This position is responsible for helping to make the office more efficient, ensuring the highest quality in producing documents for clients, and assisting our consultants in projects. The right candidate must be mature, outgoing, agile, possesses excellent communication skills, detail-oriented, and able to work on a wide variety of projects and tasks. Must have a four-year degree and be highly proficient in Microsoft Office and is familiar with using a Macintosh operating system. Three to five years of experience working in an office environment in the marketing or professional services category required. Position requires use of Adobe InDesign and must be quickly learned. This position will be 24-30 hours a week with a flexible schedule.

If you are interested in joining this dynamic team, please send your resume and references to info@brandtoolbox.com

The author of the blog Tom Asacker, an insightful, articulate writer and savvy observer of business was bemoaning the general lack of understanding of brand in the business community.

“…for the vast majority of people the words “brand” and “branding” will never take on the strategic and unifying significance that we preach. Rather than suggesting a business philosophy and systematic approach to creating happy customers and increasing profitability, brand and branding will continue to evoke naming, logos, design and other aesthetic and mnemonic concerns.”

In a video clip Tom went on to say that “Only a handful of people know about brand and they are not telling anyone!” I can understand Tom’s frustration, but I don’t share his cynicism.

Frankly I believe, based on my experiences, that many, many executives understand what is necessary to create the core of a strong brand and they understand the everyday benefits.  What I also know is that too many marketers and consultants have created their own language to make brand a special and proprietary concept.  The rub has come about when those folks have tried to cajole executives to force fit their intuition and everyday reality into a quadrant-like, business book, framework of impractical language.

I have learned through my 30 years of working with clients on brand-related assignments that when you help executives make the right connections about brand they readily understand it. The first connection is between culture and brand. Strong cultures that are aligned to consistently deliver distinctive value to customers are the power behind great brands.  What really makes these cultures strong is the connection each employee has with the distinctive quality of the organization (its brand ethos) that inspires and guides them to do what it takes to make a difference for a customer.

Building a strong brand starts with discovering and communicating the unique quality of the organization that has proven to be the driver of its successes.  This ethos is used as the standard and guiding principal in leading the company.  I came across two examples in my Holiday reading.  Samuel Palmisano, recently retired CEO of IBM recounted in an interview in the New York Times how shortly before taking over the reins as CEO he read through the corporate archives to discover that IBM’s commitment to excellence was at the core of what made it successful and respected by their customers.  In the article he recounted how he challenged the culture of IBM to demonstrate excellence by answering four key questions as key drivers to delivering distinctive value to customers.  Delivering excellence in all facets of their business is the “IBM Way;” its brand of making a unique difference for its customers.

Making a connection between who an organization is and how it makes a difference helps give a brand meaning that can matter to employees and customers.  Palmisano recalls learning from his monthly lunches with Thomas Watson Jr., (former chairman and son of the founder of IBM) that “The Watsons, he says, always defined IBM as a company that did more than sell computers; they believed that it had an important role to play in solving societal challenges.”  It may be no surprise that IBM’s long-term vision, inspired by Palmisano, is encapsulated by their global initiative known as IBM’s Smarter Planet.

Another example came to light for me when reading an interview of Wal-Mart’s CMO Stephen Quinn in Fortune Magazine.  Quinn and his staff looked back to the philosophy of Sam Walton for the wisdom to “re-launch” the Wal-Mart brand.  They found inspiration in Walton’s ethos of “Working together, we’ll give the world an opportunity to see what it’s like to save and to have a better life.”  The Wal-Mart brand is now being anchored by its new tag line “Save Money. Live Better.” Creating such a strong connection between the ethos of the retailer and the re-launch of the brand has elevated the Wal-Mart brand identity by adding real meaning to its historical promise of low prices.

Savvy marketing professionals know that it is important to be the advocates to help employees make important connections between the promise of the brand and the actions that impact customers.  Quinn addresses this important connection between employees’ understanding of the brand’s purpose and their daily actions. “Fundamentally, this is a brand that has a purpose, and our associates are very committed to making sure we can save people money so they can live better… the brand has been critical to getting everybody on the same page about who we are and what we do…” He goes on to say “Way too many marketers get focused on the advertising and the communication messages … and they don’t play enough of an activist role inside the company to get the company to do the things we have to do to be successful for the customer.”  Now that’s making the right kind of connection that builds strong brands.

Brand building starts with strong leadership, a culture that is based on an authentic differentiator and is turbocharged with a marketing department that knows how to make all the right connections.  Effective leaders can build strong customer-centric cultures.  With the help of skilled marketers the organization will receive all the credit it deserves – becoming the brand of choice.

So I am optimistic about brand building as long as more folks are willing to make practical connections between brand and the things leaders understand and relate to in their everyday world.  Let leaders do what effective leaders can do – build strong customer-centered cultures.  This will enable marketing professionals to do what they do best – make connections between customers and the unique strengths of an organization.   Working together leaders and marketers can help employees understand their connection to making a difference for a customer.  When all that comes together the most important connection takes place – the lasting, authentic connection between a customer and a brand.

Marketers can recite many legitimate reasons, like budget constraints, senior management apathy, and lack of new product technology as just a few of the reasons that are impeding their intentions and efforts in building a strong brand.  Those and many reasons can be justifiable, but I believe there may be a more organic or essential element missing that is controllable by the marketer that lies at the heart of building a strong brand.  I am referring to the emotional connection between the marketer and the brand.

Building and sustaining the level of passion that maintains an enduring, enrapturing relationship with consumers is a matter of culture.  Igniting and nurturing that passion inside the culture is the responsibility of the brand manager.

A marketer’s relationship with a brand can be neither clinical nor mercenary.  No matter how many brands a marketing professional may manage in their career, each brand must be managed with an ethos of authentic admiration for the brand’s legacy and possibilities.  This must be true no matter if the brand is Ecumen, Farm Credit System, Fluke, IceArmor, Loctite, Nike or you name the brand in any category.  True passion is heartfelt, enduring and unwavering. If we want that from a brand’s consumers we should demand it of the brand’s manager.

Writing on this topic reminds me of two different cases that can add clarity to the claim.  A number of years ago I was on a speaking panel sponsored by public radio. One of the panel members was an executive from General Mills and we asked to share our viewpoints on the state of brand management.  On one of the breaks we were kibitzing about the state of the profession and he shared a particular frustration he was experiencing with new brand managers.

He went on to tell me about how General Mills characteristically hired young, high- potential MBA graduates from a select set of graduate schools, with Stanford being the first choice.  The best and the brightest would be hired and relocated to Minneapolis.  These new hires arriving in Minneapolis feeling full of possibilities and flush with a first- quartile salary and signing bonus.   Getting settled meant finding the “right” address in south Minneapolis and buying a BMW or their brand of choice of upscale car.  Following their orientation they were assigned a General Mills household brand, like Hamburger Helper.  The frustration he was feeling revolved around the apprehension or difficulty the new brand managers were having connecting with the Hamburger Helper and its consumers.

Compare that to my experience working on a project for Cabela’s, the outdoor sporting goods retailer.  Our firm was retained to assess the retailer’s marketing process and organizational structure.  Everyone’s passion for hunting and fishing became immediately obvious from the very first interaction when I arrived at the company’s headquarters in Sidney, Nebraska.  Having a passion for one’s employer’s business is one thing, but what I experienced at Cabela’s was at a whole other level!  It turns out that one’s level of passion for hunting and fishing was paramount.  Competence always took second seat to passion for the brand.

I learned first hand the importance of passion over competence.  It became evident when I was presenting the final recommendation of our study, which had been vetted by many on the marketing team, to the senior management team.  At the conclusion of presenting our recommendation one executive responded, “That is an interesting and insightful recommendation, but how much do you fish and hunt”?  He wasn’t kidding.  To him and others on the senior management team the study recommendations from an established marketing consulting firm needed validation by our passion for hunting and fishing.  I was impressed.

Marketing knowledge can be learned or purchased, but a passion for a brand and its targeted customers needs to be intrinsic and sincere.  With employee engagement levels waning and young professionals’ serial version of a career, I am concerned that internal brand alignment may be our new brand management challenge.

The dialogue quickly turned to the obvious options for increasing revenue.  As their business volume was almost busting at the seams, it was clear that demand was strong and not a problem.  So a simple solution is to raise prices, knowing that their reputation and referral-based clientele would most likely protect them from losing much, if any, volume.  Presto chango, more revenue, no more effort, little risk.  This strategy however presented only incremental growth opportunities. Another option we discussed was opening another store.  A new store could increase their volume significantly, making this strategic option more enticing. That’s when the conversation became interesting.

It was obvious that a new store would deliver new volume and with a stable of reliable vendors the extra projects could be handled easily.  What about the risks?  The risk associated with the extra capital required to build out a new store didn’t seem to concern my friend.  In her mind hiring new employees was the bigger risk and maybe the showstopper to the whole idea.  Certainly the pool of qualified employees was sufficient.   So what was her specific concern about staffing up another store?

Our conversation quickly reminded her that the success of the business was tied closely to her personal brand and her partner’s personal brand.  She is convinced that the relationship equity of the business was tied to two personal brands and that may be a double-edged sword.  Simply stated, customers identified with her and her partner and not the store brand, so to speak.  Even to the extent it was likely customers would refer their friends to go to “Julie’s store” as opposed to using the actual store name.  She (and her partner) had become the brand where the customer loyalty resided.

The inherent risk wasn’t just one of brand awareness or association, that is a straightforward problem to solve.  Would customers’ confidence be rattled without the presence of these two important brands?  My friend and her partner make sure every part of their service is just right, the reason their brands have become so respected by customers.  Their sense of aesthetic and attention to detail are a part of their hard-earned talent.  Their talent was at the core of their personal brand equity.   Because the talent was not extended to other employees or defined through process, the organizational brand never materialized in form or substance.  The strong personal brands created their initial success and the opportunity to grow their business.  But the lack of an established store brand was limiting their options to grow quickly.

Balancing the role of all three forms of brand loyalty (product, company, personal) is a challenge facing many businesses, from the smallest retailers to the largest professional services providers.  For more insights on how to proactively manage a portfolio of three brands check out this article.

Building a strong brand, whether it’s a personal, company or product brand, creates opportunities and advantages to grow even more.  Julie and her partner’s business success, driven by their personal brands, has earned them the opportunity for even more success in the future.  Making the effort to transfer some of their personal brand equity to their store brand will provide them more options to take advantage of future opportunities with less risk and greater chances of success.

The sales executive was honest telling me it would be a year before their new technology was ready, but when it was launched it would leapfrog the new technology leader (leapfrogging the leapfrogger?).  His challenge to me – how can I motivate the sales team facing a deficiency in the one of the company’s leading product brands?

For sure the salespeople were coming to the sales conference with a bit of a sulky attitude, being asked to meet their sales goals while selling a product with inferior technology.  These sales professionals wanted to know what management was going to do to help them meet their sales quotas.

On the day of the presentation I stood before hundreds of sales people acknowledging their plight and started my presentation with a rhetorical question – Ask not what the corporate brand can do for you, but what can your personal brand do for the corporate brand? My point wasn’t to poke a hornet’s nest, but to raise awareness that every company has three brands to create differentiation: product brands, corporate brands and personal brands.  Not all three are strong all the time, so it is prudent business to recognize how to reposition the three-brand portfolio to compensate for any weakness among the three brands companies use to build customer loyalty.

In case you are not familiar with how personal brand can augment the traditional product and corporate brand portfolio I have recently published an article on this topic called “Help! The Products We Sell Are Commodities.”

During the presentation I went on to explain how over time each brand (product, corporate or personal) benefits by association from one of the other brands.  A salesperson’s personal brand benefits when they are selling the best product in the category or they work for the industry leader.  Or how many times have we seen a company’s brand become much stronger from the introduction of a hot new product brand (iPod or iPhone and Apple?)?  Is the potting soil that carries the Miracle Gro brand really better than other black dirt one can buy?

My advice to the audience was to find ways to use the personal brand equity they have with their customers to offset any perceived deficiency in the product brand.  Was it possible to ask their customers to stay loyal and trust that a new superior product was just 12 months away?  I suggested it was time to “cash-in” some of their personal brand equity for the benefit of the company’s product and corporate brand.

Not so subtly I reminded the salespeople that the brand equity of this industry-leading company had helped build and shape their personal brand.  As we all know a strong personal brand is a very important career asset for any salesperson.  Besides all of that, striving through adversity would make their personal brands even stronger.

Their reaction was very positive and enthusiastic with a resounding – count me in!  These successful salespeople and industry leaders knew that using their personal brand to shore up the corporate and product brands would pay big dividends in the future for their personal brands.  They knew having a strong portfolio of brands ultimately makes every brand stronger!

How well is your company leveraging the modern brand portfolio?

An approach that focuses on proactively building the personal brand of all associates and then fostering authentic alignment between the associates’ personal brand and the corporate brand of the firm is a bedrock brand-building strategy for a professional services firm.  Together these two coordinated brand-building activities will enable any professional services firm to implement a brand strategy with confidence.

I can certainly expand upon the virtues of embracing this dual approach to professional services brand building, but hearing it in a more organic, street-smart way is always better.  This is why I want to draw your attention to an interesting interview I read in a recent edition of the New York Times.  As a part of the interview Barry Selzberg, C.E.O. of Deloitte LLP, shares some insights that reinforce the importance of personal brand and the alignment with the firm’s corporate brand (culture).  Here are a few excerpts from the interview that caught my attention relating to the importance of brand alignment and personal brand.

The Importance of Alignment

When discussing hiring new associates – “This isn’t just believing that the person we are interviewing is perfect for some role.  It’s also that person believing that the [sic] Deloitte is perfect for the environment that they want to be in.  I’m searching to determine whether that marriage is there. … I am looking for fit.” This statement clearly reinforces what we at Brand Tool Box call the power of brand alignment.  The most effective way to foster brand alignment is to hire for alignment.  Searching for alignment in the recruitment process is most often an intuitive process.  Providing candidates the tools to define their personal brand and explicitly discussing alignment around the firm’s corporate brand is a very effective and transparent way to discover alignment.

