Make sure your brand

isnt making promises

it cant keep.

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A BRAND IS NOTHING MOREOR LESSTHAN PEOPLESperceptions about a product or company. The closer those perceptions areto what the company intends them to be, the stronger the brand. Andbecause strong brands deliver strong top-line growth, customer loyalty, andshareholder value, every company needs to ensure that customers per-ceive its brands in the way the company intends.

Without astute, active management, brand intent will not translate towhat might be called the customer experiencethe thoughts and feel-ings surrounding people as they observe, learn about, purchase, and use acompanys product or service. Many companies, though, do an anemic jobof executing on brand intent, not because they dont care, or dont realizethe value of a strong brand. Rather, most organizations, especially largeones, havent recognized or overcome the subtle barriers that impede theirability to build a strong, on-intent brand.

HOW STRONG BRANDSGET ON INTENTAND STAY THERE

Jennifer Barron

The Magazine for the Corporate StrategistThe Magazine for the Corporate Strategist

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March/April 2003 Volume 24 / Number 2

Reprinted with permission. Copyright 2003 Thomson Media

Common MisstepsMake a promise that you can keep, and then keep it. Itsounds so obvious and so easy. Yet more companies seemto miss this mark than hit it. They fail because they makeone or more common mistakes:

1. Ad campaigns precede or ignore brand intent.Too often, a company building or repositioning a brandskips to redesigning its corporate identity with a new logoand new color scheme, or to introducing an advertisingcampaign with a new tag line, before it articulates brandintent. Or it advertises a brand promise it is unable to ful-fill.

Advertising and corporate identity need to emerge froma brand; they cant define the intent. If an organizationcant or wont live up to the promises it makes to its cus-tomers, advertising cannot make things better. In fact,advertising will only shed a painfully bright light on the gapbetween promise and performance.

The folly of thinking that advertising can build a brandwas shown vividly in 2001, when dot-com companies bidSuper Bowl advertising prices up to record levels. Few ofthe commercials articulated the sponsors brand intent.For the most part, the ads were clever, but they had nopoint, and the next morning, viewers remembered the ads,but not who had sponsored them, or why.

United Air Lines suffered from dissonance between itsadvertising and its brand intent delivery. In 1997 itlaunched its United Rising campaign, committing itselfto candor and improved service. The company couldntdeliver on the advertised promise, and the campaign cre-ated great ill will among employees, who saw managementas essentially telling the traveling public, We know youdont like the way we treat you, while not giving employ-ees the incentives or training to change. The company wasunable to deliver on its intent, and during the sad life ofthe three-year Rising campaign, Uniteds market shareactually dropped.

Burger King found itself in a similar slow-motion deba-cle stemming from its inability to consistently deliver itsadvertised brand promise. Through most of the 1990s, itfamously bounced from ad agency to ad agency, campaignto campaign, slogan to slogan. At one point, Burger Kinglaunched a $70-million campaign, the largest in its histo-ry, with Mr. Potatohead as its icon, that invited the worldto judge it by the taste of its French fries, which its newesttag line promised as being markedly superior to those ofMcDonaldshotter, tastier, crispier. And in the laborato-ries, by all accounts they were. But on Main Street, wherethe lab environment couldnt always be replicated, thefries ended up cold, mushy, and unappealing. Again, an adcampaign made promises the company couldnt meet. Notsurprisingly, Burger Kings sales growth lagged far behindboth McDonalds and Wendys, and in 2001 sales actuallydropped.

Oldsmobile tried to reposition the brand with a memo-rable advertising campaign: Not your fathersOldsmobile. But it was your fathers Oldsmobilenoth-ing much had changed about the car, the dealers, or theserviceand in 2000 General Motors announced that itwould retire the oldest brand in U.S. automotive history.

Each of these advertising-based brand strategies failedfor a single reason: They paid scant attention to consis-tently delivering unique experiences that customers value,and focused on the communications campaigns instead.

