We recently had the chance to sit down with author and expert on courage, Bill Treasurer. Bill’s latest book, Courage Goes to Work, focuses on building workplace courage. Bill’s own expertise in courage comes from his background as a high diver:

“I learned at a young age that I had a debilitating fear of heights. When I was a kid, my dad took me and my younger brother to the top of the Empire State Building. As the two of them were looking down at the metropolis below, I was pressed up against the building, petrified that I was going to fall. I remember being upset because my younger brother could do something that I couldn’t. It was the first time that I realized what a paralyzing effect that fear can have over a person.

“A few years later I discovered the sport of springboard diving. The sport took hold and I became quite skilled on the 1 meter springboard (i.e., the “low board”). I won the Westchester County diving championships three times. However, when colleges started to make scholarship offers, they would always ask what dives I could do on the high board. Because of my fear of heights, I had avoided the high board altogether. I knew that there would be no way for me to get a scholarship without confronting my fear of heights. So, through the patience of a coach, I started attempting dives at incrementally higher heights. My coach helped me move outside my comfort zone, but in an absorbable way. Eventually I got a full scholarship to West Virginia University.

“After college, I continued attempting higher dives, eventually from heights that scaled to over 100 feet. I became a member of the U.S. High Diving Team and traveled around the world performing in high diving shows at entertainment parks. The genesis of that experience is my fear of heights. You can think of me as the high diver who is afraid of heights!

“The experience was so meaningful to me, that years later when I started my business, I decided that the focus of the business would be to help people take whatever “high dives” they are facing at work. My company, Giant Leap Consulting, is a courage-building company.”

We asked Bill to elaborate a little bit more on courage and how it relates to both organizations and leadership in those organizations.

How do you define courage for leaders and organizations?

“Acting on what is right, despite being afraid or uncomfortable, when facing situations involving pain, risk, uncertainty, opportunity, or intimidation. NOTE: Courage is NOT fearLESSness. It is the opposite. When you are being courageous you are fearFUL, but you carry on despite being afraid.”

How important is courage in organizations to create real, lasting innovation and growth?

“It’s supremely important. It’s courage that fuels a worker’s ability to pursue stretch goals, step up to challenges, and assert ideas. It’s courage that gives innovation the backbone that is needed when new ideas have to be fought for. It’s courage that allows you to withstand the turbulence and naysaying that inevitably accompany new ideas in the early stages. And it’s courage that allows you to ditch a product that’s on its last leg but sentimentality is causing people to hold on too tightly to the past.

“Given the chance, where would you rather work, in a company where everyone’s behavior is directed by fear and anxiety, or where people were confident and courageous?”

What are the best ways to encourage more worthwhile risk-taking when it comes to innovation and growth?

“The single most influential determinant of a culture is the leader of its behaviors. So if a company wants its workers to take some innovative high dives, metaphorically speaking, then the leaders have to be the first ones up and off the platform. Leaders have to Jump First.

“Bertrand Russell once said, “All great ideas start out first as blasphemy.” So, if you really want to create ground-breaking ideas, you have to be willing to defy tradition. You have to encourage pushback, a collision of ideas, and spirited disagreement. All, of course, directed toward an outcome of a fetching and marketable idea. That means leaders have to explicitly encourage back-talk. Especially back-talk that is directed at challenging conventions, cutting through bureaucracy, and neutralizing organizational politics that hinder the implementation, or at least piloting, of good ideas.”

What organizations are good examples of fostering courage and focusing it into innovation and growth?

“Organizationally, it is easier to share specific instances of decisions that were courageous, versus labeling an organization a fully “courageous company”. I think Patagonia displayed courage when it decided to use only pesticide-free cotton in the production of its cotton clothes. It cost them a bundle to do that, but ultimately resulted in more sales. Likewise, the decision of Domino’s Pizza to advertise that their internal research confirmed that their pizza’s tasted lousy, was courageous. In a sense, they were inviting the public into the process of reinventing Domino’s image (and pizza), and it’s working. Dove’s decision to use real women in its commercials, instead of waif-like fairy princesses, took courage. Gore-Tex, of course, is widely admired for fostering a client of smart risk-taking and mistake-making. In terms of consistent, sustainable innovation, they’re the gold-standard.”

