Why Brand Management is Everyone’s Responsibility
Something I’m sure that has every marketing leader or brand leader tearing their hair out besides seeing their brand scores tank is when they get all the blame for it. If only brand preference building and management is as easy as putting out your brand ad on a big bus, taxi or whichever platform that gets as many eyeballs as possible. If so, why not just put it on a huge sky scrapper (hey that’s done before actually!).
Such tactics (I call them tactics and not strategies) work better for “will you marry me” types of wedding proposals but to build brand preference, it takes way more than that. Similar to good customer experience management, brand management takes the whole organization, including your client facing employees and your client facing touchpoints to help uplift your brand.
Firstly, your brand needs to serve a purpose and address a need or multiple needs for your defined target customers. Secondly, you need to know what differentiates you from your competitors even if you are selling the same things. Just like Pepsi and Coca Cola, both are cola drinks but both have their differentiating factors and ultimately, appeal. Thirdly, is your brand voice, message and identity that you are bringing to life through your marketing campaigns, news about your organization, things that your client facing teams are telling your clients or prospects, right down to the things you do in the broader public facing community. Finally, you need to clearly define as well as upkeep the key channels you are positioning your brand on that serve as a communication touchpoint with your target audience.
Many business leaders think the buck stops with the marketing campaigns but the trickiest part about brand management is how to make your target audience see you the way you want to be perceived. This approach leads to a dystopia state of brand reputation and perception as you will see almost conflicting activities and messages being shared from your organization by various business functions working in silos but not realizing they are all trying to steer the same ship to avoid hitting an iceberg. This is because everyone ends up trying to chart their own course to reach the same destination instead of playing to their strengths and working as a team.
There is nothing more dysfunctional than multiple teams trying to launch different variations of what they think your brand stands for in order to meet their own KPIs (key performance indicators). A tactical offer, is not a brand management strategy, a segment representation is not a brand management strategy and a campaign telling people how good you are is certainly not a brand management strategy but all this will affect the perception of your brand. Companies need to take a giant step back to reflect on what you are trying to position out there in terms of your brand identity and whether that still stays true to the fundamental reason you deserve to exist as a brand that customers care about.
The third and last part of the brand management aspect is actually also the hardest to maintain. You have to make sure your client facing touchpoints are keeping up with the demand from a tech, process and user design perspective so nothing falls through the cracks for your customers trying to engage with you. Concurrently, you need to have a joint-up approach in what you do and say to your target audience, including the timeliness and/or appropriateness of certain actions or messages. It goes beyond having a good crisis communications protocol.
For example, if your digital platform or servicing touchpoint is having a breakdown, you definitely do not want your key spokesperson to go out with a media commentary boasting about how great your digital or client servicing capabilities are or run an ad showcasing “seamless digital or client servicing capabilities”.
It’s more important to ensure business functions are working collaboratively as part of business-as-usual in keeping each other abreast, including your brand, marketing and communications team when something breaks or if they are preparing for a major enhancement so they can pre-empt the customer impact for the better or for the worse. Your management meetings should have a cadence to exchange such information so it can be cascaded to working group level to formulate a pre-emptive and proactive communications and customer management approach.
Simply said, the brand is the soul of the company and everyone is responsible for brand and reputation management but in the right way and not just checking off a list.
About the Author
Mad About Marketing Consulting
Ally for CMOs, Heads of Marketing and C-Suites to work with you and your marketing teams to maximize your marketing potential with strategic transformation for better business and marketing outcomes.
Why Is It Hard for CMOs to Transform Their Teams
Any sort of transformation is disruptive to business-as-usual (BAU) and any disruption to BAU also means that productivity is hampered. Amidst trying to meet business and marketing goals, targets and objectives, CMOs and their teams often find it hard to simply adhere to BAU and transform concurrently, and you cannot blame them.
CEOs and COOs simply have to first understand that the transformation journey is not a simple one where you can see the end of the tunnel right from the beginning of where you start. It’s more like a long winding road with hoops, turns and circles, depending on the complexity of the problems you are trying to unpack, the processes you need to overhaul to the skillset and mindsets of the people you need to enhance and change.
It throws a spanner into the works and takes time away from the CMOs and their one-downs to even try and formulate a plan swiftly while still carrying the major decisions they need to make to deliver their plans on time. Often times, they simply don’t know where or how to start without putting a halt to certain initiatives, campaigns or programs.
It is also a case of over familiarity and attachment to current processes, tools and scope of work that can build up an inertia for change of any sort that calls for an overhaul of the marketing department. While some companies choose to refresh their CMO leadership team, they find themselves in an even worse-off situation.
Why you may ask. Well, if you look at it objectively, a new CMO as in any new leadership person who just joins an organization will need to learn about the culture, processes, team capabilities from scratch. That is the so-called teething or onboarding period where the old team is likely to view the new leadership with suspicion and is less open to sharing information on how things actually work for fear of judgment.
Worse, you expect the CMO to already have a plan on how to transform while trying to settle into the organization without knowing the ins and outs of how things work. This journey itself will take at least 9 months to a year to complete before transformation can actually take place. It definitely cannot be a cookie-cutter approach that the CMO brings and applies from their previous company as every company is unique. Also, not all CMOs even have that approach they can rely on, which means even more time trying to plan or learn it from scratch.
In my experience working with various leadership and organizational structures, often I find that as marketing leaders, we are not given a lot of leeway and time to transform, resulting in having to look at quick and cheap wins, often at the expanse of people. This is not ideal nor is it sustainable even if you see initial positive results in terms of either business or marketing returns. These results are often not sustainable for longer term growth and retention of their key talents.
This is simply because good people who are working for something beyond just a pay check would not want to be associated with such an organizational culture. And that culture is often changed for the worse or established as a result of the hasty changes to be made.
It might be worth considering having independent third parties partnering with you and your CMO to help alleviate some of the pressure of planning for that change, so they can still focus 100% on the BAU to keep the engine running on full tank. After all, that is what you are paying your CMO for and not simply to do a once-off transformation. In other words, think bigger picture and longer term.
About the Author
Mad About Marketing Consulting
Ally for CMOs, Heads of Marketing and C-Suites to work with you and your marketing teams to maximize your marketing potential with strategic transformation for better business and marketing outcomes.