Brand Mangement

Branding is a serious business. In fact it’s more than that. Branding can be the difference between your business failing or being a success. After all, your brand represents the personality of your company – the key attributes to be quantified, measured and valued. Qualities that communicate what your business stands for to both customers and your people. "In technocratic and colourless times," the head of the Nestle Company once declared, "brands bring warmth, familiarity and trust."(1). Sounds simple put like that doesn’t it – so why are so many businesses across Scotland making branding mistakes?

With the myriad of branding theories being espoused in the business world, you could be forgiven for thinking that aside from being a serious matter, effective branding is also just confusing. What is our corporate personality, how does this fit together with the way we present our products to customers and the way we train our people? Have we got our branding right anyway – or do we need to re-brand? These are complex and valid questions, perhaps asked with one eye on all those branding horror stories we’ve all heard; like the disastrous launch of “New Coke” in the ‘80s or the collapse of online retailer Boo.Com in the ‘90s. Surely if large companies can get it so wrong we have to be sure that our branding strategy presses all the right buttons from the very start. A difficult task when considering that, “most of the world’s famous corporate names have at one time or another launched a product so blatantly wonky that a chimp in a lab coat could have warned them off.”(2). As I said – it’s a serious business. So what should we have in mind when devising a successful branding strategy?

The key to an effective brand strategy is a flexible, organic approach that not only considers how your company and products look to your customers, but to the people inside your business as well. If brand values are embedded in the thinking of your staff then your external image will benefit as a result. Whilst providing a “backbone” of core personality traits that are easily understood and implemented by your whole team, your branding strategy should also be flexible and dynamic. Ensuring that your people, your products and your company brand can react to the needs of your customers, your market and your internal organisation to best represent what your business actually stands for. It’s a self-fulfilling cycle, with your people aligning what they do internally to the context of how they understand your brand, and communicating this personality externally to customers. Customers who then reciprocate this brand message by behaving and consuming in the way that the brand itself envisaged. “Just doing it,” in the case of Nike. And on the flip side of this, there’s nothing worse than….
…a brand that commits to more than it can deliver, as both your customer base and your own people will see through your brand ”promises” and stop trusting what you do. A wholly avoidable state of affairs that can hit even the larger corporations who take their eye off the ball. A company not living up to its brand profile is an organisation suffering from a personality disorder – a condition that is noticed first by its customers and then by the people on the ground that have to deal with the disjointed brand alignment every day within that business. Couldn’t happen to you? It happened to Halifax Bank of Scotland.

The recent merger of Halifax and Bank of Scotland to create HBOS, was a hugely complex transaction, which resulted in senior management focusing on the big picture to the detriment of what they did best; Scottish branch banking. HBOS CEO James Crosby acknowledged that, “HBOS had been forced to re-examine day-to-day branch practices and key marketing initiatives after failing to appreciate the strength of feeling over the historic Bank of Scotland brand. He admitted, in the midst of integration, the ‘presentation of the Bank of Scotland brand and products in Scotland had not always met with the approval of all our customers and former colleagues.’"(3). Contrast this with hotel giant Ritz Carlton, whose “web site promises the finest personal service,” a promise kept “through every interaction (you have) with the brand. From (your) initial experience at check-in to (your) last conversation with the bellman.”(4). And the difference between these two branding strategies? “Ritz Carlton’s success with branding lies in the way it has engaged its brand community in executing on the brand promise. Every employee gets it. Socializing the brand is good for business.”(5). The customers and the staff have the same appreciation of what the Ritz Carlton brand means – an alignment lost for a while at HBOS.

The real problem of course for senior managers is identifying where such branding alignment problems exist, and if the company should re-brand to address them. For instance, it seems a bit rash to change the internal culture of a company in order to align it with external brand expectations – if the company is making a healthy profit and its staff and clients are both happy. Any serious lack of alignment should be countered with specific brand awareness training, which identifies core personality traits that your people can then communicate on to the customer. Unless the situation becomes untenable there needn’t be a requirement for actual re-branding at all, and this in itself is a decision to be made carefully by management – It’s no use relieving the tension of brand misalignment to replace it with internal concerns over the culture change involved with re-branding.

In the final analysis, a successful branding strategy centres on communicating your company’s core personality traits to both external customers and internal staff. In an ideal world these perceptions would remain perfectly aligned, but it is the role of the senior executive to effectively manage these gaps in brand perception so everyone that matters sees your business in the same light. If the tensions become too great and your business starts to suffer – it’s time for a careful re-brand, or risk losing all in translation. Just like the re-branding attempted by one famous corporation: “The people of Taiwan had no problem with the taste of Pepsi, (but) were a little disconcerted by the slogan: ‘Come alive with the Pepsi generation.’ It works well in English, but was translated as ‘Pepsi will bring your ancestors back from the dead.’”(6). Branding’s a serious matter – but it stops short of being miraculous.

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