In 1971, Las Vegas businessman Michael Oliver arrived at the Minerva Reefs in the Pacific Ocean, with barges of sand in tow. Oliver’s vision? A new nation, built on an artificial island, with “no taxation, welfare, subsidies, or any form of economic interventionism.”

After Oliver had filled the Minerva reefs with enough sand to bring the level of his new island above the waterline, the Republic of Minerva issued a declaration of independence in January 1972. They immediately sent letters to neighboring countries and even created their own currency, the 35 Minerva Dollar coin.

Unfortunately, the Republic of Minerva’s official currency wasn’t enough to convince Minerva’s neighbors of the nation’s legitimacy. The Tongan government sent an armed expedition in June to claim the Minerva reefs as their own. And on June 21, 1972, the Minervan flag was hauled down.

Modern attempts at new nation building have met similar fates. In April 1950, the small mining town of Rough and Ready in California seceded from the Union. Like the Republic of Minerva, the inhabitants of Rough and Ready were hoping for smaller government – specifically they wanted to avoid a recent tax on any new mining claims and the prohibition of alcohol in Nevada County, where Rough and Ready was situated.

Rough and Ready’s short-sighted secession was rescinded by its own voters less than three months later, when they realized they were no longer entitled to celebrate US independence.

Along the same lines, the Republic of Rose Island was founded by Italian engineer Giorgio Rosa in 1967. Similar to the Republic of Minerva, Rose Island was build on an artificial island – 400 square meters, supported by nine pylons, in the Adriatic Sea. Rosa, the self-declared President, built a restaurant, bar, nightclub, souvenir shop and a post office. He also issued a number of postage stamps, some displaying the currency of the Republic of Rosa, the “Mill.” However, no coins or banknotes were ever known to be produced. The Italian government soon landed on the artificial island and took control, right before the Navy used explosives to destroy the island.

So what do all of these new nations have in common? Failure. Complete and absolute failure. Regardless of their motives behind starting a new nation, they failed to account for all of the steps required and the potential responses from existing nations. An over-investment in the visible symbols of a nation – things such as flags, currency, and postage stamps – may have distracted the leadership from what was truly important. While no one can argue that currency and postage stamps aren’t necessary, one could make a strong argument that an extremely vulnerable new nation might have more important things they could have been doing behind the scenes. Things like diplomacy, gaining recognition from governing authorities, and building infrastructure. These are not as visible as a postage stamp, but they lay the foundation for successful nation-building.

In the same way, companies that jump straight to the visible symbols of marketing without investing time and energy behind the scenes do themselves a disservice. Yes, ultimately an advertisement or a Twitter account or a press release is what the public sees. But the decisions behind the symbols are the true drivers of success. Things like segmenting and targeting a market, developing a positioning statement, developing a pricing strategy, and defining a brand architecture.

The real takeaway from the failure of these three “nations” is that strategy matters. Whether you are an established Fortune 500 company or a new start-up, you will benefit greatly from sound marketing strategy.

Image sources: tbd1 and jimmywayne

Over the past few decades the balance of power within retailing has shifted from the manufacturer to the retailer. The rise of Walmart and Target along with consolidation within the grocery and drug channels has significantly consolidated the US retail market. The practice of category management among retailers was a direct outcome this consolidation. Prior to category management, retailers most scarce resource – shelves - was often the battleground between competing brands and products with little or no gain for the retailer. For example, an advertising or price promotion of Crest could result in 10% increase in sales for Crest, a 10% decrease in sales for Colgate and no net gain for Walmart. There were also diminishing returns in price negotiations with manufacturers and a realization that profit growth for the retailer was linked to growth of the entire category.

This led to the modern practice of category management. All related or substitutable products in the portfolio are grouped together into a “Category.”  Each category is run like a mini-business, managed by both the retailer and suppliers, with its own joint P&L targets. The relationship between manufacturer and retailer becomes more collaborative and open where suppliers are expected to propose initiatives that add to the total category sales and the satisfaction of the shopper.

Over the last decade, major consumer goods organizations have reoriented their Marketing, R&D, Innovation and Sales processes to align with the retailer category management approach. This shift was in response to the increasing power of retailers but also a realization that contributing to category growth led to better performance than the historical zero-sum competitive battlefields on the shelves. Simply put, in the modern retail environment, category growth creates more ROI for both retailers and suppliers while, at the same time, enhancing consumer value.

