Ray Baird is President of RiechesBaird

Why are many brands unintentionally hijacked by their own people and strategies?

There have been many papers and books written on the importance of brand alignment, employee engagement, brand adoption, call it what you may. So, why do so many companies still suffer from poor employee morale, low retention, misalignment, performance fatigue and the inability to make good on their brand promise?

To answer the question, all you need to do is look at the typical business eco-system – its structure, interactions, systems  and most importantly its accountability and philosophy.  For the most part, business in America is built in a departmental fashion, and the larger the company becomes, the more susceptible it is to falling into a “Silo” mentality. Obviously the “Silo” effect works against the principle of being aligned, collaborative and fully informed. When the right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing, they are left to their own interpretation and often work against the brand’s best intentions.

Structure is the next problem.  The biggest problem here is, who is really in charge of pulling the entire picture together and reporting on its effectiveness. HR deals with internal issues, marketing controls brand, operations tries to deliver the goods and sales.  So the problem is not only that “Silos” are not conducive to collaboration,  but  that structures typically are not built to orchestrate a bigger picture mentality and understanding of the customer experience, the internal experience and how it’s being perceived and delivered.

In addition, companies often fail to develop well thought out interactive/collaborative processes to foster “informative decision making” internally and externally. Yes, most companies have some loosely defined collaborative meeting structure but most don’t monitor the internal brand working relationship to the external delivery. Again, people and departments are left to make decisions without confirmation of alignment to the overall strategies.

One of the biggest disconnects we often experience is the division and disconnect of Marketing and HR. So often these departments work on their own strategies without coming together to fully agree and embrace how the communication content is generated and distributed. We find that successful companies and brands that  co-develop strategies and shared systems experience greater unity and brand performance.

So, if you’re looking to  increase the morale of your organization, improve retention, or better deliver on your customer experience and brand, here’s a few things to think about:

1. Have a holistic view. Don’t develop brand strategies as it relates to your brand experience strictly in a departmental fashion. Bring department leaders together to truly understand the internal/external workings of the brand. Develop a brand council comprised of your department leaders, to guide, instruct and monitor the internal and external brand experience.

2. Say NO to “Silos”. If this is an issue, break it down now, it will only get worse. Especially make sure Marketing and HR are collaborating in strategy and the development of monitoring metrics (and don’t leave out operations).

3. Continual innovative communication. I know it sounds obvious but people need to hear strategy over and over to get it. You must reinforce the importance of the organization to nurture and foster brilliant internal communication and to have external proof that the brand is performing to its intended standards.

If you follow these simple rules, you’ll reduce the chances of your brand being hijacked by its own people. But that’s my opinion, what’s yours?

Ray Baird is President of RiechesBaird

Do you know what predicts your brand’s success?  Most marketing metrics only measure what has happened, using what could be called “lagging indicators.” But imagine the effectiveness of your marketing program if you could identify the “leading indicators” for your brand; the activities, buyer behaviors, and measurements that actually lead to sales and profits.

Progressive marketers and their agencies are exploring this brave new frontier.  Instead of just looking in the rear view mirror at historical measurements like sales and market share, they are attempting to look ahead at predictive measures that are the actual precursors of business success. Most “leading indicators” never appear on a financial statement, but they can – and should – be identified, tested, and tracked.

Identifying the real causes of brand health is vital to successful brand management.  For example, most brands with call centers, which includes a lot of B2B brands, commonly measure such things as time on hold and minutes per call.  But these metrics don’t measure or predict real customer satisfaction.  Research by Convergys shows that customer satisfaction is predicted by two things: 1) Is the customer service representative knowledgeable? and 2) Is the problem resolved on the first call? (Convergys 2008 U.S. Customer Scorecard.)

An important difference

Lagging indicators are simply a measurement.  Leading indicators are a measurement tied to a hypothesis, which can be tested and refined, in order to explain or predict behavior.  Imagine six friends getting together every Friday night to play poker.  Over the course of a year, on person wins 60% of the time – the other players win much less often.  These statistics are all lagging indicators; they tell us what has happened.  But they don’t tell us why.  You might be inclined to think the 60% winner cheats, but in fact he wins so often because everybody else in the group has such a poor poker face.  The point is that you learn nothing by observing the result – only by understanding the process that leads to the result.

For example, If you reverse engineer most successful marketing programs, you’ll find that they center around a hypothesis based on a powerful insight into buyer behavior. That hypothesis can almost always be considered a leading indicator.

All measures are not created equal

While predictive is better than historical, this isn’t to say there isn’t a place for lagging indicators in marketing measurement. Some lagging indicators – such as incremental profits generated from a campaign – are important and relevant measures of marketing success.  The same is true with lagging indicators like brand penetration and average price per unit.

But many traditional measures of success are the result of historical practices rather than a careful study of cause and effect.  Correlation is not the same thing as causation.

For example, while sales is the most common “hard” metric of success, campaigns that focus on reducing price sensitivity are more effective than those that focus on building volume or market share.  In other words, we’ve learned that value share more important than volume share.

As Einstein said, “Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.”

