Integrated Brand

Going social beyond the social network
July 27th, 2010

Social networking has just about hit its peak. What I mean by that is, we have reached a point of maximum density for social networks such that new ones popping up are bound to fail. The winners have emerged–Facebook for personal, LinkedIn for business, and Twitter for marketing–and now the focus is turning to how to make every online experience social (wherever you are on the web). It’s placeless social networking or the social web.

Companies need to be thinking about how they engage with users beyond the traditional website to establish and build an ongoing social relationship wherever a user happens to be. The days of brochure-ware have been over for awhile. It’s time to think about what it means to be social–then, build a company-wide strategy that extends beyond having a website, a Facebook page and a LinkedIn profile to how you strategically use human resources, marketing, sales and the web to build social relationships.

–Jen Travis

Domino’s Saves Their Pepperoni
July 23rd, 2010

In a clever switcheroo, Dominos pizza has turned the tables of opinion with its use of social media. Practically brought down by a Youtube video of two employees doing disgusting things with their pizza, Dominos has come back with a vengeance, with its own YouTube video showing customers in focus groups slamming its pizza. Why would that be a good idea? Their campaign is brilliant! Everyone can support a brand that admits a wrongdoing and wants to change. And even more so, when they actually attempt to make a change, which they are doing with a new recipe for “honest to goodness” pizza. It’s a rebranding campaign filled with chutzpah and authenticity, which I predict will save their pepperoni.

-Lynn Parker

The big question: to engage employees in social media?
July 12th, 2010

While I was really there to see how the morning’s keynote speaker Al Gore was going to sell global warming to 11,000 HR leaders, I found a statement made by the Society of Human Resources Management board chair Robb Van Cleave to be really quite interesting. He said during his speech at their national convention on June 28th, “With the proliferation of social media your employees are becoming brand ambassadors and you, you HR leaders are becoming brand managers.”

I found this particularly interesting because during the early morning workshop I conducted, that had concluded not 15 minutes prior to Mr. Van Cleave’s speech, I covered the social nature of modern brands and the opportunity to enlist employees in the service of this new reality to build one’s brand and to increase employee engagement. I suppose it’s possible that Mr. Van Cleave plucked the quote from my presentation, but what’s more likely, given the lively conversation during my session, is that there seems to be a trend.

Social media is forcing a conversation between communications, HR and leadership about the role of employees in the definition and cultivation of their brand promise. In some organizations, this presents the opportunity to differentiate and to create stronger connections with employees and customers alike. And in others, it’s creating stricter policies around the use of online media and the dissemination of company information in the hope that social media is a passing fad.

If successful brands today are those that function as a community, where fans engage, share and personalize, how can you deliver on this expectation without promoting the use of social media?

Regardless of where you’ve come down on this issue, I’d love to hear about how you got there and what you learned about your organization in the process.

–Briana

The New Kid Speaks
July 8th, 2010

Several years ago, I worked as a reporter for a public radio station in the Midwest. One day, while reporting a story about an emerging hi-tech company, I had a revelation about how companies think about themselves. While visiting the company to conduct interviews, I was struck first by the building itself. The facility was big and spacious with high ceilings and lots of natural light. There was a slide you could take from the second floor to the first, if you were feeling too whimsical to use the stairs. There were wonderful paintings and sculptures throughout the facility. They had a restaurant (with a trained chef) on site, as well as a massage therapist and a hair dresser. A dry cleaner stopped by daily to pick up and drop off laundry, and I was told that a nurse regularly visited the business in case anyone was feeling ill.

The skeptic in me thought, “Yeah… they have to provide all those services because they expect their employees to slave away 20 hours a day. They’re probably miserable.”

Once I started to conduct interviews, I was stunned by the positive attitude shared by employees and owners alike. From the receptionist who greeted me to the CEO, everyone referred to the same basic ideas about what made their company successful and what they enjoyed about working there. They all talked about the open culture, the mutual respect coworkers had for each other’s abilities, and the oddly plucky nature of how the company planned to grow. It was a disconcerting experience for me and at the time I wasn’t quite sure why.

Flash forward several years. I am no longer a reporter, although I haven’t lost my journalistic curiosity. The question of how an organization creates and conveys its culture to all its stakeholders has continued to be a fascinating subject. So, it was a pleasant surprise to find myself doing some work for Parker LePla where they have made an art form out of coaxing the companies into identifying and implementing on what I now know is called Brand.

When the players at Parker LePla first described how they help companies identify and build their brands, the skeptic in me thought, “Yeah, right. How can outsiders tell insiders what their company is all about?”

Yesterday, I got a glimpse of how they do it. I watched as five members of Parker LePla’s (now referred to PLP-ites) firm discussed their collective understanding of what they learned about a client through a series of interviews and surveys. The group was quickly able to agree on five core themes that everyone within the organization expressed. The PLP-ites then worked together to write a statement that not only expresses those themes but also contextualized them in terms of the client’s larger business environment.

I don’t recall any Kool-Aid being served at yesterday’s meeting, but I must have had a sip of something good. It was amazing to hear how the PLP-ites riffed off of each other’s ideas as they worked toward the common goal of finding the appropriate expression of the client’s brand.

Now, I have no idea how the client will feel about the result of the work I witnessed, and I’m not just saying this because I’m hoping that my work with PLP continues, but it was really exciting to realize that an organization’s culture – any organization – can be discovered, analyzed and verbalized with the right set of objective minds working on discovering it. For the firm that that thoroughly knows its brand, the benefits are tremendous – both internally and externally. That is what I witnessed years ago when I interviewed people at that Midwestern hi-tech firm. The company still exists, by the way. And continues to grow and develop and maintain its plucky culture.