The Strength of Personal Brand

• On the importance of being authentic – “What are the values that are most important to you?  And how have you demonstrated your commitment to those values in the last two years?” Every strong personal brand gains its strength from its authenticity that in turn gains its footing from a conviction to one’s values.  Others prize authenticity because it ensures consistency in one’s actions and is the basis for a solid, trusting relationship.

• Citing important lessons for success at Deloitte – “No. 1 is, pay it forward.” Unquestionably the single most important lesson for building a strong personal brand is holding oneself accountable to making a difference.  Every time one makes a difference for someone else your personal brand equity grows.  Every time someone makes a difference for another associate or client the stronger the brand grows inside and outside the firm.

• “No. 2 is, brand yourself.  Make sure people know who you are and that you stand for who you are. Be unique about something.  Be a specialist in something. Be known for something. …What’s different about you – that’s your personal brand.” That pretty much says it all about the importance of personal brand for success in professional services.  There is no doubt that being perceived to be distinctive about something is important, it means you have conviction.  Being perceived to be distinctive, relevant and consistent are the three outstanding qualities of every strong personal brand.

Brand Leaders Set Examples

Although I don’t know Barry, his words ring true to me, but not because we agree on the importance of personal brand.  In the interview he cited a story about some key influences in his life, one of which was his father. “I remember on many occasions, I would come home from a test in math and I would say, “I got a 99.”  And he would say, “Well, where’s the other point?  “So I said to myself, OK, strive for excellence …” In addition he recalled how when attending a training program early in his career at Deloitte  – “ …the partner teaching the class told us about the five P’s: Proper planning prevents poor performance.  That must have been in the 80’s, but here I am in 2011 and I guide my leadership style by the five P’s.” The “five P’s” became his personal brand promise.  Although I am not privy to the Deloitte corporate brand platform, I’ll bet Barry’s personal brand promise is very tightly aligned with it!

If you are interested, I have written a short article that describes an approach to brand building for professional services. It can be found at http://www.brandtoolbox.com/ideas/articles/ and click on “Leveraging the Power of Personal Brand To Build a Stronger Professional Services Brand.”

Coincidentally a few weeks ago I was having a meeting over coffee with an individual who recently (in the last 18 months) retired from being the COO of a very prominent Fortune 500 company. Since his “retirement” he has been ramping up a start-up venture leveraging his many years of industry experience. He noted how he felt one of his biggest obstacles was that he no longer had the swagger of his former employer to accompany him in important meetings. Curiously I asked about how the swagger worked when he was with his former employer. He told me, “When we would walk into a prospective client’s office everyone knew there was no difference between our competitors’ products and our products. But that didn’t matter to us. We presented ourselves in such a confident manner that most clients felt like they might be making a mistake if they didn’t purchase our product.”

Strong, admired corporate brands have a swagger about them. A corporate brand’s swagger can become one of the powerful intangibles that differentiate one company’s products from all others. Strong personal brands have a swagger that entitles them to certain relationship advantages in business and personal endeavors.

Where does swagger come from? Swagger with the most gravitas is earned and exudes a well-deserved confidence. Swagger without authority is perceived as arrogance. Some might describe these people as, “all hat and no cattle.” Swagger comes from the confidence of the organization that they are truly different and can make a difference. These strong brands intrinsically believe who they are makes what they do a cut above other organizations.

Institutionalizing swagger takes time and a strong corporate sense of identity. In my experience and observations there are three drivers of organizational swagger: an organization with a strong sense of self; leaders that embody and exude the organization’s swagger and a conscious process to perpetuate the understanding and confidence of the organization’s qualities throughout the organization, especially those that interact with customers and prospects.

Perpetuating a strong corporate sense of identity begins with defining an organization’s brand platform. An organizational brand platform is its expression of its culture in the context of how the cultural values, experience and vision creates distinctive value for its customers. In essence a brand platform is a statement of its corporate character in terms that matter to its marketplace. For a more detailed description of a brand platform

Often times the difference between one person and another or one company and another is a perception of an intangible quality that is unique to that person or company. When the person or company is aware of this intangible differentiation they present themselves with a certain swagger  – an intangible quality that separates them from others.

Does your organization have a swagger that exudes confidence or arrogance or is just plain lacking in presence?

The potential to use social media to reach out and build a stronger personal brand is almost limitless and can be liberating for all of us. To take advantage of using social media it is important to remind ourselves – it’s not that we use social media; it’s how we use social media – to get the full benefit of it as a personal brand building tool.

The interconnection of using social media and one’s personal brand came to mind while I was reading an article recently in the New York Times. In particular the following segment in the article caught my attention:

“Of an interview subject she calls Brad, Ms. Turkle writes: “Brad says, only half jokingly, that he worries about getting ‘confused’ between what he ‘composes’ for his online life and who he ‘really’ is. Not yet confirmed in his identity, it makes him anxious to post things about himself that he doesn’t really know are true. It burdens him that the things he says online affect how people treat him in the real. People already relate to him based on things he has said on Facebook. Brad struggles to be more ‘himself’ there, but this is hard. He says that even when he tries to be ‘honest’ on Facebook, he cannot resist the temptation to use the site ‘to make the right impression.’”

The phenomenon illustrated above has been described to me and some of our executive coaches a number of times as individuals become more cognizant of how their social activities impact the way they are perceived by others. To facilitate a discussion addressing the challenge that Brad describes above I coined a phrase, “URL vs. IRL.” URL is a euphemism for one’s activities in the social media realm and IRL stands for “in real life,” a term I have heard describing one’s interactions that take place outside the social media space. For more insights here’s some information on this topic from the newly expanded and revised version of Be Your Own Brand you might find interesting.

I am sure for some people it is tempting to consciously create their own “reality show” as they interact in the social media universe. For others the technology itself can sway the way they present themselves in their interactions with friends and family. And then there are some people who don’t pay attention to what perceptions they are creating and hit the return key before thinking – you know – “ready, hit return key, aim!”

Using your social media activities to add to the strength of your personal brand doesn’t have to be hard, complex or require extra work. Let’s face it; the power of social media is that we get to interact with more people, faster and with less effort. So let’s not throw a wet blanket on these great tools.

There are few things like social media that have had such a profound effect and the potential rewards in the way individuals interact with each other. Using social media to build stronger relationships is an opportunity for us all, but be careful so that the tool hits the nail on the head and not your thumb!

“Someone show me how to tell the dancer from the dance.”

- A verse from Saturday Night, a song written and performed by the Eagles

Posted by Karl D. Speak

Let’s start with the basics. Perception is reality, right? After literally asking thousands of people this same question, I can tell you most people believe that perceptions are reality.

Here is a little more background on perceptions . . .

I have come to realize that understanding the notion of perceptions is the easy part. Learning to hold ourselves accountable to the perceptions we create can be a whole different matter. We are more likely to hold ourselves accountable to getting things done than the perceptions we leave as a result of our actions. Sound familiar? A female participant in one of our workshops recently said it best – “I am so busy getting things done, I don’t pay attention to the perceptions I leave, maybe I should.” Based upon the thousands of people who have attended our workshops, her comment is more normal than not.

The way any one of us is perceived greatly impacts how others react and interact with us. If one is perceived to be open, approachable and calm, it is likely another person will feel comfortable asking certain questions or telling us things we need to know. Of course the opposite can also be true. By the same token, how one is perceived will impact the things others ask us to do. It’s why some people get asked to do certain things by their boss or colleagues and others are not provided the same opportunity.

If others’ perceptions of you are an accurate reflection of you and your abilities, it’s more likely you will get opportunities that will play to your strengths. Once in a while you may be given opportunities that will challenge you and help you grow even more. The more success you have by leveraging your strengths, the more confidence you will have in your abilities. Unfortunately the opposite can be true as well. Our successes and failures can play a big role in how we perceive ourselves.

Using the power of positive perceptions isn’t complicated or difficult. How can you take advantage of the power of positive perceptions? Start with being clear on your strengths. Then be aware that the perceptions you create reflect those strengths, so create them as often as possible. (Developing your Personal Brand Platform is a practical tool to help you focus on leaving the right perceptions.) Finally take the time to evaluate if you are being given opportunities that would indicate people really do understand your strengths. If you are getting more of the opportunities that help you grow, give yourself a pat of the back – your strengths are showing through! If not, focus more on leaving the right perceptions so you get credit for your strengths.

Even rocket scientists believe in the importance of perceptions . . .

Posted by Karl D. Speak

To put the Fortune article in context, I recently described Leadership Platform 2.0 as a customer relationship-focused set of leadership principles for an organization. As I stated in the blog entry, Leadership Platform 2.0 must be steeped in two core principles – authenticity and customer relationships. A strong and powerful Leadership Platform 2.0 answers one of an organization’s most important existential questions – ‘What is the proven unique quality of the organization and how is it used to create distinctive value for customers?’

Now back to the article. In the past year WalMart has begun another important transformation to support their growth plans. At the core of this transformation is a new mission statement – “Saving people money so they can live better.” The phrase may be new, but their origins are literally steeped in the philosophy and words of Sam Walton. There is little doubt of the authenticity of their proven competency of saving money. The singular intent of enabling consumers to live better lives by using the money saved by shopping at WalMart (WalMart has documented that savings for consumers to be about $2,500/year) provides the real customer-focus gravitas that gives this mission statement a Leadership Platform 2.0 quality. The last part of the statement adds meaning and a certain inspirational quality to the rather workaday retail notion of saving money.

In its entirety, the WalMart mission statement clearly connects the company’s unique competency to creating distinctive value for its customers, making it a good example of the tone and intent that makes Leadership Platform 2.0 a powerful tool to create customer-centered leadership throughout an organization.

No matter what you think about WalMart, the simplicity and elegance of their Leadership Platform 2.0 is clearly world class and the relationship with their customers is the envy of many, many retailers.

Posted by Karl D. Speak

“The purpose of business is to create a customer.”

-Peter Drucker, Principles of Management (1954)

Recently a colleague of mine brought to my attention a fascinating article called “The Age of Customer Capitalism” (here or here ) written by Roger Martin, a modern day business guru. This is an article that is a long time in coming and over due. In this article Martin strongly advocates and supports with data the principle that placing customer value, as the top priority will enable organizations to produce sustainably higher shareholder returns, outperforming organizations whose top priority is maximizing shareholder value. Go figure!

In a nutshell, Martin’s point of view is that maximizing customer value will likely define a new and third major phase of modern capitalism. The first era, beginning in 1932, was defined by the introduction of professional business management. In 1976 the second era defined the primary purpose of every corporation was to maximize shareholder value. Martin demonstrates how modern corporations living by the rule of maximizing shareholder value provide a short term, but unsustainable gain for owners of the capital. By contrast, corporations that produce shareholder returns that are as high, but are sustainable have a focus on delivering customer value as their “true north”.

Who would have thought that placing customer value as top priority could be such a good idea?! Martin’s work places an MBA-friendly wrapper around what many people would say is common sense. But don’t short shrift the effort it takes to make common sense, common practice. It may sound easy, but there is a lot more to common sense than meets the eye. Or as Ralph Waldo Emerson reminds us – “Common sense is genius dressed in its working clothes. ”

Over the past 10 years internal brand building has become the focus of our firm. During that evolution we have garnered a great appreciation for the effort it takes to create a shift in mindset and operations that support becoming a customer-centric organization. (Traditionally brand building was relegated as the marketing function. By definition this shortsighted perspective clearly under-delivered on growing customer value. It also allowed marketers to ignore the challenges of fostering a customer-centered organization.) For starters, shifting the organizational mindset from customer transactions to customer relationships can be disruptive and takes more time than one may think. As you might imagine a different mindset is only the beginning of the change that is required.

All meaningful organizational change starts with leadership. There has been plenty of smart thinking and evidence to support the fundamental importance of documented leadership platform that is well understood by all leaders in an organization. The basic leadership platform involves a combination of mission, vision and values. Depending upon what leadership guru one subscribes to, that platform may be modified to include a purpose statement, BHAG (Big Hairy Audacious Goal) or some other iteration of the core mission, vision, value paradigm. I call these status quo leadership frameworks as Leadership Platform 1.0.

Fostering a customer-centric organization requires a new perspective on a leadership platform. At the heart of a customer-centric organization is its deep commitment to customers. Its culture takes pride in its relationships with customers. Transactions between the organization and its customers are signals that the relationship is alive. Loyalty in the relationship is meaningful feedback that the distinctive qualities of the organization do create distinctive value for its customers; the relationship is alive and reciprocal. Making a difference for a customer serves to guide the higher purpose for the organization.

Martin provides two illuminating examples of organizational purpose statements that fit the profile of customer-centric organizations and produce high levels of stockholder value:

“We believe our first responsibility is to the doctors, nurses and patients, to mothers and fathers and all others who use our products and services… We are responsible to our employees, the men and women who work with us throughout the world… We are responsible to the communities in which we live and work and to the world community as well… Our final responsibility is to our stockholders… When we operate according to these principles, the stockholders should realize a fair return.”

Johnson & Johnson
Statement of Purpose

“We will provide branded products and services of superior quality and value that improve the lives of the world’s consumers. As a result, consumers will regard us with leadership sales, profit and value creation, allowing our people, our shareholders and the communities in which we live and work to prosper.”

P & G
Statement of Purpose

Integral to virtually all of our work over the past 10 years has been working closely with leadership teams to define an organization’s customer-relationship-focused leadership platform. Our work with these teams is steeped in two core principles – authenticity and customer relationship. The collaboration starts by discussing the existential question – ‘What are the proven unique qualities of the organization and how have they been used to create value for customers’?

In some cases developing Leadership Platform 2.0 frameworks only required us to extend the words of the Leadership Platform 1.0 to ensure the customer relationship intent was articulated in clear and precise words. As an example, a vision statement might need to be refined so that it clearly stated the organization’s long-term commitment to adding value to the customer relationship, which may have been implied, but not stated. In other cases we had to start from scratch coaching the leadership team to reorient their perspective to be consciously focused on the customer relationship as the driver of their leadership strategies and activities. Leadership Platform 2.0 is customer centric and places the customer relationship as the top priority for the organization.

