A couple weeks ago an article by William Neal and Ron Strauss appeared in AMA’s Thought Leadership newsletter grappling with the idea of valuing brand equity. While their assertion that brand equity should be treated as a financial asset is right on, what’s tricky is how you go about measuring and presenting that value so you can effectively grow and sustain profit margins.  Properly valuing brand equity provides senior management with benchmarks for gauging how many dollars and how much staff bandwidth should be focused on increasing brand equity as opposed to basic product or service development and delivery.  

HNE, a health insurer whose brand is around being personal and accountable to employers and plan members, is better able to manage their brand asset because they don’t just measure its value to the company, they also measure how well they’re keeping their brand promise: 

1) The depth of customer relationships
2) Customer understanding of HNE’s promise (brand)
3) The comparative dollar value customers place on the HNE brand 

This allows management to fine tune their ‘brand sustainability engine’ with less likelihood of under- or over-investment in the brand. 

 –Joe LePla

For those of you who know a little something about Lean (maybe your organization is building Lean into its culture and systems or maybe you’ve read one of the many books out there about the manufacturing method–popularized by Toyota–turned business philosophy) it might surprise you to learn that your company’s brand alignment process and Lean happen to have a lot in common.

Why is that valuable? If you’re already pursuing a Lean enterprise, you now have a system in place to focus the organization around its brand. And if you’re already a brand-driven organization, your employees share a central, common goal—step one in Lean. These two business strategies can reinforce each other, creating a more intentional, streamlined organization that delivers what it promises. Who doesn’t want that?

Here’s a quick run down of the top three things Lean and brand have in common:

1) Customer’s perspective: What experience does the customer want and how do we deliver that experience from the front line all the way back to the most behind the scenes employee?

2) Compass for action: In Lean they refer to this as the North Star and in integrated brand, this is your promise. In order to mitigate employee confusion (and maximize the effectiveness of either strategy) these concepts should be the same since all strategies, departmental processes and individual actions should drive toward this promise.

3) Eliminating waste: Both of these approaches provide a sense of purpose and focus to the organization that encourages it to eliminate anything that doesn’t get it closer to the North Star or doesn’t help them keep the company’s promise. This is particularly helpful for complex businesses or businesses that try to be everything to everyone.

Want to learn more about this potential partnership? Check out the case study I presented along with Group Health’s Sheila Burroughs at a conference for business leaders last week.

Lynn Parker