2. Responsibility for the brand is isolated in themarketing department. Ask an audience of businesspeople where it thinks responsibility for the success of thebrand lies, and the answer, overwhelmingly and consis-tently, is marketing. Yet marketing has little influence oversales, customer service, product development, order ful-fillment, billing, or other important points of interactionwith the customer. Meanwhile, somewhere else in theorganization are customer-facing managers and employeeswho have limited authority to make organizationalchanges. They may even lack access to channels throughwhich to propose those changes.

Launching an ad campaign or developing a new visualidentity can, and perhaps should, be kept inside the mar-keting silo. The mistake is to define those activities as thesum of building the brand.

3. Efficiency and productivity goals trump thecustomer experience. Efficiency and productivity mea-sures are unarguably important, but when they outrankcustomer-centered measures, trouble looms. Perhapsnowhere is this more evident than in the world of call cen-ters. Typically, call center managers and staff are evaluat-ed on the number of calls they handle, call length, andoperator utilization. The goals are to minimize the numberof calls that require a live agent and, for calls that dorequire live intervention, to minimize the time spent oneach. (Some call centers, notably in the computer tech-nology world, do not offer the option to reach a live rep atall, and seek to divert customers to pay-per-incident trou-bleshooting.) The better the call center performs againstthese goals, the lower the companys telecom and person-nel expense. But at what cost to the customer experience?At what cost to the brand? No one argues against a filter-ing process that distinguishes between serious issues andfrivolous ones. Yet a company that focuses single-minded-ly on volume and speed can cost-reduce itself out of astrong brand position.

4. Key insights about customers are outdated.Most companies arent geared up to replenish the knowl-edge necessary to create a durable, competition-beatingbrand. They do have demographic data about customers,of course, as well as brand equity tracking and usage andattitude surveys. But those are statisticslagging indica-tors. They seldom signal the need to shift direction or indi-

cate a course of action that would strengthen the compa-nys relationship with customers.

Synchronizing the Brand Intent, the Organization, and theCustomer ExperienceBy constructing a solid internal foundation before reachingout to customers with a clearly articulated brand intent,companies can deliver the promised customer experienceand avoid the common missteps. Building the internalfoundation is, in fact, as challenging as defining brandintent, because it requires employees to change longtimehabits, not to mention their way of thinking about theirrelationships with colleagues, the product they make or theservice they sell, and even the company for which theywork. But when brand intent, the organization, and thecustomer experience are synchronized, the result will bean enduring, on-intent brand.

The blueprint for building the internal foundation isbased on four fundamentals:

Create the brand intent Align the organization Deliver the customer experience Measure and refine1. Create the Brand Intent. A winning brand intent

maximizes the area of intersection between what a compa-ny can do well and distinctively, on the one hand, and whatits target customers want or need, on the other. The idealintent is compelling in its appeal to both the logical andemotional sides of the customer (BMW, a superbly builtcar thats fun to drive). It gives the customer a sense of howit will make his or her world a little bit better, even if forjust a while (Coca-Cola). It differentiates the company andproduct from the competition by emphasizing enduringstrengths that are hard to match (NTT DoCoMo). It isaspirational for employees and helps guide them in howthey approach their jobs (Apple). And for customers andemployees alike, it rings true.

Be authentic to the company culture. The best brands areindistinguishable from the companys culture. In the 1960sand early 1970s, IBM didnt have explicit brand manage-ment. The brand was simply what we do, and whatemployees did was consistent because of the strong cul-ture. At Wal-Mart, the formula is simple: Managementrespects the workers, and workers respect customers, qual-ity is good, and the prices are the best.

Apple clearly articulated its brand intent and adhered toit faithfully over two decades, from the launch of theMacintosh in 1984 (Super Bowl advertising done exactlyright) through the recent Think Different campaign.Apple never abandoned its vision for the brand, even indire times, and as a result, even the computer-illiterateknow Apple stands for: A customer experience that isntmatched anywhere else in the world of technology, arisingfrom a combination of innovation, product quality, and

stylish design, together with a certain genteel rebellious-ness and in-Microsofts-face impudence.

