Don’t worry, I’ve come back to finish our series on the 5 essentials of an integrated brand. New Year’s resolution for 2008–blog more!

Your company’s business strategy is the roadmap for your organization. It tells people what the priorities are, where the focus is, what you want to achieve. If your brand is the promise you keep as an organization, then that promise needs to be built into your roadmap. Strategic planning processes look different from company to company, but there are a few guidelines you can follow regardless of your process:

1) Visualize your destination: what would it look like if you reached your business goals while keeping your brand promise? Get your management team involved in describing it so they can all agree on where they are headed.
2) Create strategies that get you to your business goals while keeping your brand promise: There may be hundreds of ways to achieve your business goals, but that field is more limited if you can only choose those which deliver your brand promise. This helps you flavor what can be generic business strategies with your unique approach (your brand).
3) Apply your brand as a filter for your entire strategic plan: Is this us? If we achieve these goals will our brand be stronger? Does anything in this plan compromise our brand promise? Are there strategies we need to add specifically to strengthen our brand?

One of our clients, Group Health, is in the middle of a long-range strategic planning process. They started the work by identifying a destination (their vision) that is congruent with their brand promise, of innovation for better health. And throughout the strategic planning process, they’ve worked to achieve their vision in a way that is congruent with their brand promise by inviting leaders and staff to continually ask “what’s next for our customer’s health?”

By using the brand as their filter with each strategy, Group Health is much more likely to keep their brand promise when it’s time to execute the strategic plan. This process also helps limit staff confusion. Every employee delivers the brand every day, in part, by executing the strategic plan. It’s like a call and response.

–Briana Marrah

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As I thumb through all the articles on New Year’s predictions, I think to myself, “didn’t I read this same thing last year?” and “is this really what to do to make it in the new year?”

Articles such as, Eight for ‘08: Brand and Marketing Trends, give us the typical list of brand and marketing musts for the new year: more personalization, more sustainability, more mobile and portable channels, more measurability…and how to exploit all of these in order to succeed in the new year. While all of this may be true, it feels just a little superficial to say that if you do all of these things, your brand will be successful in 2008. People are smart, and nowadays, don’t believe everything they are told.

What consumers want is more honesty, more integrity and more showing instead of telling. We want to feel and experience the greatness of a brand more than hear about how great it is from the horse’s mouth. Brand is really the emotional and intellectual bond you have with your customers. So, I think, the ’show don’t tell’ method of branding is really the key to owning the hearts and minds of more of your customers in ‘08. If more companies did this, we wouldn’t be so distrustful of corporate America and its marketing hype. We would connect as consumers on another level and stop looking at ’stuff’ as just ’stuff’ to see the real value in it. We would engage more with those around us and with companies based on their values, instead of looking at everything as a commodity and trying desperately to find the lowest price. In other words, we would care more about the brands we choose, and tell others about how much we care.

How will your brand be more of what it wants to be in 2008?

Happy holidays and best of luck for the new year!

- Jen Travis

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