Customer-centric organizations characteristically score the highest levels of customer engagement and employee engagement, two fundamental drivers of producing sustainable high levels of shareholder value. When customers believe an organization places their relationship at the center of its purpose, their loyalty is strong and grows. When employees believe their employer is committed to a purpose that makes a meaningful difference for a customer, their engagement level is off-the-charts.

We have seen many, many examples of how developing a Leadership Platform 2.0 is a solid starting point for creating the change necessary to become a customer-centric organization. Roger Martin has convinced me that the customer-centric organization will outperform its peers. Becoming customer-centric is not rocket science, but it will require taking a common-sense approach to placing customer relationships at the pinnacle of leadership’s focus.

How customer-centric is your organization? Maybe it’s time to modify the conventional business wisdom from being transactional to a focus on building customer relationships, embracing the wisdom of Theodore Levitt, a very well respected marketing guru, “The purpose of business is to create and keep a customer.”

Posted by Karl D. Speak

There is a certain amount of irony when you discover that after writing a book your learning on the topic accelerates. The richest learning comes from the community of readers and those experiencing the attendant workshops our firm has conducted around the world. Another thing I learned is how tethered an author can become to the topic he writes about. This connection to the topic may come in the form of being asked for advice about someone’s personal brand or being drawn to people whose actions and stature qualify them as strong personal brands. Since writing the first edition of the book one indisputable conclusion that I have drawn is that strong personal brands come in many different forms, as varied as the human race.

At the core of the revised version of Be Your Own Brand is the importance of making a difference. The first paragraph of the Introduction of the new book best summarizes my point of view on making a difference to strengthen one’s personal brand.

Everyone has a brand, and anyone can be a strong brand. It doesn’t involve changing your personality—you can be an introvert or extrovert. And it’s definitely not about trying to be something you’re not. The difference between one personal brand and another is that the person with a strong brand utilizes his or her special qualities to make a difference in the lives of others. Read that last sentence again, because it is the foundation upon which a strong personal brand is built. Using one’s values and distinctive qualities to make a difference for others is the core ethos of strong, thriving personal brands.

The standard for making a difference can be small or huge. The feeling of making a difference is universal for the person on the receiving end of the difference and the person making the difference. Making a difference by being more of who you are is one of the most empowering parts of striving to become a stronger personal brand.

Making a difference is a relative concept. Many people would like to know that they made a difference that changed the world. The truth to the matter is that relatively few of us will ever achieve that status. Individuals who make outstanding accomplishments, whether it’s creating a game-changing business technology or discovering the existence of DNA, are truly special people.

These people are special not just in their accomplishments, but also their character. There is a plethora of books written trying to explain the special qualities of highly accomplished individuals, no matter their field of endeavor. One take on this subject that I have found interesting is based upon the concept of hypomania. I found the material contained in the book The Hypomanic Edge by John D. Gartner to be a very approachable take on hypomania. In his book Gartner describes a number of individuals whose achievements are legendary and relates their successes to their hypomanic tendencies. His book is a worthwhile read.

In a nutshell, people who are known to be hypomanic are described as having restless energy channeled into wildly grand ambitions, a tendency toward euphoria and a feeling of being destined to change the world. In addition these types of people: thrive on very little sleep; speak fast; have racing thoughts and are not patient with others who cannot keep with their racing thoughts; short attention spans; are outgoing and competitive; and enjoy activities that have risky consequences.

Not sure you want these types of people as your best friends? The truth is that these people with hypomanic tendencies are not your average neighbors and may even turn most people off.

But hypomanic people use their “grand ambitions” to take on big challenges and develop BIG ideas. Their tendency to believe they are “destined to change the world” keeps them focused on using their talents for a purpose larger than themselves. Their comfort with “risk taking” is a driver of accomplishing what many others dare not attempt. Their “high energy, need for little sleep and competitive nature” supports their zeal for making a difference beyond what others have accomplished.

Does one have to be hypomanic to be a strong brand? Of course not!

Learning from the individuals on the extreme end of the spectrum of making a difference can illuminate the core concepts of being a strong brand. In the revised version of Be Your Own Brand I emphasize three important concepts that anyone can apply to becoming a stronger personal brand: the strength of authenticity, the power of alignment and the importance of making a difference. When one examines the people in Gartner’s book and other cases of highly accomplished individuals it is easy to see that these people clearly made a difference; they thrive on their authenticity (some might replace authenticity with a brand style that borders on the fringe) and they align their talents and energy (one might also characterize their “alignment” as obsessed) to make contributions that are important to many others.

I am convinced that anyone can be as strong a brand as they want to be. Start today by holding yourself accountable to making a difference no matter how small or large. Everyone around you will benefit and so will you.

Posted by Karl D. Speak

What do customer engagement and employee engagement have in common? And why does it matter? Hint: The relationship between these two things will help senior managers make a cognitive connection between “the soft stuff” or business intangibles, and hard tangible results like revenue and profits.

No matter what school of thought you subscribe to regarding high-performing organizations, the level of customer engagement is a part of the conversation. Stated simply, a high level of customer engagement is one of the most reliable predictors of high-performing organizations. The reasoning is simple, common sense and proven. Highly engaged customers produce higher levels of revenue, both absolutely and on a per customer basis. The 80/20 rule (the Pareto principle for those so-inclined) related to revenue applies more often than not.

In addition, highly engaged customers are marketing assets because they have a proven propensity to refer a product or service to colleagues (these are customers that drive a higher “net promoter” score). It is hard to get more marketing leverage than from the proverbial “word-of-mouth advertising” or “marketing buzz,” as we call it today.

Finally, highly engaged customers are easier to service, as they give an organization the benefit of the doubt when a product or service lapse takes place.

So it’s easy to see how successful organizations benefit by having more than their fair share of customers who are actively engaged, a competitive advantage that is hard to beat. Said another way, an organization with a strong, admired brand is an organization with a relatively high proportion of highly engaged customers.

What separates an actively engaged customer from an average customer? For starters a customer who is engaged is convinced, in a rationale sense, that the organization they do business with consistently delivers distinctive value. This perception is the platform for a satisfied customer or even a net promoter-type who demonstrates a certain predisposition to remain loyal.

Active customer engagement transcends the rationale and relative evaluation of “what I get”/ ”what I pay.” Highly engaged customers see beyond the product/price paradigm and admire the organization for its values and its culture. Admiring an organization’s culture not only provides the actively engaged customer the confidence the organization will consistently perform, but more importantly it is a source of self-identity. In essence an actively engaged customer believes it shares a set of higher ideals with the organization. This perceived alignment adds special meaning to the relationship, elevating it beyond a rational quid pro quo business arrangement.

High performing, admired organizations are supported by a passionate, aligned culture that is driven by an above average level of highly engaged employees. There are two ways to identify a highly engaged employee from other employees. The performance management method du jour is to ask them to self-report on their level of engagement based upon answering a battery of questions developed by the human resources consulting profession. The other way is to observe their behaviors and the resulting impact on a customer or key business strategies. In this context, highly engaged employees routinely and without prompting – go the extra mile at the right time.

For starters a highly engaged employee believes they are being treated fairly, appropriately compensated, recognized for their contributions and today, more than ever, perceive their work/life balance preferences are being met. Sustainable high levels of passion and engagement require a belief by employees that the organization’s values are powered by a vision for making a distinctive difference for customers. When an employee has a so-called “clear line of sight” of how they contribute to making a difference in this outstanding culture, the level of engagement transcends the average employee. Making this connection adds meaning to the actively engaged employee’s work and contributions. For the highly engaged employee this connection is a source of self-identity and fuels the above average performance, augmenting the definition of an engaged employee to one that – goes the extra mile, at the right time, for his or her own reasons!

One can draw a number of parallels between actively engaged customers and highly engaged employees. In both cases these special individuals have high standards for relationships. Their passion for a relationship is fueled by the perceived level of alignment of things that are very important to them. In addition it is important for them to find meaning in the relationship that transcends the functional nature of the arrangement. Actively engaged customers admire the type of people who are highly engaged in their work. On a more concrete level, actively engaged customers depend upon highly engaged employees to consistently deliver on their high expectations. Without the actions of highly engaged employees, actively engaged customers will soon lose faith in the higher meaning of the relationship they have with an organization. The relationship will be downgraded to commodity status and both parties will be disappointed.

With only 76 words left I need to get to the point. For almost each and every organization the level of customer engagement is a direct reflection of the level of employee engagement. Senior executives who want to harness the business performance leverage that comes from a portfolio of actively engaged customers must start with a focus on the tangibles and more importantly the intangibles that breed highly engaged employees. Truth be known, the most highly engaged employees are fueled by intangibles that appeal to their values and their heart. When an employee believes there is an authentic connection with an organization around the things that matter most to them they will find meaning in their work and become passionate about the difference they make for the customers they serve. When employees find meaning, customers will commit to a meaningful and engaging relationship with an organization – the kind of quid pro quo that is built on purpose.

Posted by Karl D. Speak

This is a continuation of the previous interview with a Spanish interviewer.

Q. I have the luck of being able to live doing what I like and according to my values. This should be the norm but in this hectic world, as you point out in your book, it is not. Do you think recession has changed anything in our priorities and if so, do you think the change will be permanent?

A. I think that the recession has had some impact on how people evaluate how well their values are aligned with their employer or future employer. People feel less secure about their employment status so their connection with their employer is weaker. In that case individuals are more likely to look for a new employer when the economy improves. In the U.S. studies indicate that about 50% of individuals say they will look for a new employer when the economy improves. I believe they will be looking at employers who share similar values as themselves.

Generational attitudes are playing a much bigger role in individuals comparing their values to their employer’s values. People in the so-called Gen-Y demographic are clear about their relationship with their employer. An important question being asked by these individuals is “How does my job or relationship with my employer fit into my lifestyle and values?” I know this attitude is standard in the U.S. and is most likely flowing to other parts of the globe. The one clear implication of the changing attitudes of employees is the growing mandate for employers to pay attention to employee engagement and seriously consider implementing organizational development processes that will increase the level of active employee engagement.

Q. I have some doubts that alignment with values is the only and best way of getting people live the brand in an organisation. Alignment looks for uniformity and absence of dissonance. Isn’t this a bit contradictory with the personal branding philosophy in which you try to get more of what you are, no less?

A. Alignment is not the same as uniformity; it’s about congruence or compatibility. The Brand Tool Box® Personal Brand Model is a tool for individuals to discover their authentic personal brand. Our model of internal brand building is based upon a concept called the Power of Brand Alignment. This model is based upon alignment not compliance. The Power of Brand Alignment model is built upon a foundation of employees understanding their authentic personal brand well enough to examine where their values, attitudes and competencies align with their employer’s business brand. This is an opt-in model providing the employee with the opportunity to make a conscious decision about how much alignment they have with their employer.

When employees are able to identify areas of alignment and find ways to leverage the connection with their employer, their level of engagement becomes evident. Each employee will be able to contribute based upon his or her distinctive talents and engagement. Aligned personal brands bring a level of diversity that is valued and encouraged by innovative, high performing organizations.

Highly engaged employees are the drivers of high performing organizations. Disengaged employees are a drag on an organization’s performance. The largest segment of employees are uncommitted or employees unaware of their level of engagement. Employers focus on inspiring highly engaged employees to be more of who they are. Uncommitted employees are encouraged by employers to discover their level of alignment and then be more of who they are. Disengaged employees are urged to comply by adhering to uniformity and dissonance is discouraged because it is unproductive and distracts aligned, engaged employees.

Q. Sandford Meisner, probably the best ever actors’ trainer, teaches how one of the essential of good acting is to truly connect with your partner. And I think this is very applicable to a personal brand building. I totally agree with the conclusion of your book when you say that what really enriches our life are relationships: people you connect with, people you like, people you love, people you trust. How do your tools help to better connect with others?

A. Our tools of personal brand are based upon authenticity and alignment. Our Brand Tool Box® Personal Brand tools help individuals build and nourish relationships in three different ways. The first tool is a framework of defining an individual’s authentic personal brand. We help people make a clear connection between their most important values and the way they interact with others. That framework is called a Personal Brand Platform. The next tool we have is called a Personal Brand Assessment. This is a tool individuals use to assess how others perceive them, providing them real information to determine their personal brand strengths and weaknesses. Finally we have tools to help people find productive ways to create alignment between their authentic self and the needs of others. A stronger connection will enable an individual to make an authentic difference for another person. In addition when an individual consistently lives their authentic personal brand they will develop trusting relationships. Strong, trusting relationships are a very important asset of successful professionals and create ultimate fulfillment in life.

Posted by Karl D. Speak

From time to time, foreign journalists ask to interview me about the concept of personal brand described in Be Your Own Brand and more recently on my perspective on internal brand building. For a whole set of reasons I happen to find the interview questions submitted by non-U.S. journalists to be curious and interesting. The perspective behind these types of questions piques my interest and encourages me to answer them with a new eye on clarity. I recently responded to an interesting set of questions submitted by a journalist from Spain and thought you might enjoy learning from both the questions and responses.

In the spirit of brevity, I will include the first question of the Q & A today. Check back next week to read the remaining Q & A’s.

Q. Karl D. Speak is the creator of a model of definition of your brand essence (competences + standards + style) (we call it the Brand Tool Box® Brand Model) successfully tested with a great deal of companies. To understand the brand as an experience that others have from your company or product was the point of departure of his personal brand research. The model, does it really work?  Aren’t we as people difficult to reduce to such a simple framework?

A. As context for answering your two questions let me provide you with my point of view on personal brand. Following that I will address your questions about how we have been able to apply our brand model to help individuals become more effective at managing relationships in all parts of their life, including their professional life.

Over the past 10 years brand professionals have come to understand the importance of creating a model for personal brand as a viable tool to building a strong corporate brand. In one way we now understand that the enthusiasm and behaviours of employees has a great deal of impact on the strength of a corporate brand. In another way there are certain industries, e.g., professional services, where the brand of the individual has a greater impact on the customer than the corporate brand. Business leaders soon understood that a robust, yet practical model of personal brand was required to increase an organization’s ability to create stronger customer loyalty by using a portfolio of product, corporate and personal brands. Development of a personal brand model has become an important innovation in marketing.