We interviewed innovation and marketing professionals at Georgia-Pacific, Kraft, The Home Depot, Unilever, Colgate-Palmolive, Hasbro and General Mills to better understand the advantages for a manufacturer to reorient from the historical brand-centric approach to a category-centric approach. Each had a unique perspective but several common themes emerged:

•    Consumer Insight Capability. Developing a deep understanding of consumer needs across an entire category can lead to a portfolio of offerings targeted to the needs of diverse user segments, occasions and needs. For example, Georgia-Pacific manages both Quilted Northern and Angel Soft bath tissue brands. Rather than being cannibalistic, a broader understanding of consumer needs within the category has led to a portfolio targeted to specific needs.

•    R&D Capability. An investment into a category approach, with a broader, more robust understanding of the fundamental science behind the category and the emerging technologies that can meet consumers’ needs, leads to more effective R&D investment. For example, Colgate’s investment into understanding teeth and gum biology led to a pipeline of industry leading oral care products that closed the share gap with Crest.

•    Assets and Equities Development. Category-focused consumer insight and R&D also lead to a more robust development and management of brand equities as well as improved technology and the patents to create a sustainable advantage from that technology. Brand equity, as an asset, can be leveraged to create growth with a category. General-Mills recently introduced its Simple brand of cookie mix and has already built enough equity around the brand to leverage it to drive growth of multiple brands across the entire baking category.

•    Innovation and New Product Development. Capabilities and assets are only advantages if they translate to viable and sustainable growth. P&G has become an innovation leader by truly understanding consumer needs within the category, investing in R&D to develop (and patent) products and developing strong brands with appeal across categories. Swiffer is an example of a successful innovation that could only have been the product of a category approach to insights, R&D and asset development. P&G had several cleaning brands but it was a broader category insight and R&D capability that led to the development of an entirely new cleaning system – one that none of P&G’s individual brands would have developed independently. Within ten years of launch, Swiffer is likely to become P&G’s next billion-dollar brand.

•    Growth. Ultimately, the primary rationale for a category strategy is growth. Innovation and new product development lead to organic growth but a category is a defined space with a profit pool and set of consumer needs that can be satisfied through acquisitions as well. Mattel, the world’s largest toy maker, acquired American Girl as part of a broader strategy to dominate the doll category. Rather than building the equity of its Barbie brand or developing a new brand in the category, Mattel acquired the successful brand and made it immensely more valuable by folding it into Mattel’s existing distribution system.

A category approach is more holistic than a brand-centric approach.  It does not assume that a brand is well positioned.  It identifies a space – a potential profit pool and an area of consumer needs - and then develops innovations that meet both the internal financial hurdles and the consumer needs.

Innovating in categories does not constrain the organization to thinking narrowly about a brand’s equities, targets or distribution. Category innovation allows the company to find the best brands (internally or externally) and to build, buy or partner to deliver on consumers’ needs. A brand-centric focus leads to more line extensions and increasing brand affinity to drive sales. A category focus can broaden the thinking to developing new breakthrough products, capabilities or sub markets to grow share within the category, or grow the category itself.

In the end, marketing and sales must deliver on customers’ needs and, in the modern retailer environment, retailers are demanding an approach that aligns with their category management philosophy. So a category approach is increasingly a mandate rather than a choice. But it is a mandate within which manufacturers can develop the consumer insights capabilities, R&D capabilities, brand equity and IP assets to create organic growth by leveraging existing brand equities and/or new product development across the entire category. It can also lead to brand-adjacent acquisition to capture a greater share of the category.

The modern retail environment has shifted power from manufacturers and suppliers to retailers but this shift offers significant opportunities for growth by focusing on the consumer needs across entire categories and partnering with retailers to deliver brands and products to serve those needs.

Image source: SpringsBargains

Our Senses are How We Experience the World

In a normal lifespan you will experience almost 24 million images of the world around you. There are about 100 touch receptors in each of your fingertips. If your nose is at its best, you can tell the difference between 4,000 and 10,000 smells, and 75% of your emotions are generated through what you smell.

Despite the power of all of our senses to perceive the world around us, almost 83% of all commercial communication appeals only to one sense – our eyes. Today, this is not enough. If brands want to develop a deeper, more emotional connection with consumers, it will be important to simulate the senses, and as many of them as possible.  This is a concept referred to as Sensory Branding, as part of a broader shift in brand communication efforts to engage through Experiential Marketing.