Learn Why Customers Behave as They Do. Brands cen-ter on customers as much as they center on companies andproducts. Why do people prefer one overnight delivery ser-vice over another? How do they make choices among carsin a particular category, or between first-class carriers fromLondon to New York? Peoples personalities and views ofthemselves are as important in their buying decisions asproduct attributes.

Knowing how and why customers make decisionsnotonly the choices they make, but also the motivations, theneeds, the hopes, and the self-image that underlies thosechoicesis essential. A strong brand will respond to thosemotivations rather than seek to shape peoples motivationsto fit the brand. Customer-centered companies embedcustomer insights into the brand fabric. They paint anaccurate portrait of the whole customer and learn what ishappening at all the points of interaction between cus-tomers and the brand. They rely not just on occasional sur-veys and focus groups, but reach out to solicit customerinput on an ongoing basis, by wandering the floors of man-ufacturing plants, call centers, and stores, by listening tocustomer complaints, and by encouraging customers andemployees to provide feedback.

Most companies lack that level of insight, and few striveto achieve it. Home Depot, Audi, and Target excel at gain-ing customer insight, to name just a few. Target appealsmainly to the needs of middle-class moms, but it also hasa team of trend-spotters whose mission is to find out whatsgoing to be hot this season. With Gap and Abercrombie &Fitch losing some of their cachet among younger con-sumers, Target has begun to try to attract the coveted GenY customer by introducing private-label fashions that arewell-made, cool, and reasonably priced.

2. Align the Whole Organization. Armed with aclear brand intent and an equally clear understanding ofhow and why customers make choices among options inthe brands category, a company is ready to fashion themeans to bring the two together. Five principles apply:

Involve Everyone Whose Job Can Affect the CustomerExperience. The chief executive cannot tell marketing to goforth and build a brand. Brand stewardship is a responsi-bility of the entire organization. Delivering an on-intentcustomer experience is always a company-wide endeavor.It requires continuous coordination and the regularinvolvement of executives who have pan-functionalauthority. In this respect, brand-building is no differentfrom any other change management program.

Brand councils are a highly successful mechanism formanaging brands strategically. Typically, these councilsinclude high-level representation from every importantarea, not just marketing. The councils identify issues, ana-lyze options, and make smart decisions more efficiently

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than functional units can by themselves. They also havethe authority to implement across functional silos. Equallyimportant, the council, merely by virtue of its existenceand the seniority of its membership, demonstrates thecompanys seriousness toward its brands.

Educate and Train Internal Constituencies to KeepEmployees On-Intent. Employees need to accept andunderstand the importance of brand, their role in deliver-ing the brand intent, and the process for turning intent intoa positive customer experience. Research has shown thatemployees who believe in a brand are more loyal and moremotivated.

The mechanics of communicating with employees, ofeducating, coaching, training, and retraining, will alwaysbe company-specific. But no matter how the employeeprograms are designed, the effort has to be sustainedaworkshop or two or an occasional newsletter will notaccomplish the job.

Management can apply the principles of superior cus-tomer marketing internallysegmenting the internal audi-ence, designing customized internal messages and media,encouraging interactivity, sustaining the campaign, andmeasuring impact. Increasingly, corporate intranets play acentral role in transmitting and reinforcing the brandintent. Ketchum Public Relations, an Omnicom unit, isrelying on its intranet, called myKGN, to instill a newbrand positionpassion and precision in communica-tionthroughout the firm. MyKGN ensures consistencyin values, procedures, and practices and continually rein-forces the intent through its content and imagery.

One company in a resources-related industry reposi-tioned its brand to emphasize financial savviness. Thatmeant recruiting differently; the company also launched ajob-rotation program under which some of the top peoplein each functional area spent up to a year in financial typepositions. Those actions and others like them not only bol-stered the organizations financial competency but alsosent a powerful signal throughout the company about thenew brand intent.