The challenge in building a model of personal brand was to be able to leverage what we knew about business brand building without making the model impersonal. At the same time, the model had to be practical so individuals could use it. The key was to start with the things we knew were common between business and personal brands. As an example, strong personal and business brands share the following attributes:

• The strength of each brand is determined by how others perceive them. The value of a brand is determined by the perceptions of others. Perception is reality.
• Both exhibit a strong commitment to their values.
• They are admired because they demonstrate an ability to use their distinctive qualities to make a difference for someone else and their actions are very consistent. In other words both personal and business brand are perceived to be distinctive, relevant, and consistent.
• Others admire how the brand, in either case, has a vision for how it can make a difference for someone else.
• Both types of brands focus not only on what they do, but hold themselves accountable for the impression that was left as a result of their actions.
• Strong personal and business brands have demonstrated a long-term record of success.

The need for developing a model of personal brand that could be used as a business tool was the motivating force for developing the model of authentic personal brand and writing Be Your Own Brand in 2001.

As we developed our model of personal brand we didn’t attempt to create a model that would define the complexities of the human being. Our goal was to create a model that helped describe how individuals related to each other and how they could use their authenticity to make contributions to other people and to their employers. The objective was to build a model to help individuals build stronger relationships with others by adding value in each interaction, just like strong product or corporate brands.

With this in mind we translated our proven model of business brand (Brand Tool Box® Business Brand Model) that we have been using for over 20 years into a practical model of personal brand. At the core of brand building is making sure that the perceptions people have of the brand are distinctive and valued. The Brand Tool Box® Personal Brand Model is a framework to help individuals manage the perceptions they leave with other people. The model is based upon three simple concepts that individuals can use to define the way they interact with another person and ultimately add value in the relationship. The purpose is to connect each person’s authentic values with the perceptions they create with another person. This model allows an individual to build a relationship with another person that is authentic. A person can deliver the most value in a relationship (at work or in their personal life) when they are true to themselves and others perceive their true qualities.

Does the Brand Tool Box® Personal Brand Model work? Yes. Individuals have been successfully using the Brand Tool Box® Personal Brand Model for over eight years. In fact over the last five years thousands of individuals have used this model in the Brand Tool Box® Brand Alignment training workshops. We have been able to gather compelling quantitative data from individuals that this model has worked in helping them find stronger alignment with their employers and in making a difference with family members and friends.

Posted by Karl D. Speak

The virtues of truth and honesty are at the core of becoming a strong authentic personal brand.  When an individual embraces authentic personal brand as an operating principle, the universe of strong, positive relationships is expanded and the possibilities for achievement become so much larger. The potential payoff for embracing the notion of personal brand is based upon whether one views personal brand as an image-polishing strategy or as a framework to get credit for how an individual uses their values and beliefs to make a difference for others. The divergent views of personal brand are closely related to an analogous dichotomy in the way the discipline of business brand has evolved.

Establishing the notion of personal brand as a mere personification of a business-marketing concept can be troubling for many people. After all, brand does have the reputation, if you will, of being the business practice of using emotional manipulation techniques to cajole consumers to buy one product over another. The easy inference is that personal brand is a personal success strategy of manipulating other people by positioning one in the most favorable light. However, if one is imprinted with an understanding of brand as the projection of the values and beliefs of an organization, personal brand takes on a much more wholesome personal development tool.

There is a clear parallel between the development of brand as a business management tool and the subsequent development of the notion of personal brand. To provide more substance to the analogy, let’s look back on the evolution of brand as a marketing discipline.

At the core of brand as a modern marketing technique is the belief there is no technical or factual difference between different products in the same category. The practice of brand building was built around the technique of finding out what consumers desired in a certain product and using marketing techniques, most notably advertising, to associate that desired attribute with a certain brand name. In some cases when the brand images became commoditized, the tried and true technique of “new and improved” became the new brand differentiation strategy. Modern marketers employed a strategy of convincing consumers to buy based upon image not substance.

The real irony surrounding the notion of brand is that modern marketing adulterated the original use of brand. In its original form brand was used literally as a mark that signified an individual’s unique craftsmanship. Brand was created as a symbol to identify the real differences between products. It was an early “marketing” (before the idea of an MBA was ever envisioned, ah, the good old days!) technique encouraging consumers to purchase goods based upon real tangible differences.

Today businesses use brand along these same bifurcated lines. Some businesses use brand as a marketing tool to manage the image around their product or service. Brand in this context is a marketing-driven competency. Marketers are the managers of brand and use the classic 4-P’s framework to build a brand image with their targeted customers.

Other more enlightened organizations embrace brand as a customer-centric organizational development framework. In this view, brand represents the values and beliefs that serve as the underpinnings that support the quality of products they develop and the services that support the customer. Brand to these types of organizations represents their unique “Company Way” of doing business and in all likelihood this value system has a rich legacy within the organization. Brand building is used as an internal culture management tool to keep employees focused on doing business in-synch with the distinctive qualities of the organization. The inherent brand strategy is the confidence that the authenticity of their “brand” of developing products will produce tangible differences that will differentiate its offering from others.

The development of personal brand as a personal development technique has fallen along similar lines as the way businesses use brand. Some purveyors of personal brand, frankly most of them, believe personal brand is about developing relationships with others based upon image. The strategy is all about finding out what’s important to others and positioning oneself in that light, i.e. creating a personal brand that has certain appeal. In essence they are setting forth an image that is so “attractive” that it attempts to discourage others from looking further. The personal brand strategy or emphasis is on creating an attractive veneer.

The notion of personal brand set forth in Be Your Own Brand explores the other version of brand, anchored by an individual’s values. This perspective views brand as a relationship that is earned based upon the authentic qualities of the individual. Authentic personal brand is a different, more wholesome perspective on personal brand. The notion of authentic personal brand challenges individuals to use their distinctive qualities to make a difference for others as a requirement for creating a trusting brand relationship. This is the (personal brand) road less traveled.

There is no doubt that many individuals desire to benefit from the relationship advantages that accrue from being perceived to be a strong authentic personal brand.  It is also clear that many of those same individuals that hope to reap the benefits of a strong authentic personal brand do not display the discipline and courage to consistently embrace the truth and act in a genuinely authentic and honest way.

The way an individual is perceived defines their personal brand and defines the world of possibilities that exists in the relationship.  Honesty is required to understand the perceptions that define your personal brand.  Honesty is required to constrain oneself to avoid attempting to establish a perception that is not authentic. We can only have the personal brand we are and are willing to build and sustain.  For a personal brand to be real and earn equity based upon its merits, it must be authentic. Therefore it requires honesty to be clear about the truth of the possibilities of the brand we choose to become.

In the spirit of building a strong authentic personal brand one must not take George Burns, the famed actor and comedian, at his word when he said - “The most important thing in acting is honesty. If you can fake that, you’ve got it made.”

Building a strong authentic personal brand is not natural for everyone and requires a different perspective.  It can be antithetical to a short-term objective of quid pro quo and requires a long-term commitment to one’s authentic values and interest of others.  Every individual who chooses to gain the benefits of being a strong authentic personal brand must be honest with themself and decide to take the high road and let their brand speak for them. Build relationships on substance, not image. Do you have the courage and commitment to build a strong authentic personal brand?

“Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference”

…Robert Frost

Posted by Karl D. Speak

Strong relationship skills are a common trait of effective leaders. In their relationships with others these leaders are admired because they add something special in the relationship, that is to say they have a distinctive point of view that can make a difference. When the distinctive quality is on display time-after-time, leaders are believed to be authentic in their relationships with others. Authenticity takes a strong sense of self and the courage to consistently apply one’s special qualities. The authentic personal brand framework combines the process of declaring one’s authentic self and the skills to get credit from others for the distinctive difference that defines a value-added relationship.

There are five fundamental concepts to understanding the authentic personal brand framework.

1. The power of positive perceptions.
2. The strength that is derived when perceptions of you are distinctive, relevant and consistent.
3. The trust that results from making a difference, not just the perception of being different.
4. The importance of having the courage to define a strong personal brand platform that inspires you to make a difference in the important relationships in your life.
5. The leverage that comes from the power of alignment in achieving your short-term and long-term goals.

These insights are based upon the experiences of many individuals who have used the authentic personal brand framework to become more effective leaders.

“It isn’t what they say about you, it’s what they whisper.” – Errol Flynn

Actor Errol Flynn’s profound insight speaks volumes about perceptions. It is an insight that every business professional that values the role of productive relationships must understand to be an effective leader. Perceptions may be the most important of all the tenets that comprise the concept of authentic personal brand. When an individual holds themselves accountable to the perceptions they create with others, they expand the possibilities of the relationship. Embracing the intangible nature of perceptions will expand the possibilities of every relationship.

In some regards perception is a straightforward concept, one that is easy to understand intellectually, but is not intuitive for many people. Perception is about sensing, feeling and empathy and is an example of a “soft” business skill that has, by its nature, limited the way it is incorporated into personal development and leadership. To fully understand the potential of a healthy, productive relationship, one must be willing to be held accountable to perceptions.

The study of the concept of perceptions has its roots deep in the behavior sciences and if you read enough it can get so complex you begin to wonder what side of the mirror you are facing! There is no need for me to present a theoretical construct that supports a purer understanding of perceptions. Applying the notion of perceptions to personal brand building requires only a basic understanding of the concept. The more difficult part is the discipline of viewing things from someone else’s perspective and the fortitude to hold oneself accountable for the perception that is created and not the action that was taken.

Incorporating perceptions into your everyday thought process starts with the following easy steps:

1. Decide what perceptions you want to create in the minds of others. Establishing perceptions with other individuals doesn’t have to be held to chance. Building a strong brand starts with deciding what perceptions you want to create. Determining the desired perceptions is a decision based on careful consideration and commitment. Decide on the set of perceptions you want to create, based on the following criteria: first and foremost focus on the qualities that make you distinctive from others; make sure the perceptions are targeted at what is most important in your relationships; and be sure the targeted perceptions are based upon the qualities you can consistently deliver.
2. Be accountable for creating perceptions as often as possible. Every action leaves an impression. Some perceptions are created intentionally, though many are not. We are all accountable for the perceptions we create. A lack of accountability can create unintentional consequences in our relationships with others. When there is a gap between how you want to be perceived and how you are actually perceived, the relationship can suffer.
3. Measure the perceptions. Perceptions are real and can be measured. Continual improvement starts with measurement. A commitment to consistently measuring and assessing the perceptions others have of you is fundamental to the positive growth of your authentic personal brand.

Perceptions of your brand define the limits and possibilities of relationships with others. When someone’s perceptions underestimate an individual, the relationship never achieves its potential. When perceptions are in synch with the true qualities of an individual, the full potential for the relationship is a real possibility. When perceptions grow with the possibilities of an individual, leadership potential is unbounded.

Understanding the role of perceptions is a good start to building a stronger and more authentic personal brand, a competency that will add to your leadership abilities.

Posted by Karl D. Speak

There are brands that are personal and then there are personal brands. At the core of every brand strategy is an objective to create a personal connection with a brand. Organizations create brand identities that represent and remind customers of that important connection with the company. At the foundation of managing a portfolio of brand identities is determining whether to create that personal connection with product brands or the corporate brand or some combination of both. This dual context to leveraging brand strength misses another very important brand segment – the personal brand of employees, especially key employees. A new, innovative approach to brand identity management can benefit many organizations by helping them leverage all of their relationship assets, i.e., making brand more personal.

Are you personally confused? Let me explain.

The basic premise behind brand identity management is to reinforce the personal connection through the consistent use of brand identities, avoiding dilution and supporting consistent brand impressions and usage. The primary process tool is a set of brand identity guidelines. The key tactical challenges of brand identity management range from ensuring consistent logo usage to defining and enforcing brand extension boundaries.

Tactical execution delivers better with an allegiance to a strategy. Fundamentally the mandate of a brand identity strategy is to connect the targeted customer with the brand equity that delivers the most value in the relationship. The product brand becomes the primary brand when the company believes the strongest, most strategic relationship is between the customer and the product brand, i.e., Kindle. Among brand management professionals this is known as a segmented or product brand identity strategy. In an analogous manner if the corporate identity is the strongest relationship lever, the corporate brand becomes the primary brand, i.e., Google. This identity strategy is known as a monolithic or umbrella framework. The final option is to split the relationship between the product and the corporate brand, convincing the customer that the relationship is supported by the respected business standards represented by the corporate brand delivered through the specific competency of the product brand, i.e., Apple iPod.

This classic brand identity framework, treating brands as marketing tools, has limited the perspective of brand managers. Brands are relationships. Therefore the most viable brand strategy must be “walked back” in its perspective to focus on a broader framework of relationships. This new perspective recognizes that personal relationships are important assets in driving business results and provide competitive advantage for the organization. In some cases certain personal relationships have brand power that rivals or surpasses product or company brands. The new perspective of relationship assets must be expanded beyond the product-customer relationship (product brand); company-customer relationship (corporate brand) to include the individual-customer relationship (personal brand).

In certain industries the personal brand of selected individuals is clearly more important than the product brand and rivals the company brand. Professional services organizations such as health care providers, law firms, accounting firms, financial advising firms, commercial insurance brokerage firms, commercial real estate firms, or architectural firms are prime examples where the personal brand of key individuals is an important driver of business results. Some of these personal brands are so important to the firm they have earned the status of “rainmakers.” The impact of strong personal brands is not limited to professional services organizations. Companies where sales people have a disproportionate amount of impact on the customer relationship, e.g., medical device companies, must also consider personal brand in their overall brand strategy.

The brand strategy of organizations where personal brands play such an important role must be broadened to incorporate the role of key personal brands. Personal brand adds a new dimension to the portfolio of brands that impact the customer relationship. Any organization will benefit by expanding their perspective to embrace the relative role of each brand (product, company and personal) and develop a brand strategy that explicitly coordinates how each brand impacts the customer relationship.