Sensory Marketing More Important Than Ever

•    It is increasingly difficult to connect with consumers. There is a paradigm shift happening in the 21st century. Technical advantages are fleeting, anything can be duplicated and there are endless choices for consumers. Armed with endless sources of information and choices, consumers are fickle, flee from the mainstream and see through the persuasion techniques of traditional marketing.
•    Marketing must engage the most powerful part of the mind. Roughly 90% of consumer buying behavior is subconscious. Buying is not a rational decision, but is instead an emotional decision that arises from within the subconscious brain. In fact, unconscious decisions guide conscious decisions - our brains automatically make buying decisions, sometimes within fractions of a second. This unconscious part of the human mind is capable of producing very powerful and beneficial experiences over and above those expected from the technical merits of a product.
•    Traditional marketing and product efforts are not enough. In this new economy, many brands are experiencing diminishing returns on traditional ad spending and improvements to products and services.  As branding becomes increasingly important to differentiate, marketers will need to employ new forms of communication to be successful.

Sensory Branding – An Evolving Practice

Sensory Branding is a form of branding that relies on the use of sensory stimuli to develop a more relevant, compelling and memorable customer experience, and engage with consumers on an emotional level. However, sensory branding is not a new concept. Many successful brands have worked to engage the senses. Consider Kellogg’s use of sound in Rice Krispies’ signature “Snap, Crackle and Pop”, Crayola’s trademarked and differentiating scent of its crayons, and the tactile experience at an Apple store where interaction with the products is strongly encouraged.

However, in today’s world, focusing on just one of the human senses is not enough. When experiencing the world around us, the human brain does not process stimuli through one sense. Remember some of your favorite experiences or memories.  What senses did this experience engage? I love going to college football games, but the thrill of my experience is not just about the action I see on the field.  It’s the roar of the crowd on a good play, the smell of hot dogs and popcorn, the taste of warm hot chocolate, and the camaraderie of high fiving with my neighbors when our team scores. All of these sensory elements create such strong memories that every time I smell popcorn or drink hot chocolate, I immediately think “college football” and feel a tinge of excitement inside.  Today, successful brands are engaging several of the senses to create the ultimate brand experience. Singapore Airlines has successfully differentiated its brand through a multi-sensory experience by carefully designing the fragrance, flight attendant look and behavior, interior setting and foods and services, to blend together to reflect the brand image.

Is Your Brand Communicating Effectively to the Senses?

When thinking about developing your future brand marketing strategy, consider the following:
•    Which senses are you using to engage consumers in your brand today?
•    How well are you using sensory stimuli to convey your target brand experience and image?
•    How can you better leverage multiple senses across different consumer touch points to communicate and differentiate your brand?

(r)evolution can help you successfully create the right sensory branding strategy through five key steps:

1.    Determine the most important elements of the brand image, experience and positioning you want to convey
2.    Map out key points of customer’s experience with your brand
3.    Identify a blend of potential sensory stimuli that best convey the brand along key touch points
4.    Validate through consumer research
5.    Create a sensory stimuli roadmap to activate through your marketing strategy and communication

Sources:  Millward Brown Study. Lindstrom, Martin. BRAND sense. New York, New York: Simon& Schuster, 2005. Walker, Rob. Buying In: The Secret Dialogue Between What We Buy and Who We Are. New York, New York: Random House, 2008. Zaltman, Gerald. How Customers Think: Essential Insights Into The Mind of the Market. Boston, Massachusetts: Harvard Business School Press, 2003. Brandchannel.com. Image from paul.malon.

For over 1300 years fishermen in China, Japan, and other places around the world have traded in their nets and poles in favor of birds.  That’s right, birds.

The ancient technique of Cormorant Fishing puts the skills of these glossy black avians to good use and over the years has provided fishermen with food for their families and a means to make a living, not to mention offering a unique and compelling tourist attraction.

While visiting Guilin Province in China a few years ago, I had the opportunity to take a trip down the Li River, surrounded by the towering limestone Karst landscape, and watch a demonstration of this intriguing fishing method.

