Managing the Brand Beyond Communications

Managing the brand is all about leaders having the "courage of conviction" to adopt and commit to a new course.

By Dr. Lawrence A. Crosby and Wayne Marks

Any good rancher knows that to find the herd, one must first apply a very hot chunk of iron to the bovine body with a mark that identifies the four legged product as "my cow." Indeed, the etymology of "brand" can be traced to the old English word for burning.

Similarly, companies try to burn their own unique image on their products so customers can find "their company or their product" among competing offers. Marketing 101 is replete with historic examples of great companies like Nabisco, Morton Salt, Sunkist, Kikkoman, P&G, and many others and how they established the fundamentals of branding to firmly burn an indelible impression in consumer minds. They packaged and communicated unique value propositions (Ivory Soap – "It Floats."). And, consumers responded – they sought the products and bought, and re-bought.

It would be folly, however, to think of branding and brand management as only about conveying a product's unique benefit or even only in terms of the 4 Ps of marketing. Differentiation in the eyes of today's customers argues that we expand our view to include not only product, price, place, and promotion but also "experience." Managing the brand is about purposefully delivering the brand (and customer) promise in the total experience the customer has with the product or service.

Consider your own experience as a consumer in most any category. You listen to what friends have to say. You go on line to get information on a variety of products and services. You turn to a company because you feel good about who they are and what they stand for. You buy from them because their products are cool and you want to be seen as cool. You like the way their sales people treat you as a person; they care about you. You are blown away when the customer service rep not only answers your question but suggests a way you could save money. You monitor discussion threads on Amazon.com. You check power seller ratings on eBay. The list is endless.

The multiple ways customers touch companies and their products constitute their experience. Traditional marketing communication is important but is only part of the mix of brand management. Brands carry a promise that presumably differentiates the company or product and that the entire organization needs to deliver consistently. If all those touchpoints don't deliver the promise, then marketing communications dollars are wasted. More to the point, marketing communication dollars run the risk of creating negative equity – by communicating an unrealized promise that generates customer backlash.

Brand management needs to focus on four basic goals: Gaining new customers; keeping existing customers, getting more share of wallet from existing customers, and creating indelible bonds with customers so that they are passionate advocates. To do this, we need brand management systems that focus on what in the total customer experience drives customer behavior. Why do customers really buy? What is the influence of the sales person at POS? To what extent is the customer's behavior motivated by rational factors in their experience like product features and quality versus emotional factors like the peace of mind from warranty or service support?

Brand management has entered a new era where we need to manage the entire customer experience. This requires marketing to work across organizational functions and with the rest of the executive team to ensure the brand promise is being delivered. The organization must deliver the promise consistently and uniquely against those touchpoints in the customer experience that actually drive customer behavior.

Brands carry a promise that presumably differentiates the company or product... If all those [customer] touchpoints don't deliver the promise, then marketing communications dollars are wasted.

Costco figured this out from its founding days. As reported in the October 30, 2006 issue of Fortune, the company has more sales per square foot than any other retailer save Best Buy. When was the last time you saw a Costco ad in the paper or on TV? Hint: You didn't. They figured out that the touchpoints that drove their customer loyalty, and their brand promise, needed to be delivered in different ways. Hence, customers like us now have a two-year supply of giant-size French's mustard in our pantry.

How to deliver the brand as an integrated element of the total customer experience? The answer to this will differ from company to company. But let us suggest, as starters, 11 points we have learned that enable success.

1. Broaden the executive mindset to look at the brand as the total experience of the customer. Ask yourself as a leader whether this is something you hold dear to your heart. Managing the brand as a total experience that yields customer loyalty is all about leaders having "courage of conviction" to adopt and commit to a new course. HP gained notoriety for its strategy of the Total Customer Experience (TCE), which looked across organizational silos to how the entire organization could serve the customer best. Notwithstanding the changing of the guard at HP, Carly Fiorina put a stake in the ground about TCE and it remains today.
2. Synchronize the brand and customer strategy with the business strategy. Southwest Airlines has a low cost business strategy with fast turns at the gate and no frills on board. Making fun of giving passengers only "peanuts" works for them, as does the "fun experience" element of their brand strategy. That fun experience likely would not work as well in an airline with a different business model, one that looks more for premium pricing and a buttoned down business customer, for example.
3. Focus the ultimate metrics of brand management on business-critical loyalty metrics: New customer sales, existing customer repeat business, existing customer expanded business, and the growth of passionate customers. Link other more traditional brand measures and organizational process measures to customer outcomes to establish a system leading indicators of customer loyalty and business outcomes.
4. Get facts and data. Conduct reliable customer loyalty research to identify the drivers of the brand and customer loyalty. Identify priority improvements among high impact drivers.
5. Involve leadership to deliver improvements. With direct executive involvement, pinpoint priority improvements among organizational functions. Look for synergies across functions because it is highly unlikely the customer will become loyal just through one functional initiative.
6. Hold multiple levels of employees accountable for action. Simply wishing things will improve and assuming they are improving never works.
7. Give operational and front-line managers concrete and meaningful direction on what to do. Generally, people want to do a good job and will try to do what's right. But without direction, they could end up as a lot of well-intentioned people doing a lot of well-intentioned things that have little or no impact. Focus the organization on priority brand drivers.
8. Create clarity. Prioritize and stage organizational change. If one can't reduce the priorities to a manageable number, then re-think.
9. Create feedback loops on progress and reward/acknowledge people. Track improvements with data. Be careful about tying employee incentives to customer data unless you can ensure the systems can't be gamed. But, do acknowledge individuals and teams for outstanding efforts in living the brand.
10. Encourage employee creativity and establish explicit processes to harness and focus innovation. Don't get caught on the downward side of the S curve, but look at delivering the brand as a constant improvement and differentiation exercise.
11. Do it all over again. Managing the total experience of the brand and delivering the brand's promise is not an initiative, project, or program. It's a way of running the business to create sustainable business results that outperform the market. Ingrain brand and customer loyalty as an integrated strategy to create business results.

One branding iron on one flank of the cow just doesn't suffice. Companies need to deliver the brand around the whole customer experience to generate passionately loyal customers.

About the Authors

Lawrence A. Crosby, Ph.D., Chief Loyalty Architect, Synovate Loyalty, has more than 25 years of experience in strategic marketing and market research and works with major global companies to redefine and improve the use of customer research as a strategic, actionable management tool.

Wayne A. Marks, Sr. Vice President, Synovate Loyalty, is a recognized expert on helping companies increase business results by building customer loyalty. He has guided major global companies' programs in differentiating customer experiences; identifying loyalty drivers; installing customer metrics; and implementing organizational change.

© Reprinted with permission, American Marketing Association's Marketing Management, July/August 2007 Issue. All rights reserved.