Acknowledging the existence and impact of personal brand creates new opportunities for an organization’s brand strategy. However adding personal brand to the strategy mix requires a new perspective to brand building. Since writing Be Your Own Brand, the best selling book on personal brand, I have had the opportunity to work with many clients to integrate personal brand into their organizational brand strategy. Here are a few key insights to adding personal brand into an organizational brand strategy:

• Develop personal brand-building tools. When personal brand is important, provide those individuals with the tools to become even stronger brands.
• Building strong personal brands can be a win-win. When the personal brands of key employees are in alignment with the organization’s brand, both can become stronger. If the personal brand is a good representation of the corporate brand, the corporate brand can become stronger with every interaction with a customer. At the same time when the corporate brand reflects the values and aspirations of the personal brand, the employee is in an environment where they believe their brand can prosper – that attitude is a foundation for retention.
• Senior managers must have the courage to not tolerate personal brands out of alignment. Too often senior managers know that the personal brand of a key employee is not in-synch with the corporate brand but fail to address the misalignment. The misaligned personal brand may be making significant contributions to the business in the short term and some senior managers are convinced that the extra effort to “manage the misalignment” is a reasonable trade-off. The misalignment will eventually cause a problem. Tolerating that type of misalignment will result in a lack of respect of the corporate brand by other employees, eroding the power of the corporate brand.
• Create a healthy balance between the corporate and personal brand’s impact on the customer. The more influence a personal brand has on a customer relationship, the less power the senior management has to implement customer-driven strategies. The less power an organization has on directly impacting the customer relationship will surely create unnecessary hurdles introducing new products and repositioning the company’s relationship with its customers.
• Personal brands trumping corporate brands can be a workable corporate strategy. When an organization is confident it can successfully manage the relationship with key personal brands, a lopsided personal brand-biased strategy can work. It is working today with many companies. This lopsided strategy requires a specialized management competency and is fraught with all sorts of vulnerabilities and idiosyncrasies and depends upon very talented, niche management talent.

Choosing to integrate personal brand into your company’s brand strategy doesn’t have to be difficult. In fact personal brands are a part of every company’s effort to build strong customer relationships, to a lesser or greater degree. Some companies are consciously competent about incorporating a personal brand strategy and others leave it to chance. How personal is your company’s brand strategy?

Posted by Karl D. Speak

The Halo Effect, by Phil Rosenzweig, is the business book that has been a long time in coming. I love this book. As far as business books go it is a page-turner. If you don’t own it yet (or haven’t checked it out of your local library), get it and put it on the top of your reading pile. Why all the hubbub? For starters, the author provides pitch-perfect insights about the fallibility of most business books that claim to offer the Holy Grail of what it takes to create a high-performing organization. Secondly, after you read this book you will save yourself a bunch of time by not reading too many new business books and spend more time with your family or on the golf course. Besides all of that, the next time that pedantic MBA-nerd in your office tries to impress you by espousing the latest business-guru theory you will have the three questions to ask that will send him packing to Starbucks to commiserate with his social networking friends on LinkedIn.

The Halo Effect described by the author is, “The tendency to look at a company’s performance and make attributes about its culture, leadership, values, and more. In fact, many things we commonly claim drive company performance are simply attributions based on prior performance.” The good professor clearly articulates eight delusions that are created based upon how many so-called business gurus have been misguided based upon their attempts to force fit their perspectives and set forth over-simplified formulas that describe high-performing organizations.

I want to bring attention to two outstanding tenets of Rosenzweig’s work. Tenet one: Successful organizations are given more credit for the attributes that supposedly made them successful or enabled them to outperform their competitors, i.e., the popular kids are viewed as being smarter and better looking. Individual business successes are too often over glamorized and the media likes to mythologize the success. (The exception is Lake Wobegon where the kids are average, but it still makes a good story.). Talk up current business success, keep the analysis simple and add a human-interest twist and that story will sell and capture people’s attention.

The business gurus suggest (of course you need to read their book or hire them as a keynote speaker to get the real insights) that if you just follow the blueprint of these captains of industry, the performance of your company will be a hands-down success. Unfortunately there are at least two proverbial flies in the ointment. Companies are more unique than similar, which means the attributes that make a company successful are hard to extrapolate to many other companies. Second, past success is not a very good predictor of future success. This fact is exacerbated when an organization mimics past success based upon the wrong attributes. It’s like driving while looking through a distorted rear-view mirror. Of course what makes matters worse is in hindsight the business gurus have a new perspective on what caused the lack of performance. The author points to many examples where the specific characteristics that made the company successful during its peak, were deemed to be the traits that caused their demise. The author sets forth many examples where a particular attribute, e.g., rapid decision-making or growth by expanding into many new markets, was determined to be the reason for a certain business’ success. Rosenzweig then reports that following relative failure of the same successful business, the business gurus point to leadership’s “rash decisions” and not “sticking to their knitting” as reasons for their current failures.

Second tenet: Business is too complex and subject to too many external forces to attribute one or a few qualities as predictors of future success. Rosenzweig suggests that there is so much randomness and uniqueness to a company’s success that only 20-30% of the variables that account for success can be identified. Mix in luck, fortuitous timing, human intuition and good judgment and it is easy to understand that developing the blueprint for organizing a company for high performance is a crap shoot, at best.

Many companies, more now than ever, are looking for the Holy Grail or blueprint for building a high-performance brand. Let’s be careful not to latch too quickly onto the latest brand-building trend. What analogies from the lessons presented in The Halo Effect can we apply to brand building? Here are a few thoughts:

• Brands don’t create business success. Successfully managed businesses that consistently deliver distinctive value over a long time period create strong brands. An organization doesn’t create a brand because it needs to be more successful. Brands are earned over time. It takes a total effort by the organization to earn or lose brand equity.
• Strong brands provide organizations leverage to grow faster than competitors. Stated another way, strong brands get more opportunities with less effort than competitors. It’s common sense – success breeds success. A strong brand is recognition that the business has been successful. It’s not any more complicated than that.
• There are many organizations that have earned the potential to be a strong brand in their category. Without consistent execution of proven brand-building practices an organization will not get credit for the brand it deserves.
• Don’t try and mimic other brands, especially the big name brands. Businesses are more unique than similar. Big brands play with a different set of resources and rules. Remember, a brand gains its value because of its distinctiveness. Managing a brand mimicking others leads to sameness and ultimately a lack of confidence in your brand. Besides that, when you are not the lead dog, the view is always the same! (Don’t quote me, I stole that from someone whose name escapes me.)
• A brand has its strongest appeal to a target audience. Know your audience better than anyone else. Don’t manage your brand with conventional wisdom. When the so-called conventional wisdom changes you will follow others down the path of brand irrelevance.
• Some of the strongest brands, by any measure, are the brands you have most likely never heard of. There are brands in industries you are not aware of that have brand power that far exceeds that of the most popular consumer brands. Brand power boils down to relationship power and the ability of an organization to use key relationships to grow in ways competitors cannot. Learning from other brands is important and can be valuable. Pick the right role models. Be curious. Look at brands beyond your industry, based in different cultures, brand building that uses different techniques and have different target markets. Relationships are built in many different ways, but the business leverage delivers the same advantages.
• Don’t let your brand building get too cocky. Leverage your success, but know that success has more to do with circumstances created by others before you or unknowingly by your competitors. Humility is the most important quality of any business leader who delivers long-term business success. The same is true about your brand’s success. The most successful brand-building discipline and effort will be known as a great success for the leverage it provides the people that follow you. Embracing stewardship as a primary brand management tenet will ensure that those who follow will not fall prey to building a business on a weak premise. Building on a strong brand building foundation will encourage new brand managers to use their new insights and tools to build a stronger brand, not a new brand.

How’s that for starters? What other thoughts come to your mind? Read The Halo Effect and let us know what you would add to the list.

Karl D. Speak

How well organizations link brand on the outside with the brand on the inside will ultimately determine how strong their corporate brand will become. There are many implications to this important notion; in particular it is becoming imperative that marketing and human resources executives need to learn to collaborate on an internal brand-building process. The objective of a robust internal brand-building program is to create a culture that is passionate about the difference it makes for its customers. Internal brand building is customer-centric culture building.

Most management gurus agree on one thing – the companies that have achieved the most sustainable growth have a strong, focused corporate culture. Peter Drucker, Peter Senge, and Jim Collins all point to the importance of corporate culture as a key contributor to long-term success. In fact Collins, in his new book How the Mighty Fail, suggests that weak or underdeveloped corporate cultures is one of the main causes of failure in many companies. Conversely, he shares that a strong culture often prevents great companies from suffering through extended downturns.

Building and maintaining a strong culture is unarguably important to every organization. The value of a strong customer-centric corporate culture cannot be overstated. But knowing how to proactively build one is a real challenge. If a strong culture is important to success, why are the tools needed to build one in such short supply? There are several good reasons.

1. Corporate culture is difficult to define.
   Culture is often described as the psychology, attitudes, experiences and beliefs of a company. It is the specific collection of strong values and norms that are shared by people and groups within an organization. Culture greatly influences the way people interact with each other and with stakeholders outside the organization. Defining the culture in terms of how it is relevant to delivering value to customers can begin to add clarity defining a business culture.
   
2. Corporate culture is intangible.
   Most leaders believe that you will know the culture of an organization when you feel it. Ask many companies who are known to have a strong culture and they describe their culture as “the organization’s way” – e.g. the IBM Way, the Apple Way, or the McKinsey Way.
   
3. Corporate culture is self-sustaining.
   Culture is not a by-product of a single event or situation. It develops over time but can’t be mandated. Corporate culture relies on each individual’s commitment to change. Because when you change people you change cultures. Once established, it can be counted on to manage change brought on by external factors or internal failures.
   
4. Strong cultures are built on a strong set of shared values.
   At the core of every strong corporate culture is a long-standing commitment to a set of values. Values are not intellectual or passive in organizations with strong cultures. The values must be perceived to be authentic, consistently applied and durable. The values of the most successful organizations are admired by employees and customers.
   
5. Corporate culture must impact customers.
   Successful cultures have one thing in common – there is a clear understanding of how the distinctive nature of the organization makes a substantial difference for customers. Strong cultures are admired by customers, as well as employees.

Here are a couple of examples of how well known organizations have linked their cultures to delivering distinctive value to customers:

Since its inception in 1998, Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin have worked hard to maintain a small company feel. At lunchtime, almost everyone eats in the office café, sitting at whatever table has an opening and enjoying conversations with “Googlers” from all different departments. This is critical since Google is committed to innovation, and innovation requires that everyone feel comfortable in sharing ideas and opinions. Moreover the egalitarian nature of their culture resonates and connects with the democratic nature of the Internet itself.

Another example of a strong culture is Southwest Airlines. – the only major airline in the U.S. that is consistently profitable and has a great reputation as an employer. This is no coincidence. In an article written by Herb Kelleher, Southwest’s former CEO, he shared how Southwest maintains its culture as a strategic imperative:

“We are looking for attitudes that are positive and for people who can lend themselves to causes. We want folks who have a good sense of humor and people who are interested in performing as a team and take joy in team results instead of individual accomplishments.”

Delivering a differentiated traveling experience for customers is a high stress, complex business. Without a positive culture with a sense of humor, and teamwork it would be difficult for Southwest to succeed with employees and travelers to the degree they have.

I believe that every organization has the ability to build a strong culture and it doesn’t have to be complex. There are just a few key principles to understand and ultimately apply on a consistent basis.

• Everyone in the corporate culture must believe in the clear connection between the distinctive values of the culture and how it makes a substantial difference for customers.
• The way the organization leverages its culture, starting with its values, to make a distinctive difference for customers, establishes its “brand” of doing business.
• One of the largest untapped opportunities for building a stronger culture is helping each employee discover their personal brand (attitude, skills, beliefs, and values) and fostering alignment of their personal brand and the brand of the company.
• Customer-centric employee engagement must be embraced as a sustainable corporate strategy. Employee engagement and customer engagement are two fundamental long-term strategies of every sustainable, successful organization.

In both the examples mentioned, the top management of the companies are vigilant about aligning their employees with their organization’s values and their “brand” of making a difference for a customer. Although organizations may have unique cultures, few consciously understand how to create the alignment required to successfully leverage the full potential of their value with customers. The health and vibrancy of a corporate culture is predictive of their strength in customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Building a strong culture can be achieved by any organization willing to make the commitment. Strong cultures don’t happen by accident or are only achievable by organizations with exceptional leaders or extraordinary products. If more companies had access to the practical tools to build and sustain a strong customer-centric culture, it’s likely they would. Internal brand building is a set of process tools that will build the foundation for creating and sustaining a customer-centric culture. Is your organization ready for internal brand building?

Posted by Karl D. Speak

While cleaning out my briefcase I came across an article that was worth re-reading. The article is titled “Can You Say What Your Strategy Is?”, written by David J. Collis and Michael G. Rukstad, published by Harvard Business Review. In essence the article is a call for brevity in writing and presenting an organization’s strategy. In the authors’ opinions the statement should be no longer than 35 words, accompanied by a supporting “value-proposition chart” and “activity-system map.” Their proposition is that if an organization lacks a clear statement of strategy it is unlikely it will be executed well.

The authors point-out that “words lead to action” and that employee engagement is an important rationale for promoting succinctness in communicating an organization’s strategy. Their notion is that the more employees know about the strategy, the more likely an employee is to direct their actions in concert with the strategic intent. That makes sense, except most employees are not fascinated by or frankly not very interested in corporate strategies. By their very nature, corporate strategy presentations can be perceived as self-important and off-putting to many employees. Generally speaking, employees are pragmatic and more likely interested in things that are easily understood and positioned in a way that is relevant to their work.

At the end of the day employees want to know, or in some way surmise, that they have made a difference in the work they do. Employees like to know that through their efforts and talents, individually or in concert with fellow employees, they made a real difference for a customer or customer group. Many experts believe engagement is at its highest level when employees are inspired by the passion and talents of the organization’s culture (the brand inside) and believe that collectively they make a distinctive difference for customers (gaining brand recognition on the outside). So the most effective leadership platform statements are those that link the distinctive qualities of the organization with the difference they make for customers.