Each fisherman fishes with his own small set of trained Cormorant birds, who are something akin to pets and are passed down from generation to generation.  Every night at dusk the fishermen load their birds onto a flat-bottomed boat and float down the river. The birds jump into the water and get to work, catching the fish that are attracted to the boat’s light. Each bird is fitted with a small collar, which prevents the birds from swallowing any fish that they catch whole.  Over the course of a few hours the fishermen pull the birds back to the boat one-by-one, slipping the fish out of their mouths and returning the birds to the water.  When enough fish have been caught, all of the collars are removed and the birds are allowed to eat their fill.

Apply this concept to business and the old adage, “If you can’t beat them, join them” may come to mind.   Ancient fishermen recognized that they had an unlikely competitor in the fishing business and capitalized on the expertise of these animals by joining forces with them.

Coors Brewing Company (now MillerCoors) took this concept to heart in the late 1970’s when Coors Light was first introduced in the U.S. market.  The beer became popularly known as “The Silver Bullet” due to the taller, narrower silver packaging.  Coors knew a good thing when they saw it and rather than fighting a rather violent nickname referencing firearms, they embraced it.  The Brand’s marketing references this consumer-generated nickname to this day in its Silver Bullet Train imagery and NFL Silver Tickets promotion.

As we look at our own business landscape, including our competitors, consumers and other stakeholders, what perceived weaknesses can we learn from or take advantage of?

Image sources: David Newbegin and Coors Light

In the 1980s and 1990s, Circuit City was the leading electronics retailer in the United States with about 400 stores nationwide. From 1982 to 1999, Circuit City generated cumulative stock returns 22 times better than the market, beating out Intel, Wal-Mart, and GE. Circuit City’s future looked bright. However, when the dynamics of the market changed, Circuit City rested on their existing brand equity.

In the 1990s, Best Buy entered the market with an innovative retail strategy. In an effort to gain market share, Best Buy secured prime real estate positions and invested in gaming, the creation of an e-commerce website, and viral marketing. But even though Best Buy had changed the retail electronics game, Circuit City stayed the course.

Circuit City laid off their highest paid sales personnel to reduce costs, which negatively impacted customer service. And while Best Buy was paying a premium for the best retail locations and opening new stores, Circuit City stayed with their current stores and failed to update their design. In 2009, Circuit City went bankrupt. Could bankruptcy have been prevented? Perhaps not, but a brand repositioning may have helped.

Brand repositioning is different from rebranding. Rebranding is essentially re-skinning a brand, focused on brand identity and the perceptions and associations of that brand.  Repositioning delves deeper than the skin, and involves changes to some or all aspects of a brand’s positioning strategy, including:

•    Target market
•    Frame of reference (space in which the brand competes)
•    Core benefit the brand provides
•    Reason to believe the brand can deliver on this benefit

Companies should consider repositioning their brand when they need to alter their strategic direction, adapt to changing consumer preferences, bring in new customers, and/or differentiate from other brands.

As in any major corporate change, not every repositioning effort is successful. Several best practices can be employed to avoid common pitfalls and mitigate some of the risk involved.

Secure CEO buy-in

CEO commitment is essential in a brand repositioning effort. The CEO brings credibility to the effort and shows the company’s commitment to change. Furthermore, the CEO is the only person within an organization who can drive change in all functional areas within the company, create a vision, and gain support from key stakeholders.

Engage the whole company

A company’s greatest asset is its people. If a brand repositioning initiative only involves the marketing department without support from sales, finance, engineering, consumer service, and manufacturing, it is likely to fail. Since repositioning is more than “re-skinning” the company, it must go deeper than marketing.

Remember your history

An excavation into a company’s history can lead to new insights and illuminations and reveal core competencies and what differentiates the brand from their competitors. Looking back can help a company move forward and gain inspiration from the company’s founders.

Understand your target market and consumer needs

It is important to listen to your consumers and ask for their feedback. By speaking to current users and non-users of the product or service in question, a company can better understand what resonates with their target market, and what might resonate with ancillary target markets.

Make the new branding believable

When a company repositions their brand, they may say, “We have the best consumer service and we offer the lowest prices. We are fun, reliable, and innovative. We are the best.” However, if it isn’t true, consumers will not trust the brand. The brand’s message should be uplifting and positive, but it must also be honest and believable.

Consistently project and reinforce the branding

Communication of any positioning needs to be clear and consistent so that consumers can easily understand the brand’s benefit to them.

