Getting buy-in to developing a brand strategy

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Question - do organisations still need convincing that a strong brand is an important asset?

Answer - strangely enough, yes. At a time when a lot of tiny companies have gained some mastery of the concept, and branding tools and resources are getting ever cheaper, there are still many die-hard B2B companies who prefer to follow a product or service marketing approach where everything is based on short-term sales and profits

Key points

If you have ever worked for a major brand and then set up a new company, you will realise just how important having a strong brand is.

Within a landscape characterised by noise and clutter, brands stand out.

And the biggest brands invest, invest, invest. Being seen everywhere a potential customer looks is the ultimate key to building a strong brand.

But to get your hands on that investment, your organisation has to believe that brand development and communications money is money well spent, and the investment is typically large and the payoff only over many years.

In more detail ....

Organisations

For most organisations, the main justification for developing a branding strategy is that a strong brand gives you two levels of profit:

1. On-going sales & profits

Profit from income from loyal customers because:

• you protect your current level of sales to those customers
• you get additional sales for other products/services to those customers
• you reduce your "costs to serve" because both sides are trying to make the process as cost-effective as possible
• you get recommended by loyal customers, and so attract new customers
• loyal customers value you more and are therefore prepared to pay a premium for your products/services

Product differentiation gets eroded, patents expire, prices get undercut, services get copied, but brands last forever if you manage them properly.

2. Capital growth

You can sell off your brand at many times the capital asset value. Several Internet-based brands are worth $ billions (even after the melt down), having only existed 2-3 years and only made massive losses.

People

The way to convince the people in your organisation is to take them through a branding workshop designed to achieve 3 things:

1. To educate them in branding principles and practices (something for the soul)
2. To get them to tell you how it is in their market and what they would like you to do about it (something from the heart)
3. To share any third party market data which already exists relating to your and competitive product/services, market conditions, government activities, technologies and trends (something for the head)

In a multinational company, this will require an extensive program of workshops throughout the organisation with cross-functional regional teams, usually lasting 2 days.

The likelihood is that a brand strategy will require you to implement both a change management process and a knowledge management process - so you will need to borrow tools from each of these areas.

Combining organisations and individuals

A business scorecard can be especially helpful if you are trying to align the organisation to a new brand.

Business scorecards were developed to try to counter-balance the preponderance of financial measures used in companies, by refocusing management attention on the importance of the processes and behaviors that generate those financial outcomes - visionary leadership, committed customer relationships, robust internal processes, the quality of the workforce, and new product development.

Business scorecards map and communicate the strategy of a company (or a department within a company), from the overall business strategy to the individuals' work expectations, so that the management can understand the business and how it is performing. They are time-consuming to develop, but many of the companies that have adopted them have out-performed their peers. They are particularly relevant to corporations focusing on improving performance as, not only do they help people to understand their role within the organisation, they also identify how well each individual is performing.

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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