The traditional (some might say, old school) leadership platform is built on some variation of a mission, vision and values framework, some more audacious than others. There is no question these core elements are important parts of any leadership platform, but they may not be personal enough for employees. In addition, it is my experience that way too many of these types of leadership platforms are not written well and are too inwardly focused.

Like it or not employees are not inspired about big ideas solely for the company’s benefit. But, if the big idea is targeted at making a difference for customers you can get employees’ attention. If you want to engage employees’ passion and spark their imagination, convince them the organization’s most outstanding quality makes an exceptional difference for a customer. That’s the type of big idea that can be inspiring at a personal level. Like great leaders, big ideas must be perceived to be authentic in their abilities and their intention to help others.

Bottom line, the traditional leadership platform must be extended and reframed in a way that makes a direct connection between employees’ passions and the difference the organization makes for customers. It’s not about business strategy, it’s about connecting employees’ passion and imagination with making a difference for someone else. Outstanding strategies are a dime-a-dozen. Cultures passionate and confident about the difference they make are a much more rare commodity.

It seems whenever an organization chooses to develop a platform that is directed at connecting with customers it becomes a marketing department assignment. In most cases the result is a tagline. The primary purpose of a tagline is to support a myriad of marketing communications and promotional activities. In that context a good tagline must have a certain “retail” essence that speaks directly to customers and prospects with certain Madison-Avenue panache.

Too often taglines lack relevance and authenticity with the majority of employees. Marketers would like employees to admire their taglines, but employees were not the target audience during the creative development process. On a related note, a hybrid approach to taglines was presented in the book Blue Ocean Strategy, written by W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne. The authors suggest that any good strategy should be able to be summed up in a tagline. Interesting idea, but it wasn’t clear how the authors differentiated strategy taglines from marketing-oriented ones. Bottom line, many organizations have not created a customer leadership platform that is designed specifically to ignite employees’ passions about making a difference with customers. A leadership platform focused in this important human dynamic is the foundation to create a customer leadership culture.

A brand platform is a proven framework that can be used as an effective organizational development tool to create a customer leadership culture. In this context I am not using brand in its most myopic perspective as a marketing tool or corporate identity. Brand in its essence defines the distinctive qualities of an organization that are proven to make a remarkable difference for customers. Marketers’ responsibility is to make sure the organization gets credit in the marketplace for the distinctive value it provides to customers. Leaders’ responsibility is to ensure that employees are engaged and passionate about making a difference for customers. A full-bodied brand platform must speak with the kind of authenticity and relevance that inspires employees and also contains the market sensibility that connects with customers.

I strongly recommend that every organization develop a brand platform. A well-conceived brand platform is a powerful framework to extend the fundamental principles of the traditional mission/vision/values leadership platform. Much like the word brand itself, a brand platform can have various meanings. In way too many cases brand platforms are skewed for serving primary marketing needs. A well-crafted brand platform is an assignment for the leadership team, not a creative exercise for the marketing team.

Developing a brand platform that supports effective dual brand building – brand inside and brand outside – requires a different dimension than the traditional brand-building model. A brand platform must describe the brand with an organizational development sensibility to support employee engagement (brand inside building) and exude creative possibilities to capture the fascination of the prospective customers (brand outside building).

First and foremost, the brand platform must be anchored with a brand ethos. In this context, a brand ethos describes the one most important value residing inside the organization. Identifying a brand ethos requires keen insight and it must be grounded in the “truth” of the organization. I cannot emphasize enough the importance of discovering a brand ethos. Without a credible brand ethos, a brand platform will lack authenticity and the fundamental grounding required to develop a brand platform that is distinctive, relevant and consistent – the essential traits of every strong brand. A brand ethos is the heart of any customer leadership platform.

A well-founded brand ethos becomes the genesis to define the cadre of brand platform elements, starting with a brand vision and culminating with a brand character. A more detailed description of a corporate brand platform can be found at http://beta.brandtoolbox.com/corporate-brand-platform.php.

Karl D. Speak

Conventional wisdom has it that brand building is a niche competency contained within the marketing silo. There is an innovation in brand building now taking place that integrates the relationship-building competencies of the marketing and HR functions.

The name for this new business process is internal brand building. Internal brand building produces high-performance customers (customers that produce above average revenue, better profit margins, or purchase a broader portfolio of products) and substantially higher levels of employee engagement. When employees are highly engaged around the things that make the biggest difference for customers, the result is a strong brand. Engaged employees create engaged customers. Internal brand building is an innovation that connects employees with customers.

The innovation is based upon marketing and HR working together, using a shared process to coordinate the relationship building inside the organization with employees and the relationship building outside the organization with customers. I am talking about an innovation that can have a direct impact on improving the value customers receive and as a result will have a positive impact on the organization’s financial results.

One of the most important responsibilities of a marketing executive is managing the relationship between a company and its customers. An important leadership role of the marketing executive is to create a customer-centric discipline for the organization. The focus of the marketing leader is to cajole, inspire and otherwise encourage employees to keep the best interests of the customer front and center of everything the organization does. By necessity the marketing executive approaches each leadership challenge with an outside-in perspective.

HR executives are accountable for the relationship the company has with its employees. The HR function is perceived to be much more effective when employees are aligned and focus their efforts on delivering value to customers. HR’s perspective naturally is inside-out of the organization.

Creating symmetry between these two perspectives will enable organizations to more effectively build a stronger brand. Marketing and HR working together can increase the number of high-performing customers, a key performance indicator of every industry leader.

This is an excerpt from a recently published article titled Internal Brand Building: HR’s Path to Leadership. Click here to read the entire article.

Posted by Karl D. Speak

In this post I suggested using the metaphor of an iceberg to better understand the whole of brand building. The essence of the blog entry suggested that effective brand building required a dual effort, represented by the two parts of an iceberg. Marketing represents the visible part of the iceberg and human resources is depicted by the part of the metaphorical iceberg that was below the surface. That post presented marketing’s perspective of the iceberg. Here’s human resources’ frame of reference of the so-called iceberg of brand building.

High performing human resources executives understand the positive impact an aligned culture can have on business performance. The challenge has been to create a direct link between an aligned culture and business performance. The culture of an organization is represented by the part of the iceberg that lies under the surface. Being associated with the segment of the iceberg that is under the water has its own irony for human resources executives. The part of the iceberg that can have the most impact on brand building goes unnoticed by senior management teams in so many organizations. Unfortunately too many human resource executives have faced an unnecessary uphill battle to act on the opportunity they so clearly see.

Truth be known, human resources executives have demonstrated an understanding of the connection between culture and business performance for quite some time. This important connection is at the root of the evolution of human resources from an administrative function to the strategic use of human capital to drive business performance. Human resources executives are very aware of the importance of aligning and engaging employees’ behaviors to deliver value to customers. In some ways, human resources executives have been waiting at the station for the marketing train to arrive.

The most credible, innovative human resources leaders have been strong activists aligning their organization’s human capital strategy with its business strategy and needs of the marketplace. As a result, these outstanding human resources executives have earned a viable and respected place at the senior management table. A new set of human resources competencies is required to earn this admired place of the leadership team.

The results of the 2007 Human Resource Competency Study (HRCS) reflect human resources professionals’ understanding that a new set of competencies determines professional excellence. The researchers conducting the HRCS concluded there are six core competencies that high-performing human resources leaders embody. There are three of these competencies highlighted in the study that directly address internal brand building.

Being a proficient culture and change steward, one of the three relevant competencies, is fundamental for connecting employees with the uniqueness of the culture that creates a distinctive brand. The competency described as strategy architect is focused on activities that enable employees to connect with customers. Of course this is foundational to internal brand building. Being a competent business ally requires the human resources executive to have a first hand and active knowledge of competition and customers. Brand building is based on being distinctive from competitors and relevant to customers.

Employee engagement is another example of a human resources competency that has not been given enough credit for its potential in driving business performance. The concept of employee engagement is not new; its origins go back at least 25 years. Employee engagement is enjoying resurgence, in part due to firms like Gallup and BlessingWhite.

Like other human capital strategies, employee engagement has not been getting the traction it deserves. The acceptance of employee engagement programs has lagged due in part to human resources executives’ ability to articulate a reasonable connection to acceptable business performance drivers.

I’m not a human resource professional and frankly until the last five years I have had very little interaction with the human resource profession. I have become an accidental tourist in the human resource profession as a part of the steep learning curve I have experienced designing and implementing internal brand-building programs.

My rather skewed perspective on human resources through my connection to internal brand building has enabled me to gain some insights into why some organizations have had false starts with programs that attempt to connect culture with business performance. My experience suggests that many human resources executives have been disabled from using their vision and passion to connect culture with driving customer performance because:

1. Marketing (and in some organizations this is extended to include sales) has traditionally “owned” the customer and marketplace. In too many cases the marketing function has acted as a silo and this isolation from human resources professionals has been unintentional. This lack of collaboration has limited the possible contributions by human resources professionals to add value in building stronger customer relationships.

2. Human resources have limited knowledge of the customer. This limited knowledge inhibits the human resources executive from developing viable human capital strategies that are linked to customer performance.

3. In some organizations human resources has been locked out of the customer conversation because it is perceived to lack the “marketing chops” due to their inexperience in marketing or sales. In some cases this attitude has tainted their perceived role at the senior management table. This has limited their role in conversations relating to customer relationships and marketing strategies.

4. There is a lack of a proven process that links human resources initiatives with marketing objectives. Internal brand building is the customer-centric employee engagement innovation that bridges that gap.

5. Finding a credible cause-effect link between employee engagement programs and measurable customer performance improvement has created a hurdle to gaining acceptance by the senior management team to implement such a program. Brand is becoming much more accepted in the minds of senior management as an important lever in marketing and sales productivity. In addition, innovative leaders believe one of their roles is to help employees understand the company’s connection with its customers. The organization’s brand is becoming a very effective leadership tool to describe the value-added relationship with its customers that will result in competitive advantage. As a result internal brand building is a process that will add more credibility to the notion that employee engagement and business performance have an important cause/effect relationship.

6. Human resources has been given a limited, in some cases cursory, role in corporate brand initiatives. After 25 years of developing corporate brand programs it is clear that without human resources’ involvement, any corporate brand program becomes just another short-lived campaign. More importantly this lack of collaboration limits the potential for human resources to use its creativity and competencies to expand the corporate brand initiative into a program that engages employees in a more meaningful, sustainable way.

So, much like their marketing executive colleagues, human resources executives are frustrated. The irony is that the frustrations experienced by both executives are connected. In fact the only way to realistically reduce the frustrations in a way that benefits the organization is to understand that the issues and solutions are inseparable. Just like the iceberg, the top gets its respect from the power of what lies beneath the surface and the bottom gets its recognition from the top. Marketing represents the top of the iceberg, which interacts with the outside world and human resources represents the bulk of the mass that can have the most impact on the customer. Together the iceberg is a force to be reckoned with.

Posted by Karl D. Speak

Truly great brands are few and far between. These great brands are in a class by themselves. For starters, these great brands consistently maintain their relevance as markets change through time. In addition, these standout brands consistently outperform competitors and produce innovations that enhance the usage behaviors of their consumers.

Great brands have another thing in common. These highly admired brands were the brainchild of an individual, who in their own right, are/were a strong personal brand among their peers. These individuals didn’t set out to create a brand, in the context of a modern marketing strategy. They had bigger, nobler ideas in mind. These overachievers had a vision and an unflinching confidence aimed at changing the way the world worked or the way people lived their daily lives. The special qualities of these outstanding individuals are the souls of the great brands. These phenomenal people are the brands inside the brands that so many admire. These are brand achievers.

Unfortunately brand achievers, like many, phenomenally gifted people are hard to dissect, much less model (of course that’s why they’re phenomenal!). The curiosity surrounding these people has motivated many writers to understand the source of genius that powers these special people. Recently, two popular business authors have each published books that have added to the body of contemporary literature on the topic. Geoff Colvin, a well-respected business journalist, presents his ideas in his recent book Talent is Overrated. Malcolm Gladwell has presented his ideas in his new book Outliers.

I think Colvin and especially Gladwell’s point of view is limited, at best. David Brooks, New York Times columnist, is a smart guy and a practical intellectual. In a recent column David provides a perspective on highly successful people that hits the target and can offer insights about the types of qualities that are at the base of many brand achievers.

Reading business history is a more direct route to gaining some insights into the brand achievers that created the great brands we know today. If one stays attune to history you will find valuable tidbits here and there. As an example, this recently published article by Michael Schrage provides insights into how some brand achievers changed the game by changing the way product performance is defined. Michael’s perspective is an interesting angle and another tidbit to understand the mind of the brand achiever. Nancy Koehn’s book Brand New Delivery, a well-written expose on the brands inside (brand achievers) six of the most successful enduring brands in recent history. It’s worth the read.

Not everyone can be a brand achiever, but learning about the brand achiever behind the brand you manage can provide valuable insights. The ethos of the brand achiever that created the brand you manage is the soul of that brand. The more you understand that ethos, the more you will have a profound, organic understanding of the brand. That intimate understanding will enable you to better manage and extend that brand. A more profound understanding of the ethos of that brand will enable you to be a better steward of the brand and extend its legacy of greatness.

How well do you know the ethos of the brand you manage??

Posted by Karl D. Speak

How can this proven advice be applied to brand building?

• Plan that budgets for brand building activities will become tighter. Don’t go into denial. Now is the time to proactively challenge the effectiveness of all your brand building activities. Look at the “storm” as a way to make your brand building ship stronger and more efficient. Be tough minded, your brand demands and deserves it. Plan for a time when the seas will be less rocky.
• Don’t stray from your brand platform. Now is not the time to let your brand flag. The true character of a brand is known in times of stress and distress (the same applies to your personal brand.) Step up and reinforce the key elements of the brand platform. Don’t let the dark cloud of economic downturn eat away at the confidence in your brand’s platform. If you must revisit elements of the brand platform be sure not to let any gloom and doom bias your thinking about what your brand stands for.
• Keep a long term view, build a stronger brand for good times that are sure to come. No one ever knows when an economy turns the corner until long after the bottom happened. Stay intense and don’t let up with your brand building activities, you’ll be rewarded faster than you think.
• “Contrarians know that downturns don’t last forever and, in effect, they make friends with others who are trapped in the same foxhole – employees, vendors, business partners, and customers.” Be an enthusiastic brand leader and enlist all your partners to develop, innovate, and create ways to build a strong brand in these challenging times.