Image source: jakerome

In the wake of a tumultuous decade, many consumers are actively voicing a loss of confidence in big business. This cynicism coupled with a heightened awareness around social and environmental issues have placed a lot of companies on the defensive.  Over the past several years, a number of our clients have approached us with a similar challenge:  a need to improve their consumer-facing image to develop emotional connections and build a foundation of trust.

While the core issue was similar for many of our clients, the execution of each engagement varied.  We have worked on innovation, positioning, messaging, and Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) platform projects, all with this end goal in mind.  The question that remains is whether these efforts resulted in the desired effect of re-engaging a disenchanted consumer.  In order for any efforts to be effective, the approach must be holistic.

Kaiser Permanente re-engages consumers

Kaiser Permanente is one company that has had a successful run at re-engaging consumers. Five years ago, the company launched a new messaging campaign to reposition the healthcare giant in the prevention and wellness space.  The push came as a direct response to falling membership as well as lack of awareness among the general public.  The company believed that the negative opinion held by non-members was largely due to a “lack of a strong and consistent voice in the general consumer market.”  From this need came the “Thrive” campaign, whose focus was not on how Kaiser cares for the sick, but rather how it delivers wellness and enhances the overall quality of life.  Most would agree that this has been a fairly successful advertising campaign.  It clearly resonates with consumers who feel that there is much more to health than healing the sick.  However, is this just a great messaging campaign?

A holistic approach reinforces consumer branding

Kaiser is actually backing up its brand message with a slew of innovations through an institution-wide effort known as KP Innovation.  Their goal is to align every consumer touch point – from the waiting room experience, to the doctor patient interaction, to the way patient information is stored and transferred - with the overall brand positioning.  In 2007, the company began building a Total Health Environment, which involves applying design theory to all aspects of Kaiser’s operations.  A team inventoried Kaiser facilities to identify areas that were not “thriving,” and they drew inspiration for revitalizing these aspects from outside industries like hospitality and retail.  They also spoke with consumers to identify pain-points within their current experience.  They translated their findings into plans that will be used to build new facilities and remodel existing ones.   They are designing greener buildings, increasing the use of natural light, making waiting rooms more welcoming, selecting cozier chairs, making patient rooms more comfortable, and choosing color palettes that are brighter, just to name a few changes.  These changes not only improve the look of the facilities, but they have also been shown to improve overall patient satisfaction.

The healthcare provider has also launched additional innovative initiatives that align with its wellness positioning.  A number of facilities have on-campus farmer’s markets that offer healthy produce for employees and members.  In addition, the provider teaches health and wellness classes that cover many topics including stress relief, smoking cessation, chronic disease management, and even yoga.  For patients that do not want to come to the facility, Kaiser also offers online support tools weight loss, nutrition, stress reduction, pain management, and smoking cessation.  All of these initiatives support Kaiser’s efforts to show both consumers and employees that they are serious about keeping people healthy.

So it looks like Kaiser’s catchy tag line, “live well and thrive,” may be more than just empty promises. Peter Andruszkiewicz, President for the Kaiser Foundation Health Plan of Georgia, Inc., says this about the effectiveness of the KP Thrive campaign:

“In Georgia and nationally, it has successfully increased the number of people willing to consider KP for membership. It has also significantly increased the perception across multiple audiences that KP is serious about proactively keeping people healthy.”

What do successful brands like Zappos, Google and New Belgium all have in common? Their employees exhibit passion and energy for their company, their brand and their ability to deliver on the brand promise.

At Zappos, they position their brand to be “a service company that happens to sell shoes among other things.”  However, providing great service requires a customer-focused culture. So their number one core value for the company is “Deliver WOW through service.” They train and empower their employees to live and deliver “WOW,” and make “WOW” part of the every day vocabulary.  All new hires at Zappos.com Las Vegas headquarters, “including accountants, lawyers and software developers,” are required to go through Customer Loyalty training.

At Google, they realize that in order for employees to be champions of the brand, they must also be champions of their own products.  It is a culture norm for all employees to use Google’s products daily in their work, and there are ways to easily relay feedback and share ideas for the innovation process.  To make sure the “Google blinders” aren’t on, employees also try out all of their competitors’ products.  Through this practice, employees stay up to date on continuous product iterations and innovations that occur each day, and most importantly, know first hand what sets the Google brand apart from everyone else.

