or more, times their net assets (divide the total value of your shares by the net assets as stated on your balance sheet). Over 90% of the total value of the Coca-Cola Corporation is intangible. In many consultancies, the vast majority of their assets go up and down in the lifts every day, and walk out of their offices at night.

Therefore, the process of optimising these assets is becoming a critical issue for most organisations. This process is generally referred to as knowledge management. Brand management is one aspect of KM.

Knowledge is also critical to the optimization of your on-going brand marketing-related processes from one end of the supply chain to the other, e.g. supplier knowledge, procurement knowledge, legal and regulatory knowledge, product and service design, manufacturing knowledge, inventory knowledge, distribution knowledge, sales and marketing knowledge and customer experience knowledge including up-to-date integrated insight into their changing structures, situations, behaviours, needs, wants, attitudes, values and desires.

The complexity of knowledge

Some categorise knowledge as "explicit" knowledge, which can be encoded and distributed, and "tacit" knowledge, which people may not know they even have. The classic example of tacit knowledge is the guy who has been doing the same job for 30 years and, when he retires, the whole system breaks down because no-one knows how he did it.

Another categorisation of knowledge is as knowledge that, how and why.

The ultimate goal of KM is often to reduce tacit knowledge to explicit knowledge, without losing its richness, and embed, encode, embrain, embody, and enculture it within the organisation, its people and all its operations.

IT is a solution but not the only one

While information technology is an important part of the knowledge management process, it is only one building block among many. Beware of consultants who say that your KM problem can be solved by a computer system. They may be right in the end, the your pain and suffering along the way can be close to unbearable and hideously expensive besides.

Computers are becoming increasingly intelligent in a human sense, but they are still best at handling explicit knowledge. Tacit knowledge is still primarily the preserve of human beings and any KM program must recognise this.

If you want proof of this theory, phone most call centers.

Having said that, in terms of brand guideline policing and campaign management there is a category of tools streaming onto the market which allows you to store and share your brand guidelines and templates, route sign-offs, archive previous campaigns, hold meta-information and metrics about campaign performance, and log what was sent to whom how (or if) they responded.

Implementing a KM program

The requirements for implementing a KM program look very similar to those for a change management program because, in both cases, you are above all trying to persuade people to behave differently.

The key issues you should consider are:

• Leadership - it must be amongst the top 2 or 3 issues top managers ask about as they tour the organisation
• Vision - creating a compelling vision of the end result of the change
• Organisational design - ensuring that the organisation is design in alignment with KM objectives
• Culture - ensuring that the organisational culture is supportive of the KM objectives
• Processes, tools & techniques - developing processes to underpin the objectives of the KM program
• Networks - KM programs usually work best within a so-called "community of practice" where each member has a common interest in the generation, use and distribution of the knowledge. What networks are available, and how can they be accessed?
• Market opportunities - identifying opportunities to use the knowledge directly as a source of revenue for the organisation
• Financial resources
• People resources - ensuring the right level of resourcing, competencies & skills, development and rewards & recognition
• IT resources - systems and software

We can help you in two ways - we have a mass of smart strategic brand marketing tools, processes and workshop techniques for you to use, and a mass of smart brand marketing agencies as members across the world with niche knowledge and experience to support you thereafter.

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