With the right attitude and discipline these may be the best times to build a brand that will thrive when the good times return. Short term determination + long term perspective = strong brands. Are these tough times exhilarating or exhausting for you? Will your brand be stronger or weaker because of the downturn?

Posted by Karl D. Speak

Success in business is all about relationships. The ability to leverage key relationships is an outstanding performance driver for all successful businesses. There are many relationships that impact an organization’s performance: relationships with employees, customers, distributors, strategic partners, prospective customers, potential employees, competitors, the media, and the community-at-large. Every organization has a portfolio of relationships to manage, some on the outside and others on the inside of the organization. Every organization will benefit by having a corporate relationship strategy.

The aim of a corporate relationship strategy is to implement a coordinated relationship-building effort for the organization. Too often managing the many different corporate relationships is done in isolation. Like any other asset (business relationships are a good example of an intangible asset) these relationships should be managed as a portfolio. And like good portfolio management, these relationships should be managed in a coordinated fashion to achieve a common goal. The common goal of a corporate relationship strategy is to consistently improve the delivery of distinctive value to customers.

A pragmatic, proven framework is a necessary element to effectively implementing any strategy. I recommend that brand be used as the framework to manage a corporate relationship strategy. Let’s slow down here and get on the same page about brand. When you think about brand don’t focus on the tactical elements of brand building like, logos, tag lines, or advertisements. A brand is a relationship. And brand management is the business discipline of creating and building a relationship for the purpose of improving the performance of the business. Brand is a proven relationship-building competency that can be used as a framework to implement a corporate relationship strategy.

Corporate Brand – Thinking Beyond the Customer

Traditionally, the business world has focused its brand management attention on managing the relationship between a customer and a product. Effective product-related brand management will yield a relationship with a customer that is based upon a single dimension usually defined around the attributes of the product. At best, that relationship can be expanded based upon brand extensions. In its own right product-based brand management can produce solid relationships between a company’s product and its target market. But limiting the brand-building competency to the product-customer relationship cuts short the possibilities of a corporate relationship strategy.

Corporate brand is not new and every organization has one. Some organizations use their corporate brands more effectively than others. Most organizations have a limited perspective on corporate brand, viewing it either as a reputation management tool or as a master brand to identify its products. When understood in a broader context, a well-managed corporate brand can encompass a myriad of relationships, inside and outside the organization. This expanded view of corporate brand extends the core discipline of brand building to a broader set of relationships that impact the performance of the organization. A new, broader view of corporate brand will provide a new powerful framework to implement a coordinated, proactive corporate relationship building strategy.

This neo-corporate brand perspective requires a whole new paradigm for coordinating the relationships inside and outside the organization. Neo-corporate brand management requires the coordinated efforts of marketing and human resources. The core competency of the marketing function is building relationships outside the organization (sometimes called customer brand building). The human resources function has built a proven competency of relationship building inside the organization (sometimes referred to as employer branding). Each of these professions has by necessity differing perspectives on relationship building. By working more collegially these differing perspectives can prove complimentary. This cross-functional team working with a common purpose and shared competency will deliver true innovation to the corporate relationship building process.

Delivering on the possibilities of a corporate relationship strategy will require among other things:

• A new cross-functional team approach that extends the brand competency and responsibility beyond the marketing department.
• A new approach to corporate brand that is embraced by the leadership team.
• Be consistent in applying the proven brand-based relationship competency to each targeted relationship that comprises the corporate brand portfolio.
  
• Define and consistently use a corporate brand platform that clearly defines the important relationship attributes of the corporate brand, starting with the organization’s brand ethos.
• Measure the perceptions that surround each of the targeted brand relationships.
• Implement relationship-building as a core competency as a part of the organization’s leadership development program.

Corporate relationship strategy is an innovative approach to consistently delivering value to customers. It requires a new perspective, new set of competencies and will yield improved bottom line results to any organization. Is your organization ready?

Posted by Karl D. Speak

Sounds like a tabloid headline doesn’t it? Our organization, Brand Tool Box has been conducting workshops on personal brand and the power of perceptions for years. Believe me, you hear a lot of stories about how relationships changed after the workshop from participants understanding how perceptions can affect relationships in all areas of their life. One story struck me in particular about how awareness of the perceptions you’re leaving can really change a relationship for the better.

A couple of weeks after conducting one of our Brand Tool Box Brand Alignment training session, one of our trainers was doing some follow-up with the participants who attended the session. One woman pulled aside our trainer and told her that the workshop had saved her marriage! Kind of a big statement don’t you think? Well it turned out that she and her husband had gone over some the basic principles (intentions vs. perceptions) of the workshop and had realized that many times they weren’t saying the things they meant to and were unintentionally insulting each other with their choice of words, inflection, and tone. They weren’t communicating in an effective manner and by not paying attention to the perceptions they left on each other; they were unconsciously damaging their relationship. The woman said that after they starting paying attention to the perceptions they were leaving with each other they are communicating in a more meaningful manner and their marriage is greatly improved.

While I don’t think we’re ready to get into the business of marriage counseling quite yet, this story is a really good illustration of how by learning to manage perceptions in everyday relationships, you can strengthen and change them, for the better.

What do brand, perceptions, and personal relationships have in common, you ask? It’s simple. Brands are relationships. Any brand is defined by the perceptions surrounding it. When the principles of brand are sensibly applied to human relationships positive things can happen in the relationship.

Posted by Karl D. Speak

A recently written column by Nick Coleman in the Minneapolis Star Tribune titled “Cranky lady tangles with Mr. Nasty.” caught my attention. The title in and of itself is enough to get me to click, I’m a sucker for well-written headlines. I was expecting a story about a strange and slightly weird domestic encounter. But what the article was really about spoke to me on a much stronger and deeper level, a business level, related to brand (bet you didn’t see that one coming, did you?).

The story is about a 79 year old woman who was at a Target store trying to return 3 shirts because they didn’t fit and she wanted her money back. The customer service employee would only give her a gift card and refused to give her money back because she paid by check. The manager escalated the situation and told her to leave with her gift card because she wasn’t getting her money back. She refused on the grounds that since they had already taken the money out of her account, they could easily give it back. The heated exchange escalated until the police were called. When the woman refused to leave without her money an ambulance was called to take her to the hospital to have her mental health evaluated.

When I first read this article I immediately thought that this would be a perfect example of how one insensitive, harried employee can alienate a customer. But then I realized that it is even bigger than that, it’s about inflexible corporate policies. As I read this story it came to mind that there is maybe a bigger theme here. A theme about how corporate policy gets in the middle of the relationship between a well-intentioned employee and an upset customer. An inflexible, insensitive corporate policy that inhibits an employee’s desire to build a relationship with a customer.

Many of today’s large retailers are so into designing corporate policies and regulations for their employees that they don’t allow individual employees the room or the margin for human judgment to help customers as they see fit. Of course I don’t know this, but there is a distinct possibility that the manager was just following policy. Granted he didn’t have to be so inflexible or try to send a customer to the emergency room of a hospital, creating an unneeded expense and wasting a woman’s time, but what if he was just following policy? In his mind the rules say that he HAS to give a gift card no matter what. He has not been given “permission” to help solve customers’ problems the way that HE sees most appropriate, not the way that the corporate policy dictates it should be done. This resulted in two things. One, Target lost the opportunity to live out their brand in this customer interaction. Target tied their manager’s hands by insisting that the manager use a hard, cold corporate policy as a framework to manage a very human relationship. Two, this employee will now have to live with the fact that he lost a customer, possibly alienated some other employees’ friends and neighbors and changed the public perception of both himself and his Target store. His personal brand took a hit and the brand of Target ended up with a ding. All because the big bosses at the top didn’t think he could be trusted to make his own customer service decisions.

Corporate policies set the tone for the brand on the inside and trust me, any insensitivity will find its way to a customer!

Posted by Karl D. Speak

P.S. If you want your “brand caffeine” a bit more stout, but still lacking any pretension, visit our other blog Brand Insight Wit Attitude.

Posted by Karl D. Speak

We all know the tried and true metaphor of the iceberg that reminds us of the importance of taking into account what’s under the water to get a deeper understanding of the whole situation.   Many marketing and human resources executives understand they face an iceberg-like dichotomy that has frustrated their best efforts in applying their professional competencies to exert more direct impact on the customer relationship that drives their organization’s financial performance.

The marketing executive is frustrated over what appears to be a governor on his/her ability to build a stronger brand that strengthens the customer relationship and leverages the organization’s marketing resources.  On the other hand, the human resources executive has a difficult time making a more direct connection between their employee engagement efforts and the impact on the customer relationship.  What many marketing and human resources executives don’t realize is that there is a simple and congruent solution that will satisfy their frustrations.  More importantly by working together they will create a synergy that produces mutual satisfaction and ultimately benefit the organization’s growth objectives.

Okay, I know this sounds a bit complicated or even convoluted, but let me take you through my logic one piece at a time.

Marketing’s Iceberg
Let’s start with the marketing side of the coin, if for no other reason than it is where I have spent most of my time-in-grade.  That is until the last few years where I have spent much more of my time in a particular part of the marketing world that cross-borders with HR.  My time and new perspective on this cross-functional territory that lies at the nexus of marketing and human resources has evolved slowly starting about 10 years ago when I was asked by one of our innovative clients to take on a leadership problem in an unconventional way by using a marketing-oriented (brand) approach.

Brand is not complex and relates to all organizations.  At the core of every thriving organization is a belief that it has a unique combination of values, competencies, and people all guided by a business model that enables it to deliver distinctive value to a target group of customers.  Those unique qualities define their brand of doing business.  The organization has earned a strong brand when customers acknowledge the distinctive value they receive and admire the organization for the way it does business.  This fundamental understanding of brand makes the link between human resources and marketing essential, no matter the nature of an organization’s marketing budget and activities.

Generally speaking, marketing has the responsibility for managing the relationship between the customer and organization.  In essence this boils down to guiding the organization to focus its brand of doing business on the needs of its targeted customers and at the same time making sure the organization gets credit from its customers for consistently delivering that unique value.  No one said marketing was easy!  In many organizations marketers have not been provided the tools or the position to be accountable for managing both sides of that equation.  Even in the most sophisticated marketing organizations, marketing’s influence has not been wide enough to deliver on the true promise of building a strong brand.

It is becoming conventional wisdom among marketers that there is a two-part process to building a strong brand. Delivering distinctive value is the first, most important part of brand building.  To consistently deliver the brand’s value requires the efforts of the majority of the organization.  The leadership framework and processes to focus the organization’s values, competencies, and passions is called building the brand on the inside. The second part of building brand equity is the process of using marketing communications to get credit for the value an organization provides to its customers.  This effort is called building the brand on the outside.

Generally speaking the visible part of an iceberg is 12% – 14% of the entire mass.  The implied lopsided ratio has an analogy for marketers when it comes to brand building.  If one had to apportion the effort to build a strong brand it would be an 85/15 ratio, where 85% of the effort is required to deliver the distinctive value (inside brand building) and 15% for the marketing communications to get credit in the marketplace (outside brand building).  This ratio is a generalization and depends upon a number of different factors, but it is fundamentally sound.

Unfortunately the purview of many marketers has been on the part of the brand that’s visible in the marketplace that can be impacted through effective marketing communications. While this restricted perspective can help build a stronger brand, it lacks the level of influence that produces the necessary leverage to build sustainable brand equity.  The part of brand building that has the most leverage lies below the surface, so to speak, with the majority of employees who together have the most sustainable impact on the qualities that make the brand valuable.

Leadership and organizational development provide the most potent levers that can impact the largest part of the brand-building mass.  Too often these levers are not normally within the reach of the marketing department.  It is very difficult for marketers to reach out and impact the part of brand building that exists below the surface.  The first challenge is to convince the senior management team of the importance of internal brand building.  Even if the senior managers are open to the new perspective, marketing has no credibility in the organizational development competencies required to create change within the organization.

Let’s give marketers credit; it’s not that they didn’t know that this disparity exists.  On the contrary, many very good marketers were (and continue to be) very frustrated by their lack of direct influence over the parts of brand building that can make the most difference in building sustainable brand equity.  In some industries like consumer packaged goods marketing professionals have much more influence over the entire business mix.  Anecdotal evidence suggests this broader span of influence results in more effective brand building.

So marketers are frustrated and their organizations are losing out on the opportunity to effectively build a stronger brand.

Stay tuned for the rest of the iceberg dilemma from the HR executives’ perspective.

Posted by Karl D. Speak

Errol Flynn’s profound insight speaks volumes about perceptions.  It is an insight that every business professional that cares about their brand should heed and keep top of mind.  Perception may be the most important of all the tenets that comprise the concept of brand.   When an organization holds itself accountable to the perceptions maintained by its customers, it expands the possibilities of the business.   Embracing the intangible nature of perceptions will enable the organization to expand the tangible results of its business.

In some regards perception is a straightforward concept, one that is easy to understand intellectually, but is not intuitive for many people.  Perception is about sensing, feeling and empathy and is an example of a  “soft” business skill that has, by its nature, limited the way it is incorporated into business strategies and processes.   To fully understand the potential of customer relationships, one must be willing to be held accountable to perceptions.  Perceptions measure the intentional energy that drives the amount and scope of business transactions a customer will have with an organization.

To be sure, perception is not a new concept to the world of business.  Just ask any successful salesperson to react to the following Ralph Waldo Emerson quote – “I can’t hear what you say over the thunder of who you are.”  You will get an instant lesson on the street-wise impact that perceptions play with their relationships with customers, especially if they have recently had to struggle through a customer service problem.  Understanding and managing customers’ perceptions has been primarily an individual sport within many organizations. Too few organizations have incorporated managing perceptions as an organizational competency.  This lack of focus has limited the organization’s accountability for creating the desired perceptions with customers.