New Belgium is a microbrewery in Colorado with a large and loyal following. New Belgium has built a brand based on sustainability, which they preach internally as well as externally. After one year of employment, all employees gain an ownership stake in the company and a customized New Belgium bicycle, which symbolizes the company’s commitment to sustainability. Employee ownership also empowers employees to carry forth the brand on their own, without a mandate from above. In 1998 employee owners voted unanimously to turn New Belgium into the first wind-powered brewery. In addition, 1% of all revenues go to environmental non-profits.

All of these examples show great practices in internal branding, which can be defined as programs and tools to inspire and engage employees to “live and deliver” the brand. As many successful brands have learned, employees can be your most passionate and powerful brand champions.  However, brands can also fail because they lack the organizational buy-in, energy and momentum to achieve a sustainable and recognizable position in the marketplace.  Studies show that, on average, only about one-third of employees are actually highly engaged champions of their brand. This means, that many brands, new or existing, are at risk of failure.

Lessons

We recently worked with a company to develop a strong, recognizable brand and positioning and faced this very challenge – how to engage the entire organization to be champions of the brand.  Based on this experience, we wanted to share our learnings with you, because not all brands are like Google and gain instant brand enthusiasts in the hiring process.  When we started this work, we were focused on two important steps: 1) creating an effective and compelling brand strategy and 2) effectively launching the brand in the market.  However, there remained an extremely important step in the middle – launching the brand internally.  To do this, we first thought about our biggest organizational obstacles.  For any company embarking on an initiative to brand internally, here are some important questions to consider in determining the challenges ahead:

•    Do senior leaders believe enough in the importance of branding and the brand itself to stand behind it and invest in its success?
•    What is the current mindset of employees at the start of this initiative? Have there been failed branding initiatives in the past that may cause employees to be more skeptical?
•    How large and spread out is the organization geographically, and are functions and regions well aligned and in close communication?
•    Has the company ever had a customer centric mindset that lends itself to the importance of branding, or is there a “build it and they will come” mentality?
•    How well do employees believe in the strength of the current offering and its potential?

Even if your answers to these questions make you skeptical about the outcome of an internal branding initiative, our recent work in this area has unveiled some key initiatives that will increase your chances of success.

•    Have it come from within
•    Build circles of influence
•    Don’t just tell…inspire
•    Educate and engage
•    Make it more than words on a page

Have it come from within. When developing or revitalizing a brand, it is important to make employees feel like they are part of it.  When people feel responsible for the brand’s origin or direction, they have a lot more passion and ownership, versus when they are told by Marketing or the powers above what the brand is to be.  Methods to instill ownership of the brand range from a simple employee wide survey to gather opinions, to one-on-one interviews with various stakeholders, to having people from key regions and functions react to iterations in the brand’s development.

Build circles of influence. This is particularly important for large, complex organizations, in which Marketing is limited by the reach and number of people on the team.  Before a new brand strategy is rolled out to the entire organization, it’s important to immerse select employees in its development.  These individuals could be:

•    Organizational leaders: Senior management or individuals with strong influence within the company
•    Early pioneers: Individuals or groups who will be the initial implementers of any new brand strategy “proof points” in the market
•    Motivators: Employees with a natural skill to inspire others in the organization around an idea and who have strong passion for the potential of the company
•    International counterparts: Individuals in offices around the world that serve in one of the three roles above

Don’t just tell…inspire. In sharing the brand strategy with employees, it is important to take measures to inspire them to believe in the brand and its promise. This is important because emotions help people care.  When people are emotionally engaged by an idea or initiative, they are more likely to become part of it and take action.  Some methods to inspire include immersion workshops to generate excitement around the possibilities of the brand, or creative forms of media to communicate the meaning and essence of the brand.  These could include an object for their desk that illustrates the soul of the brand, a compelling brand film that conveys the emotional promise, or mocked up visuals illustrating the “imagine ifs” for the future brand.