Brand health as human health

It’s critically important to measure B2B brand success using a combination of both leading and lagging indicators.  You can think of the health of a brand in the same way we think about the health of a human body.  A physician would never attempt to diagnose a serious problem merely based on a few outward symptoms.  He or she would also likely measure temperature, blood pressure, organ functions, and other things that would give a more complete picture of health.  Diagnosing and monitoring the health of a brand involves the same dynamics.  Sales and market share alone only tell us the brand is healthy or sick, but don’t tell us why.

(SIDEBAR)

Two Different Kinds of Indicators of B2B Brand Success

At a time when marketers are looking to prove the value of every marketing dollar spent, their agencies have an opportunity to provide an immensely important new dimension of value by helping their clients develop and test leading indicators of brand success.  Far too many agency-client relationships begin only with a “scope of work” instead of an understanding of “scope of value,” a clear distillation of the desired outcomes that combines both lagging and leading success metrics.

Knowing the metrics that matter should be part of the intellectual capital an agency brings to the relationship it has with its clients. By measuring what matters, brands can make limited marketing dollars go much further in these economically challenging times.

Ray Baird is President of RiechesBaird

Originally posted on B2BBrandDebate

On the surface this question presents some quick responses and initial thoughts as it relates to an external point of view. Most professionals would agree, re-brand when it becomes irrelevant or tired to the end customer, or when it loses its competitive advantage or differentiation. Certainly re-branding is critical when several companies or brands are merged together and have developed a new point of distinction–not re-branding in this situation can be dangerous and confusing. These are all obvious rational reasons, but B2B branders today need to address the current conditions and how it’s affecting internal B2B brands and their ability to stay relevant and motivated.

With the recent financial turmoil, most all companies are being forced to re-think just about everything. Will the existing business model and strategy continue work? Do we have the right leadership? How can we retain the key talent? How do we cut costs without cutting into the core? And how do we best communicate the changes that are happening? And most importantly, how do we keep our people motivated?

Whenever B2B companies and their employees undergo the type of radical changes most are experiencing it’s time to step back, re-think the internal brand strategy, re-consider the communication delivery and determine if the current internal brand needs to be freshened up, re-branded or just re-communicated.

Asking the following 5 questions to your leadership team, managers and employees can help you evaluate the situation quickly and provide direction:

1. Has our purpose changed? What is it?

2. Is our vision still relevant and inspiring? What is it?

3. Is our mission current, clear and distinctive? What is it?

4. Do our employees understand our strategy and how it relates to their role? What is it?

5. Are we communicating properly? How are we measuring?

So, when is the right time to re-brand? Depends on the answer to your questions. But most likely, the answers are inside.

Let me know what you think.

By Tim Price, V.P. of Verbal Strategy at RiechesBaid

Admittedly I’m late to the game on this one. Although I just discovered Cisco’s foray into The Realm, it’s been live since March. So, while this isn’t a timely review, I felt it was appropriate to review such a valiant creative attempt.

Here’s the background. The Realm is an animated saga that dramatizes enterprise threats and pushes Cisco’s security solutions. The Realm’s episodes are produced using the comic book, er, graphic novel illustration style. The storylines revolve around a cast of “Defenders”—stereotypical comic characters right down to the blonde, buxom heroine in a skin-tight bodysuit named—wait for it—Vixa. Her special talents include sound-wave manipulation and subliminal encryption, although I’m sure she possesses others in the minds of her audience. The Realm is a techie’s wet dream. It plays into their love of the genre, tells a relevant story in dramatic fashion, and it has the “cool” factor that’s lacking in so many of the industry’s marketing efforts.

My gut reaction to The Realm from a creative standpoint was one of appreciation—it’s well produced, engaging and original. But I’ve come to think that it feels just a little too easy. Meaning, the concept is a slam-dunk and the graphic novel style is a no-brainer considering the audience. I’m left with the sense this novel will soon lose its novelty. If it hasn’t already.

A quick online search for The Realm supports my theory. The top hit isn’t The Realm itself, but Cisco’s blog about it—beginning with a post from Marie Hattar, Cisco’s vice president who presumably presides over The Realm. Her initial post espousing this Web 2.0 approach is followed by only a trickle of other posts that span just one month. Even more notably, as the most recent poster points out, most of the comments seem to come from Cisco employees. So it appears that the blog was being used mostly as an internal mechanism to bump up The Realm’s search results. And The Realm’s FaceBook page? A mere 42 fans.

Not helping matters is Hattar’s claim that Cisco invented “a new genre of animation—mixing a comic book medium with 2-D animation.” That’s quite an assertion. I’m sure I’ve seen this more recently, but I immediately think of a cheeky music video created in 1985 for the Norwegian pop band a-ha and their classic 80’s hit “Take On Me.”

That little trip down memory lane brings up a good point. The music video’s concept (and intrigue) was based on the interplay between a real person and a cartoon character. In the Realm, we find only fantasy players—which lacks a connection to Cisco’s positioning as “The Human Network.” There’s nothing human about the Realm, unless it’s explained away as the imagination of humans. Using a fantasy world to illustrate (no pun intended) security threats to the enterprise has its charms, but I wonder just how effective it is compared to a real-world approach. Or maybe the combination of a real-world-meets-fantasy approach.

It’s difficult to say whether or not The Realm is a success from a marketing standpoint because I’m not privy to Cisco’s definition of success for it. But, at the very least, Cisco deserves credit for taking a different approach than the industry norm. And I’m sure it has its fans. 42 of them, at the most recent count.