Why your brand is dead in the water

August 14, 2012

Here’s how most brand evolve.  The organization’s leadership huddles up at a corporate retreat (or if it’s a start-up, around the kitchen table) and decide on a tagline and maybe a logo.

The tagline becomes the battle cry of the brand and they’re off to the races.

Or worse yet…the organization hires an agency who claims to “do branding” and after a little deliberation, the ads have the new tagline and logo and voila, the brand is launched.

Fast forward 6 months or maybe a year.  The tagline and the brand are limping along.  No one really uses them anymore.  And if they do, they think of it as the “theme of the month” and assume it will just go away over time.  And it does.

There are many reasons why a brand fails….but the biggest one in my opinion is that the employees are not properly engaged and connected to the brand.  Without a huge investment of time, energy and some money — the brand remains a superficial cloak that can easily be pulled off or shrugged off when it gets to be a challenge.

Your employees are the key to a brand’s long term success.  It’s that simple.

When we are asked to develop a brand for a client, we require the step we have dubbed “seeding the brand” which is the whole idea of introducing the brand promise to the employees and letting them take ownership of it — deciding how to deliver the promise, how to remove the barriers to keeping the promise and how to keep the brand alive inside the organization.

If a client won’t agree to implementing that stage of the process, we won’t do their brand work.  No ifs, ands or buts. Why? Because it won’t work without that step. And I don’t believe we should take their money if we can’t deliver success.

Discovering and then building a brand takes a village.  And you have to start by including your own villagers.

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Marketing Insights Question: How are you building your marketing foundation?

December 20, 2011

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How are you building your marketing’s foundation?

Over the next few weeks, as we head towards 2012, I want to get you thinking about your business in a new/fresh way.  I’m going to ask a single question in each post — but I’m warning you, these aren’t slam dunk questions.

I’m hopeful that as you ponder my question — it will give you some ideas for making 2012 a break out year for your organization.  If nothing else — this exercise should fine tune some of your marketing efforts.

How are you building your marketing foundation? We’ve talked a lot about the know • like • trust model.  If you remember, the final leg of that equation is that consistency creates trust and trust leads to sales.

How do you generate that trust?  By building a marketing foundation.  And here’s how you go about that.

You do one thing on a regular (daily, weekly or monthly) basis that will add incredible value for your prospects and customers.  This is something that, if you stopped doing it or skipped a week — they’d not only notice the absence but they’d actually miss it.

What is the one thing?  It’s going to be different for every one of us — depending on our industry, our clientele, our position in the market place, our bandwidth and our organization’s culture.

It could be as simple as an enewsletter or as complex as a podcast where you interview leading experts in your field every week.  It might be a cartoon or an ongoing video series.

No matter what form it takes, it must meet these criteria to qualify:

  • It’s scaleable so as your audience grows, you can include many more people
  • You are 110% committed to honoring your consistency pledge
  • It is not a sales piece — this is you creating incredible value
  • It is shareable (people can pass it along to colleagues somehow, even if that means tacking it up on a bulletin board)
  • It should be unique to you.  Either no one else in your competitive set does something like it or you do it so differently that it stands out

This is going to require some creativity on your part. And some discipline.  As soon as an idea starts to sound at all like a sales tool or gimmick, smack yourself.  That’s the kiss of death.  And it is the mistake 90% of all organizations make.  They just can’t resist hinting at or outright asking for the sale.

If you truly adopt this effort — you will create long lasting relationships with clients and prospects.  You’ll also create a word of mouth marketing machine, as your audience shares your offerings far and wide.

Start with that first building block…and you’ll be amazed at how quickly you’ve built something worthwhile.

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Can your brand co-exist with your company’s brand?

July 28, 2011

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…How do you balance your personal & company brand?

Earlier this week, we explored the idea of how your personal brand influences and sometimes becomes your company’s brand.  If you are an author, solo consultant or solopreneur that can actually work to your advantage, as we discussed.

On the flip side, if you’ve got an entire organization behind you (whether it’s 4 employees or 400) then having a very prominent brand can be problematic.

Why?

Because you get into the sticky situation of people wanting to hire YOU not your firm.  Which means your company can only grow to the peak of your own capacity.   And potential customers will be disappointed if they get assigned to one of your co-workers rather than being excited to be connected with an organization as smart as yours.

So how do you combat that?  You certainly don’t want to douse your own brand and when pointed in the right direction, your brand’s reach can extend to serve your entire company.  But how do you make sure your personal brand doesn’t overshadow the entire team?

Only the best: If you’re in the position to influence or control the hiring, you’re going to have to guard against settling.  You will need strong individuals who perform at the top of their game every day.  They also have to be ready to stand in tide of your brand and hold their own.   Be candid about the situation and help them define and build their own brands that compliment yours and the company’s.

You’re also going to have to recruit people who are committed to always bettering themselves: And part of your role is going to need to be coach/mentor.  We give a lot of lip service to the idea of hiring people who are smarter than ourselves, but you’re really going to have to walk that out.  How can you truly motivate and support them getting even better?

Celebrate your team: Get out of the spotlight when you can.  If you can turn it to one of your teammates, all the better.  You’re the team’s biggest and most vocal cheerleader.  Do it internally and do it with clients and prospects.    Encourage them to take leadership positions in the community, especially in areas where you have not already been.  Let them carve out their own path and be on the sidelines applauding the entire time.

Think differently about your products/services: Odds are your strong personal brand was borne out of you being very good at something.  And you probably built your company around that core competency, as well you should.

Let’s say you are the best cupcake maker in the world.  Your cupcakes make grown men weep.   And maybe there’s no way any of your very able bakers are going to be able to duplicate your cupcakes.  That’s okay….you keep making the cupcakes.  And if you want — your business can only sell cupcakes.  But that means you have to always be in the kitchen.  And your team can’t grow and enjoy basking in their own light.

Why not examine both what your customers need and where you team has some unique talents.  Perhaps there are some complimentary offerings that they could own.  Maybe one of your staff makes killer expresso or quiches.

Even within a niched company like a law firm specializing in taxes, there are nuances or levels that are worth exploring.    Help them find their own niche that can flourish alongside yours.

In the end, it’s a balancing act.

Every company would like to have a charismatic leader who is well known and well respected.  So you don’t want to do anything to diminish that.  But you do want to elevate the rest of your crew so that all of you can build a company that exists and succeeds beyond your own sphere of influence and your 24 hours in a day.

For those of you who have a strong presence or brand — how do you create the balance for your organization?

 

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