Educate and engage. Knowledge is power, so it is important to create a central forum to educate the organization about the brand and all of its elements.  It is also important to clearly connect the brand strategy back to the role of every individual in the company.  Concepts that stick in an organization are clear, not abstract or ambiguous. In order to make something clear and easy for others to understand, you should explain it using concrete images that take advantage of existing schemas in the audience’s mind.6 Without this information, employees, especially those outside of Marketing, are disengaged from the brand.  An individual who works in Accounts Payable is not likely to realize that her actions and dialogue with customers, partners or vendors can speak volumes about the brand.  Many brands address this through a creative and inviting brand website that is accessible to employees, vendors, partners, etc. and contains information, guidelines, role play scenarios, etc. as well as a place for open dialogue and questions.

Make it more than words on a page. Depending on past experience with the organization or previous employers, many or some employees prefer to reserve their efforts and go into “wait and see” mode when a new brand strategy is launched internally.  Without tangible proof points that the company is making impressive changes in its approach to align with the new brand, they might feel as if they are wasting their energy on something that will never come to fruition.  This does not mean that a company has to spend millions changing its entire go-to-market approach to turn employees into believers.  In fact, new branding efforts that are broad and spread too thinly across every aspect of the organization lose their meaning and commitment and are usually unsuccessful.  Instead, the best approach is to identify select initiatives within the company that will have the biggest initial impact for the brand relative to the level of required investment, and start there.

Conclusion

“A brand that captures your mind gains behavior. A brand that captures your heart gains commitment.” When implementing a new brand strategy, employees can be your toughest customers, however, when the organization is rallied around the brand, it can be a formidable force in the market.  We have seen this through the incredible success of brands like Zappos, Google and New Belgium, all of which have enviable brand ambassadorship.  By capturing employees’ hearts, giving them the tools and information to engage, and proving leadership’s commitment to execution, an organization can succeed in creating powerful brand champions.

Sources:

Brandeo. Brands: Zappos Brand Based on Great Service Not Lip Service
Building a Customer Focused Culture, Presentation by Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos
Interview with Google employee
www.newbelgium.com
“7 great places to work” CNN.com
Employee Brand Engagement: It’s Not a Myth—Happy People Make Happy Businesses.
Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, Dan Heath and Chip Heath
Scott Talgo, Brand Strategist
lil 1/2 pint

Marketers are a lot like consumers. Both are human, and both are fallible. As humans, we all have a limited capacity for digesting and making sense of information. Which is a problem, since both marketers and consumers are being confronted with more information than ever before. This dichotomy was forecasted as early as the 18th century by French philosopher Denis Diderot:

“As long as the centuries continue to unfold, the number of books will grow continually, and one can predict that a time will come when it will be almost as difficult to learn anything from books as from the direct study of the whole universe. It will be almost as convenient to search for some bit of truth concealed in nature as it will be to find it hidden away in an immense multitude of bound volumes.” Encyclopédie (1755)

The same principal holds true in a professional context. Case in point: the NASA Challenger disaster in 1986. The scientists who tried to persuade their superiors to postpone the launch had all the right data, but it wasn’t presented in an easily digestible form, as statistician Edward Tufte points out in his book, Visual Explanations. These are the two charts scientists had describing the O-ring erosion, which led to the crash.

It is only when this same data is charted along a temperature axis (thanks to Tufte) that the problem becomes abundantly clear: cooler temperatures increase the chance for damage.

Of course, not even 18th century French philosopher Denis Diderot could have foreseen the emergence of computers and the internet, which have put massive amounts of data within our reach. As marketers, we now have access to enough numbers to make our heads spin, from volume projections to time spent on websites and everything in between. And while all of this information can make our jobs easier, we need to make sure that we aren’t overwhelmed by it.

So what does all of this mean? Information is, at its basic level, a tool that we use to make decisions. Before diving into all of the information at our fingertips, we need to ask what decisions it is enabling us to make and filter out unnecessary information accordingly.

We also need to make sure we are giving consumers the right amount of information, as too much can only get in the way. Consider Apple, an over-used but nonetheless relevant example. In product packaging and on the products themselves, Apple displays only the relevant pieces of information. The only visible words on the computer I’m typing on right now are “MacBook Pro.” Beyond that, the product design speaks for itself, and Apple has recognized this.

That’s not to say everything should be simplified. In today’s consumer-powered market, many consumers are looking for large amounts of product information when making purchases. But this information shouldn’t be thrust upon them. Rather, it should be easy to find when sought out by consumers.

The bottom line: Keep it simple, know your end goal, and use information selectively to achieve it.

Image source: AskTog.com