Give your brand a seat at the table!
Most brands spend their days incarcerated within the marketing department. This might seem reasonable if you think of a brand as a ‘marketing tool’ – a device that attracts and retains customers while adding a seductive charisma to the organisation.
But nine times out of ten, it’s a company’s advertising agency that actually makes use of it. While the Marketing Director acts as a ‘custodian’, it’s the agency team that puts it to work – usually as a blueprint to ensure consistency across advertising executions in a variety of media.
The rest of the time it doesn’t do much at all. Once in a while, the ‘Brand Guidelines’ might get dusted off so a design group can refresh the logo or tart up the PowerPoints. Or perhaps choose colours and fonts for the annual report.
It’s a tragic waste of potential. (And money! Agencies and consultancies charge a motza for telling you what your brand is all about.)
A better way of looking at your brand is to think of it as a ‘business tool’ – one that directly impacts the bottom line.
How?
Through a process we call ‘Brand Symmetry’.
The real power of your brand to drive profits lies as much within your organisation as it does outside. How your people relate to the brand is just as important as how your customers perceive it. Or to put it another way, while your customers are buying the brand, your people need to buy into it.
Does this internal/external alignment really pay off?
Well, here’s some numbers:
Organisations with strong internal brands spend 50% less on recruitment. *1 (That’s less money down the drain!)
Organisations with strong internal brands have 28% less churn. *2(That’s less people down the drain!)
Organisations with strong internal brands get 3 times the number of positive posts on social media. *3(These days, that really matters!)
Organisations with strong internal brands outperform the total stock market index by 22% higher than average. (It took the brainiacs at McKinsey and Co to work that one out!)
Organisations with strong internal brands are 18% more productive and 12% more profitable. *4(The board’s idea of a good investment.)
These are the sort of numbers that will make your CFO wake up and take notice.
But unfortunately, your CFO doesn’t get to play in this particular sandpit. While the marketing department is allowing the agency to monopolise your brand, it’s only value will remain outside of your organisation.
Agencies have no interest on the inside. There’s no incentive for them. No serious media opportunities, no creative exposure to impress the rest of the world.
That’s where we can help.
biG was set up by three advertising, marketing and media stalwarts. But once outside the constraints of the agency model, we decided to take a different approach to building brands.
We’d lived a C-Suite life for decades and so we had intuitively known the importance of the role that culture plays. So, we went searching for a process that drove profits by aligning the inside with the outside.
We found it in the application of a scientifically proven psychometric profiling tool – the Herrmann Brain Dominance Instrument. (HBDI)
Given that brands behave in much the same way as people, (they crave love, loyalty and flattery!), it made sense to repurpose a tool that could deconstruct human behaviour to understand brand behaviour.
Popularly known as Whole Brain® Thinking, the HBDI enabled us to develop a unique approach and process we call Whole Brain® Branding.
It aligns your people and your customers around a core brand promise that also serves as a strategy for product and service development. And our online version of the model allows you to involve entire swathes of your workforce to get a true representation of the culture. (In a recent job for Anglicare, we built the brand profile from over 800 Whole Brain® questionnaires.) And being digital, we can slice and dice the data and see how perceptions differ between departments, age groups, time with the company and so on.
But it’s fair to say that a large part of what we do doesn’t belong within the remit of a marketing department. At the same time, it shouldn’t be relegated to People & Culture or get lost in Learning and Development or Human Resources.
What we’re doing is more than cross-organisational. It goes beyond that and also reaches your customers and potential new business.
It’s a business tool – one that drives revenue and reduces cost.
So where does it belong?
In the boardroom!
If you’d like to know more about our process, please give Mike Beckerleg a call on 0414 209 220 or drop us a line at info@bigadvantage.com.au
*1 CEB Research
*2 LinkedIn Research
*3 Nate Butki
*4 Melcrum Internal Branding report