Lynn Parker will be speaking at the Advanced Learning Institute’s Internal Branding Conference. The conference will cover topics on communicating to your employees how to build your brand, change their behavior and ultimately impact your organization’s bottom line.

To find out more, please visit the Advanced Learning Institute’s website.

If your whole value proposition is based on price, you’re sunk. On Seth Godin’s blog, he says that “maybe the reason it seems that price is all your customers care about is that you haven’t given them anything else to care about.”

Price wars aren’t real. People only use price as a purchasing criteria when there is no difference. We say, be different and charge more.

-Jen Travis

Whether a website acts primarily as an online brochure, an e-commerce vehicle, a lead generation tool, or a community builder, it is always doing one thing – demonstrating and delivering a brand experience. Because it is often the first place potential customers go to learn about an organization, it’s also where first impressions are made. That makes it necessary to review how it is organized, how it functions, and how people interact with it from the perspective of what brand experience it delivers.

Consider the difference in the experience of Google vs. Yahoo. Both are search-related companies. Both offer multiple products and services around search and community. But, only Google has used its role of “search simplifier” to inform its site strategy – from user interface, to design, to architecture. The site is simple, clean and easy to navigate. People know what to expect when they go to Google and use it most often because it delivers a simple search experience.

For brick and mortar businesses, the website is almost even more important. It needs to continue delivering the same in-person experience in a virtual world – where it’s even more important to control the brand experience for the user. Consider Target, whose brand is built around connecting great design with affordability (tagline: Expect more. Pay less.). They deliver on this concept by offering a greater variety of web-only merchandise and discounts and providing a seamless e-commerce experience that users can choose to continue in their stores. Their website is not only an extension of their brand, it is a primary brand delivery vehicle and is designed and organized as such to reinforce the brand experience on every page – in design, navigation, functionality and form.

So what does a brand manager take away from this conversation? Focus on how customers feel and act, not on what you say and the design. Review your website ongoingly to ensure it’s delivering the experience you promise. And elevate the importance of your website as a strategic business activity.

Instead of spending all your energies on search engine optimization, spend some time thinking about how your customers feel once they get to your site and how to keep them coming back (among other things).

–Jen Travis

Is it just me, or are more companies resorting to rebranding as a way to avoid actually changing? I’m thinking of Philips Morris changing to Altria, or WorldCom to MCI. Can a name change successfully reflect internal changes, or does it signal to consumers and investors a desire to run away from negative brand equity? Does crow taste better eaten with a foon?

-Lynn Parker

Marketing folks, afraid of overstepping some boundaries, might say the latter; savvy CEOs, on the other hand, might surprise you by believing the former (even if they don’t say so out loud). Why? Because a truly integrated brand is the long-term framework for adding value to the business. Look at Volvo: brand clearly drives business strategy, whether it’s dictating car design or website content. Look at Home Depot: recent forays into marketing to contractors notwithstanding, its strategic role of “the resource center for do-it-yourselfers” drives store design, service and product offerings, as well as communications. While it may be apocryphal that I can buy a hammer in 12 places in the store, it is true that I can take a class on laying tile, rent a band saw, or join its garden club—not typical hardware store activities.

Less confident executives might be wary of ceding control to a concept that has long been owned and driven by the marketing department. Many of us practicing integrated branding have felt shackled by the common belief that branding is marketing, versus business strategy, when it’s clear that the customer experience you are trying to deliver needs to inform every business decision. Branding shows up for the customer through every touchpoint, whether it’s the packaging, their invoice, where they purchased it, what happens when they call customer support, the website, actually using the product, and more, so is only stands to reason that most company decisions should use “does this decision strengthen our promise?” as its litmus test.

When branding drives business strategy, a company is making all of its decisions about spending, priorities and investment in terms of what will create more of the value that has made it be successful to date. In addition, a brand-based focus reduces distractions caused by “initiative of the month” approaches.

This doesn’t mean that companies must abandon their efforts to improve operations, ROI, quality or innovation. It just means that if your brand promise is around, say, “tasty nutrition” for a smoothie company, then your annual business strategy planning needs to hold that concept as paramount, and feature actions that strengthen that concept in the customer’s mind.

–Lynn Parker, Principal

Many of you visiting this site are familiar with the term brand. As a matter of fact, lots of people know the term. And we all know that a stronger brand means more loyal customers who are willing to pay more for your product. Beyond that, however, mass confusion tends to set in. Is brand a tagline? Is it an ad campaign? It is a logo? Is it even the sum total of all your external communications?

Let’s try answering these questions with one more question: Are visual and verbal communications the only way you build brand loyalty? Of course not. Brand loyalty is also based on how well the product works, how good the customer service is, how easy the sales process was, etc.

Brand is, therefore, the sum of all experiences the customer has with a given company. And if that experience is consistent and compelling, it becomes a promise you make to the customer, an experience they grow to value and expect.

Integrated branding is about defining the promise and then employing company-wide strategies and tactics to align all company actions in the service of delivering that promise.

This site is devoted to those of you who are responsible for driving your brand promise throughout your organization, whether you live in the HR, marketing, strategic planning or product management worlds. We have assembled a library of materials to assist you in this effort. We will feature best practices and new learning here on this page. And we’ve established a user-driven forum so that you, the real experts, can share your thoughts, techniques and questions with each other.

This community is only as strong as its members, so please take a moment to create a user account and to get to know each other. And if you have something specific you’d like us to address on the home page in a future installment, please feel free to add a comment.

–Briana Marrah, Vice President, Parker LePla

Hyatt Regency Crystal City

Washington, DC

http://www.aliconferences.com/conferences/ib0507/0507.html