Use Rewards and Incentives to Reinforce the BrandIntent. At Southwest Airlines, employees who excel intheir jobs are recognized not with cash but with a profileon the companys Web site (global recognition) or, betteryet, a weeks ownership of the best parking space in the lot.You will be surprised, one Southwest executive said, athow much people, employees, and customers are willingto give when they feel loved and acknowledged. Othercompanies go against prevailing practices in their indus-tries by giving entry-level employees benefits such ashealth insurance and stock. As a result, employees devel-op a remarkable commitment to the company and to itsbrand intent.

Nordstroms brand promises that no customer shouldleave the department store without being satisfied and

happy. The company identified employees as the mostimportant asset in delivering on that promise. SoNordstrom adopted Rule Number One: Use your goodjudgment in all situations. There will be no additionalrules. Nordstrom treats its employees as partners in theenterprise. Daily, before each store opens, sales associatesare greeted by the store manager, who celebrates someonewho went an extra mile the day before to exceed customerexpectations. As the legendary loyalty of Nordstrom cus-tomers shows, the companys emphasis on a well-motivat-ed, well-informed employee is the key to fulfilling its brandintent.

Weave Brand Concerns Throughout Business PlanningProcesses. Most companies have a core planning forum,where major decisions are made about budgets, invest-ment plans, and the like. The brand program has to beincorporated into those top-level planning sessions.Central to Ketchums planning process, for instance, isscreening a proposed activity on its relevance to the firmsbrand intent.

Acquisitions, spin-offs, product-development initia-tives, and other decisions that could reshape the characterof the company or its product portfolio have to be consid-ered partly in light of the questions Will this proposalimprove the customers experience in light of the overallbrand intent? How? Unless such a review happens rou-tinely, the concept of an on-intent brand isnt really embed-ded in the business.

3. Deliver the Customer Experience. Its at thispointwhen organizational capabilities, processes, andincentives are securely in placethat a company is set todeliver the promised customer experience. That meansdelivering the customer experience across all contactpoints, every time, all the time.

If the goal is to get customers to think differently abouta brand, they have to experience it differently, and theyhave to notice the difference. For example, if K-Mart weretransported tomorrow into a world where it had an on-intent brand, its customers would exclaim, Hmm, K-Martisnt what I thought it was; its better.

Companies can go about improving the customer expe-rience in any number of ways; there is no single template.In one instance, a business-unit-by-business-unitapproach might be right. In another, the best approachmay be to focus on specific aspects of the customer expe-rience, such as e-commerce or after-sale service, redesign-ing them to make them more consistent with the brandsintent. In another, a company might focus on a particularqualitative association it wants its brand to reflect in cus-tomers eyes (speed, price, variety, simplicity). In yet anoth-er, the company might zero in on a particular customer seg-ment, as Harley-Davidson and Starbucks did.

Here are four strategies that pay off:Eliminate Off-Intent Actions. Continental changed its

incentive programs to encourage employees to adhere tocustomer-service standards and reduce avoidable delays.IBM redesigned its sales process to make it more consis-tent with brand intent. Lord & Taylor, seeking to recaptureits upscale image, eliminated the display tables that clut-tered its aisles and became more selective in the styles itcarries.

Reinforce On-Intent Actions. Early wins are importantsubstantively and symbolicallyamong employees andamong customers. They are usually easiest to achieve bytaking things that work and making them work even better,or shining a brighter light on them.

Add New, High-Leverage On-Intent Actions. At Lord &Taylor, brand-focused action steps ranged from the prosa-ic, like improving the lighting, to the dramatic, such asbringing in new suppliers and narrowing the assortment offashion brands. Virgin Atlantic substantially improved thecustomer experience by outfitting even economy class witheight-channel televisions and Nintendo game sets.

Recover from Off-Intent Actions. Customers are loyal tobrands that consistently create and deliver experiencesthat meet their expectations, but that loyalty is always thebrands to lose. How a company responds to a mistake candetermine whether the customer sours on the product(and tells others why) or whether he or she becomes moreloyal (and tells others why). When an airline or hotelempowers front-line employees to give on-the-spotupgrades to customers who are justly annoyed, or when amail-order catalogue merchant waives handling chargesbecause a shipment is late, both the customer and thecompany win. Its the right thing to do, the cost is notgreat, and the return on that minor investment is almostcertain to be high.