-Shula Neuman

Plain Talk
June 22nd, 2010

The art of plain talk is critical for anyone who has a message that needs to be understood by someone else. Whether you’re a marketer, a teacher or even someone who emails a lot at work, your writing can either win someone over or just create confusion.

Google the topic and you’ll find a ton of rules like avoid euphemisms, bullet your points, make it short, only use words with 3 consonants or less, etc.

I simply say: Picture an actual person from your target audience in front of you. If you wouldn’t say it out loud, don’t put it in writing.

The better you understand your target audience, the stronger your writing will be. You might need to channel your inner 6^th grader to simplify the message or use the latest slang to build rapport—whatever techniques help you clarify it for them, do it.

- Bianca Abate

“Whooo are you… Who, Who?”
June 11th, 2010

One of the things that has been rattling around my head for a while now deals with the most fundamental strategic decision of any business: who you are and why. Branding certainly takes these elements and weaves a coherent (and hopefully appealing!) story around them but it’s the decision itself that has been intriguing me.

Sure, you can position a product or service to meet any given niche. You can start a company to chase a market opportunity – or reposition the company you already have. But what – strategically – should influence these decisions? What preternatural self-awareness must a business have to know who it is, what it does, and how it makes its customers’ lives better?

The real question is, “Who is a company?” It is certainly a product of its founders, and its current employees. Past employees, events, and decisions affect a business and its culture much like an individual. Growing up in the Great Depression, for example, keeps my grandmother from wasting food to this day; growing up in the Great Recession might cause a company to place a different emphasis on cash flows, for example, or growth rates.

A strategic decision for a person (“Do I take this job?”) is similar to one for a company (“Do I make this product?”). Management scientists would have you believe that companies should be controlled by the spreadsheet. This is akin to advising your best friend to simply take the highest paying job. (What if he isn’t good at the skills required? What if it’s too far away from home?)

Like with a “real life decision,” success comes through knowledge and self-introspection. Businesses that know and align their people and processes with their purpose for being tend to succeed. These businesses have engaged the employees that power them to do more of what has made them successful. They have developed the personality, the story – the brand – of a winner and this brand in turn helps them succeed.

So my advice to you: take a corporate vision quest and figure out who your business really is… before jumping in to whatever’s next!

–Dan Liska

Should hospitals be held to a different standard?
May 25th, 2010

Last week (coincidentally while on my way to a conference on healthcare and emerging technology), I heard James Unland, editor of the Journal of Health Care Finance, talking on NPR about whether or not it was appropriate for hospitals to be spending money on advertising. As a consultant to healthcare organizations—many of whom have successfully and responsibly used marketing to improve inaccurate perceptions, attract funding and compete for patients—I was a bit surprised by the naiveté of Mr. Unland. Non-profit organizations or not, hospitals who do business in a free market economy (as they do here in this US) must promote themselves to survive. Put another way, hospitals and other healthcare organizations must be financially sound to fulfill their mission to serve their patients. And marketing and advertising is an essential component to their success.

His interview reminded me of another presentation I heard just a couple of weeks ago at the Washington State Non-Profit Conference. There, social entrepreneur and Harvard Business Review blogger Dan Pallotta eloquently argued for new standards by which we judge non-profit organizations. His argument was that our collective perception that non-profits should operate from a different rule book, one that prohibits them from adequately competing with their corporate counterparts by spending and investing in marketing and other types of administrative costs, limits their ability to do good in the world. His theory is that this stems from our Puritanical need justify our greed and desire for profit with charitable efforts, bi-furcating our work into that which is for good and that which is for evil.

Mr. Pollatta’s argument, one that I support, is that it doesn’t have to be so black and white. Organizations that do good can also leverage the success-promoting principles of for-profit enterprises to increase their capacity to fulfill their mission. Should we hold hospitals to a different standard than their insurance plan or pharmaceutical counterparts? I don’t think so.

-Briana Marrah

The Curiosity Factor
May 24th, 2010

What sparks your curiosity or motivates you to take action? Interests obviously vary from person to person, but there’s one consistent factor that significantly impacts our ability to draw others in: simplicity.

People gravitate toward concepts that are easy to understand in a few words yet still poke at the imagination. The goal of a message should be: when people hear about it, they ask questions.

Spanx is a great example. If I told you that Spanx are “body shapers” would you be interested in finding out more? How would your impression change if I called them Power Panties? A girdle?

Body shaper is a gender-neutral description that’s easy to understand—it’s obviously slimming. And their sub-brand Power Panties works really well in targeting women while fighting the stigma of control-top undergarments. Most importantly, upon hearing it you probably have questions. What do they look like? How do they work? Who wears them? And so on. It’s clear yet thought provoking.

Capturing that special element to compel people to action is less about wordsmithing and more about figuring out the key concepts you want to focus on. And those drilled-down concepts form your brand’s foundation. Examples:

Home Depot- Home improvement center for the do-it-yourselfer
The Simpsons- Dysfunctional family cartoon sitcom
Staples- Office supply ordering made easy
Levi’s- Classic American jeans

Ultimately, it’s this over-arching concept that helps you answer the fundamental “why?” question for your customers. Leverage your first impression by giving an easy-to-digest tidbit that hints at that “why,” and their curiosity will bring them to you with an appetite for more.

- Bianca Abate