The study of the concept of perceptions has its roots deep in the behavior sciences and if you read enough it can get so complex you begin to wonder what side of the mirror you are facing! There is no need for me to present a theoretical construct that supports a purer understanding of perceptions.  Applying the notion of perceptions to brand building requires only a basic understanding of the concept.  The more difficult part is the discipline of viewing things from the customer’s perspective and the fortitude to hold oneself accountable for the perception that is created and not the action that was taken.

Incorporating perceptions into a business’ operating principles starts with the following easy process steps:

1. Decide what perceptions you want to create in the minds of your target audience.  Perceptions don’t have to be random.  Building a strong brand starts with deciding what perceptions you want to create.  Determining the desired perceptions is a strategic decision based on careful consideration and commitment.  Decide on the set of perceptions you want to create based on the following criteria:  first and foremost focus on the qualities that make you distinctive from your competitors; make sure the perceptions are targeted at what is most important to your target customers; and be sure the targeted perceptions are based upon the qualities you can consistently deliver.
2. Be accountable for creating perceptions as often as possible.    Every action leaves an impression and those that start inside the organization will create an inertia that will find its way to a customer.  The bottom line is that everyone must be held accountable for the perceptions that are created.  The process starts with creating a clear understanding of the desired perceptions. This is followed with a process of coaching employees on the behaviors that support consistently creating the targeted perceptions.
3. Measure the perceptions.  Perceptions are real and can be measured.  Continual improvement starts with measurement.  A commitment to quantitative research is a necessity to understanding and managing perceptions.

A customer’s perceptions of an organization define the limits of the relationship. When a customer’s perceptions underestimate an organization, the relationship never achieves its potential.  When a customer’s perceptions are in synch with the true qualities of an organization, the full potential for the relationship is a real possibility.  When a customer’s perceptions grow with the possibilities of an organization, the potential for the relationship is unlimited.  

Posted by Karl D. Speak

Brand is about truth and honesty.  When an organization (or an individual) embraces brand as an operating principle it opens itself to the opportunities that result from an honest relationship with its customers and marketplace at large.

There is no doubt that many organizations desire to have the business benefits that come from having a strong brand.  It is not always clear that the organizations that hope to reap the benefits of a strong brand have the discipline to embrace and consistently execute the principles of brand. 

Brand thinking requires a different perspective. For starters consider the following two facets of brand thinking.

Brands are relationships.

Brands are relationships, not products. A brand is defined by the distinctive qualities, if they exist, of the relationship between the company and its customers.  Brand is a connection with a human. Brand is not transactional, it’s about affinity. Brand building requires intuition, adeptness and passion for relationships.

Brand is not some sterile business principle that positions the customer as another tenet of a business strategy. The customer is not another input placed in the modeling-mad business world that surrounds us.  The customer relationship is THE POINT.  Financial performance of an organization is measured by how well an organization delivers distinctive value in the customer relationship and how competent an organization is at executing a clever business model -  in that order.  Brand building is the commitment to use the vision, values, unique talents and passion of an organization to make a difference for customers.

Sustainable growth is greatly influenced by the amount of equity an organization has in its customer relationships. Brand is a business construct that places the customer relationship at the nucleus of the organization’s strategy and tactics. Brand strategy is an organization’s customer relationship strategy. 

Brands are based upon perceptions.

The brand is not what the company claims, it is defined exclusively by the perceptions held by customers. 

Any kind of incongruity in the two perspectives can be misleading to either or both parties. Strategies can misfire or fail to get enough traction when organizations are not in synch with the way they are perceived by their customers.

When customers and companies operate from different sets of perceptions it is only a matter of time when customers become dissatisfied and loyalty wanes. 

When an organization holds itself accountable to the principles of brand, it becomes accountable to the truth of the relationship because it holds itself accountable to the defining element of the relationship — the perception. 

The way an organization is perceived is the permission it is given to use that relationship in its business plans.  Honesty is required to understand the perception.  Honesty is required to manage within the constraints of the perceptions.  We can’t have any brand we want.  We can only have the brand we are and are willing to create and sustain.  Therefore it requires honesty to be clear about the truth of the possibilities of the brand we can become.

Building a strong brand is not natural for every organization and requires a different perspective.  It can be antithetical to a short-term business view and requires a long-term commitment to customer relationships.  Every organization must be honest with itself and decide if it has the courage and commitment to build a strong brand. 

Posted by Karl D. Speak

When it comes to defining brand, the business world seems to operate on extremes.  People either over-simplify or over-complicate, but rarely land in between.  This is a sure sign of a lack of understanding.  The notion of brand becomes over-simplified when it is reduced to logos, tag lines or other marketing communications paraphernalia.  Or there are the “brand hotshots” who pontificate that brand is a deep-seated emotional connection with a consumer. 

 Virtually every business leader knows that having a strong brand creates competitive advantage and superior customer performance.  If it were as simple as marketing communications, a brand wouldn’t be very valuable.  Most executives know success isn’t that simple.  On the other hand, seasoned executives know that business isn’t that complex and customers pay for tangible results, so an emotional connection is a bit out there for most veteran leaders. 

So how do we define brand in a way that is simple enough to be believed and robust enough to be used as an important business tool?  Let me give it a shot.  I have used the following definition for over 20 years.  It’s pragmatic enough to enable organizations and their leaders to embrace the concepts of brand to enhance the relationships that impact their business performance.

Brands are relationships. It is not any more complicated than that. Strong brands equal loyal customer relationships. Brand equity is something an organization earns by consistently delivering distinctive value to its customers.  When a customer perceives that an organization’s values, competencies and history of performance are the basis for consistently receiving superior value, that’s brand equity.  Distinctive value can range from being the most outstanding commodity supplier to the most talked about fashion item or consumer tech gadget.  After all, to the buyer of a commodity raw material, consistently receiving outstanding service and great prices can be darn right sexy!

Every organization can build a strong brand, regardless of its size, industry (profit or non-profit) or its marketing budget.  There is a two-part process to building brand equity.  If an organization can consistently deliver distinctive value to its customers, it has built the important foundation for building a brand. Relationships in business are a function of how much value is delivered. Delivering distinctive value is the first, most important part of brand building. 

Consistently delivering distinctive value is necessary, but not sufficient to earn brand equity fast enough to grow faster than competitors.  The second part of building brand equity is the process of getting credit for the value an organization provides to its customers.   Embracing the concepts of brand management, inside and outside the organization, will provide the organization with the processes and competencies to build brand equity that will yield superior customer performance that can be measured.

The brand of an organization matters in every relationship that influences the performance of that organization.  Managing a brand is the process of proactively enhancing the relationships that impact business performance.

Posted by Karl D. Speak

Defining brand and understanding its role in business has been arguably one of the biggest challenges in getting executives to embrace brand as a viable business process.  Understanding that brand was created to solve a practical business challenge may be helpful in creating a broader understanding of brand and its role in business today.

Although we often refer to brand as a modern marketing technique, the basic construct of brand dates back to medieval Europe.  Brand wasn’t called brand at that time. The core idea behind brand served as an effective and fundamental tool in market expansion and served as the foundation for the growth of the manufacturing industry.  What we now call brand added integrity to the relationship between the buyer and seller. 

When medieval manufacturers wanted to expand their business by selling to consumers in new, distant markets they faced two important challenges: counterfeiting and consumer skepticism.  Unlike selling goods in local markets, competitors could more easily sell poorer quality, look-alike versions of a product, especially durable goods, to unsuspecting consumers.  Policing the counterfeiters was a challenge, but not the biggest challenge to market expansion. 

The larger challenge was overcoming the new potential consumers’ skepticism that resulted from being disappointed by buying the knock-off products.  Therefore consumers were hesitant to buy some goods from manufacturers they did not know.   The counterfeiters poisoned the pond, so to speak for market expansion.  To expand into new markets manufacturers had to provide consumers with the confidence the product was of high quality and would perform consistently over time.  Without consumer confidence market volume would be limited.  Manufacturers needed a pull-through strategy to defeat the counterfeiters and reap the possibilities of distant markets where consumers did not know them first hand.

The shorthand answer is that manufacturers took two important steps to solve their marketing problem.  The particular order of their solution is fundamental to understanding the duality of brand.  The first step was to have the medieval manufacturing guilds establish and enforce quality standards.  That is to say, using their values and collective competencies to produce a consistent high quality “brand” of goods.  Secondly the guilds redesigned their goods to contain a special characteristic easily observed or detected by consumers that was associated with the guild’s high standard of quality.  The characteristic could range from a certain detectable product quality or a specific thread or color.  The identifiable characteristic became the brand on the outside that ensured consumers of the authenticity and quality of the product – the real brand of quality on the inside. 

Taken together these two measures combated the counterfeiting and consumer skepticism.  One without the other would not create value for either the manufacturer or the consumer.  Brand became one part manufacturing and one part marketing, but not in equal proportion.  Differentiation was the sum total of quality manufacturing and savvy marketing.

If you are interested in a much more detailed reference of the role of “brand” in medieval manufacturing you can check out this link.

Posted by Karl D. Speak

Every organization can build a strong brand, regardless of its size, industry (profit or non-profit) or its marketing budget. If an organization can consistently deliver distinctive value to its customers, it has built the important foundation for building a brand. Building and implementing a process to consistently build a stronger brand starts with establishing a common language about brand for business leaders. Upcoming entries of the Brand Bytes Blog will provide the reader with a pragmatic business lexicon of brand based upon my 20+ years of coaching executive teams of large and midcap-sized businesses.

Posted by Karl D. Speak

Posted by Karl D. Speak

Posted by Karl D. Speak

In my more than 24 years as a brand consultant I have watched a very interesting evolution of brand. The evolution I am referring to is not about how the Internet is upending the way some brands are being promoted, that’s much too narrow of a focus. I am referring to a much larger context of how many, many more organizations are embracing the framework of brand in their strategic thinking and planning. Brand has evolved from an exclusive business strategy available only to consumer packaged goods companies with large advertising budgets to a business framework that can and is being used by leaders of all types of organizations to describe the uniqueness of their products, organization and even themselves.

Early in my career most of my work focused on assignments related to the challenges facing established respected product brands. Much of the work centered on challenges like category management or bread-and-butter brand re-positioning facing brand manufacturers. Our more trade-driven clients asked us help them develop strategies in defense of their large trade customers who were taking more control over the dollars that used to be controlled by the marketing department. Some of our more sophisticated clients retained us to help them work through strategies that included brand licensing. In other cases we were asked to develop multi-tier brand strategies to rationalize the recent acquisition of a competitive brand or to appease the demands of trade customers for a multiple price point offering (code word for offering a brand that had better margins). Our conversations with our clients in the marketing departments were punctuated with a specialist language that clearly indicated brand was designed for an exclusive audience.

Posted by Karl D. Speak

Many, many organizations have the potential for becoming strong, exceptional brands. Most of those organizations never achieve their true potential as a brand because they lack the one most important ingredient that separates the great brands from the also-rans – leaders who integrate the discipline of brand in the way they make decisions, communicate and lead their organization. Brand-based decision-making focuses the organization’s attention on building valuable customer relationships that drive business results. Great leaders build great brands. Great leaders are great brands.

Great brand leaders aren’t just the senior executives in the organization. Brand leaders can reside in all parts of an organization. Their leadership qualities are not defined by their position, but by their passion for making a difference for customers and their focus on building relationships. Great brands depend upon a strong portfolio of leaders throughout the organization. Brands are built inside the organization and are rewarded on the outside.

The biggest brand-building opportunity for any organization is building a brand on the inside of the organization. Sharing brand leadership power means engaging individuals throughout the organization and equipping them with the tools that enable them to consistently make a difference for customers. That’s the power of internal brand building. (We’ll dig much deeper into internal brand building later in our blog series.)

The passion for making a difference with customers is at the core of all brand leaders. That level of dedication is necessary, but not sufficient to be a consistently great brand leader. To generate consistent brand-building traction and share brand-building power throughout the organization, the enthusiasm must be equipped with a common language and set of brand principles and practices. A brand-building competency fueled with passion and enthusiasm creates a customer-centric culture that builds brands.

The best way to demonstrate how a world-class brand leader thinks and acts is to introduce you to Chuck Berger. Click on this link to read an insightful interview with Chuck. Chuck’s brand-based leadership style is timeless and could have been applied to any industry with the same level of success. The customer-focused principles and dedication to customer relationships were instrumental in his well-deserved success as a global business leader.

The near term focus of the Brand Bytes Blog is to provide you with a set of learning vignettes presenting many of the core principles of brand applied in their broadest business context. Our intention is to provide you a common language and the encouragement to be an enthusiastic brand leader and help your organization reap the benefits of building a strong brand.

Posted by Karl D. Speak

This is a blog focused on developing and supporting brand leaders. What you can expect from this blog is a set of insights and lessons that will enable you to better understand the core discipline of brand in a way that can be applied to any organization. The aim of this blog is to provide you with the language, tools and encouragement to be a more effective brand leader.

We will share practical insights on what we have learned from our 24+ years of working with executive teams on a wide range of product, corporate and personal brand assignments. The intent is to provide a practical and pragmatic perspective on building a brand. Our perspective is steeped in the belief that every organization has the opportunity to build a strong brand and reap the time-tested rewards associated with being respected as the leader in their business category.

This blog is not focused on advertising, although we may touch on it from time to time. The blogsphere does not need one more blog on brand that provides another opinionated commentary on a current ad campaign or celebrity snafu. Our focus is wider and more practical so more organizations can benefit from the discipline of brand building. Brand building is a business management discipline, not a marketing strategy.

Before I go any further let me state that when I refer to strong brands I am not constraining my perspective to the most well known brands associated with large advertising budgets or high profile consumer products. Frankly that is the easy route to take when writing about brands. Such a limited perspective constrains the possibilities of brand as a bona fide business discipline that can be used by a broad audience of types and sizes of businesses.

The core of the brand discipline is about building and growing customer relationships that support a business model and vision of an organization. Strong customer relationships are fundamental to the success of every organization, regardless of marketing budget or product category.

Going forward this blog will provide you a set of lessons describing the core principles of brand that will enable you to become a more effective brand leader – a leader who uses the principles of brand to make a bigger difference inside and outside your organization.

Posted by Karl D. Speak