Audi has developed a highly flexible response capabilityby establishing a customer advocacy group whose 100 orso members see themselves as ambassadors of the brand.When an owner has a persistent problem, an advocatetakes on the case, reaching out to the customer, getting tothe cause, pushing for a solution, and following through.Its hard to say whether dealers or owners are the moreenthusiastic fans of Audis advocates.

4. Measure and Refine. However resonant its brandintent and excellent its products, a company cannot suc-ceed over the long haul if it does not know what occurs atthe points of customer interactionwhat happens to cus-tomers, how they are treated, how they perceive they aretreated, what matters to them. A good brand evaluationprogram gives management an early-warning system thatflags problems and opportunities. It continuously gaugesthe extent to which a brand remains on intent and howcustomers motivations change. Like Target, companiesthat invest in listening to customers, not just in formal dia-logue but by watching where theyre heading, are able toestablish a new position ahead of the rest of the market.

The best brand evaluation programs provide real-timeinformation. Tracking surveys and sales growth are laggingindicators. Deterioration in either of those measuresalmost certainly reflects a misalignment of the brand intentthat began months or a year ago. The company with win-ning brand intent generates forward-looking indicators.

Creating the VisionA successful brand always emerges from a set of promis-esthe brand intent, or visionthat the company canactually keep. In keeping its brand promise, the companycreates a distinctive customer experience. Although theattributes of a good brand intent are easy to discern, theresno formula for creating one. Like good taste, some are bornwith it and some acquire it later.

Born with a Vision. In companies whose vision is intheir DNA, the organization and the vision are perfectlyaligned; the organization is the vision. These companiestend to share several attributes:

They emerged under the leadership of visionarieswho created a customer experience not previously seen inthe categoryfor example, Henry Ford and Henry Luce80 years ago; more recently, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak,Richard Branson of Virgin, Sam Walton, Ben and Jerry.

They built organizations with a strong focus on cre-ating a distinctive customer experience.

They recognized that person-to-person interaction,i.e., employee-to-buyer, can have the strongest impact onhow customers perceive the brand. They invested heavilyin equipping their employees to carry out these interac-tions in ways that satisfy customers.

Take Starbucks. It doesnt sell coffee; it sells an experi-ence. The companys chairman and chief global strate-gist, Howard Schultz, saw an opportunity to create aEuropean-style, coffee-centered culture. He made surethat employees were well trained and highly motivated andthat stores were far more appealing than the typical cornerdiner. Shultz built an organization that delivers exactlywhat it promises, and Starbucks grew exponentially over20 years, even without a major foray into advertisinginvesting that money on building the customer experienceinstead.

Virgin operates in myriad disparate businesses. It dis-tributes music and movies; it operates three airlines; it sellsmortgages, soft drinks, wedding dresses, and bicycles.Conventional wisdom would argue against applying a sin-gle brand to all those operations. But in fact they all sharea common brand intent, centered on value and fun, anddeliver on that intent consistently and well. The Virginintent reflects the personality of Richard Branson: anunlikely stew of irreverence and flamboyance and ele-gance. It has more to do with attitude than any functionalbenefit. Look at the difference between Virgin Atlanticsupper-class experience and British Airs first-class product.

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Theyre essentially the same in terms of getting a travelerfrom A to B in X hours. Virgin, however, provides mani-cures and massage and almost any kind of music you canthink of; it takes you to the airport in a limousine. Further,Branson doesnt manage any of Virgins units closely andthey are, if not exactly freewheeling, allowed to take risks.

When Home Depot opened its first store, foundersBernie Marcus and Arthur Blank had a simple vision:warehouse stores, filled with a wider range of productsthan any competitor ever contemplated, catering mainly todo-it-yourselfers but to professional builders as well, andoffering a vast array of home-improvement services, fromhelping design a bathroom to potting an arbor vitae. Twodecades later, the companys stock price exponentially sur-passed that of its competitors in the building-materialsindustry. Today, the vision is intact, and the brand intent isso strongly entrenched that the depot concept has beencopied not only on the same turf (Lowes) but also in retailarenas from soft goods (Bed, Bath and Beyond) to officesupplies (Staples and Office Depot).

Transformed with a Vision. What if a company is notborn with a vision? Can it create the same strong align-ment of brand and company? The answer is that it is pos-sible to transform existing brands and companies by delib-erately developing a brand-based culture and skills set.Sometimes the galvanizing force is a quest to improve busi-ness performance; often it happens when the business is ata difficult crossroads.

Harley-Davidson is a good example: A brand is indis-putably strong when its customers tattoo themselves withits logo. The company was on the brink of bankruptcytwice, and in the early 1980s decided to refocus on mak-ing bikers passionate about the product. The companymassively improved the quality of its product, and it recon-ceived its employee and management incentive programs.Harley chose not to manufacture as many bikes as it mighthave, knowing that at a certain point, quality would beginto suffer. It created the Harley Owners Group (HOGs) toreinforce the brands sense of community. With minimaladvertising, the re-intending of the brand has led toimpressive long-term sales growth and financial perfor-mance: Harleys stock price significantly outperformed theS&P 500 over one-year and three-year periods.

In 2000, oil company British Petroleum was at a criticaljuncture. BP has pulled off three major acquisitions in asmany years, finally giving it the size it needed to become atop player in the oil industry. However, CEO John Brownestrongly believed that, even with its new assets, BP wouldnever reach the top spot unless it made a radical change.BP executives had evaluated the characteristics commonto the worlds top 10 global corporations and found some-thing that BP lacked: a strong corporate brand.

BP developed a new brand positioning with four keyattributes: green, innovative, performance, and progres-sive. It initiated a three-phase campaign to activate thebrand both internally and externally. The first phase was toclearly communicate the new brand to the market withnew advertising, more aggressive PR, and redesigned sta-tions, as well as to strengthen employees sense of identityand common purpose. Phase two focused on trainingemployees to create the knowledge and capability to livethe brand. And the third phase was to actually change thebehavior of employees and the company at large, to deliv-er on-intent customer experiences. This step included anew recognition system that regularly gave awards togroups and individuals who best lived each value.

BPs repositioning generated response outside andinside the company. Consumer brand awareness increasedsignificantly, and in 2001 BP was voted the No. 1European Most Admired Knowledge Enterprise, up fromNo. 4 in 1999. Internal surveys indicate that employeesfelt favorable to the new brand, 80% were aware of thebrand values, and 90% thought the company was going inthe right direction. And BPs stock price has outperformedan index of major integrated oil/gas companies.

Both Harley and BP developed a clear, achievable visionof what they wanted their brands to say; they changed theirculture and their operations to align with the vision; andthey consistently delivered everything the brand promised.Building a brand-based company demands plenty of timeand effortbut its worth it.

The PayoffA brand is on-intent when the promises a company makesand fulfills are the same ones the target customer values.Staying on-intent requires aligning the organization todeliver the customer experience, motivating employees tochange their beliefs and work habits, dismantling organiza-tional walls, and constantly reassessing and refining. Itrequires skill, judgment, intuition, sensitivity, farsighted-ness, patience, and, perhaps, even a little bit of luck.

It is worth the effort? Ask the shareholders of compa-nies like Heineken, Wal-Mart, and Dell Computer thathave invested in developing strong brands and keepingthem on-intenttheir efforts have yielded top-of-categoryshare performance. Or ask the customers themselves,whose loyalty to on-intent brands such as Audi, FedEx,and Wendys have brought those brands to the top of theircategories sales growth.

Jennifer Barron is a partner of Monitor Group and aco-founder of Market2Customer (M2C), the marketingstrategy division of Monitor Group. She may be reachedat jennifer_barron@monitor.com.

Reprinted with permission of Thomson Media

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