Article taken from May 2011 edition of The Marketer; the Journal for the Chartered Institute of Marketing (CIM). Written by Justine East for CIM.

Masterclass: How to communicate your brand’s values

Emblazoning your corporate values across all media is a growing challenge. How can marketers make sure that the left hand knows what the right is doing when it comes to corporate comms, asks Justine East “Your brand is what people say about you when you’re not in the room,” Amazon founder Jeff Bezos famously said. So how can you ensure your corporate communications create the kind of brand image that would make you proud to be a fly on the wall? Brand storytelling “It’s rare to find a company with a genuinely unique selling point,” says Nick Ellis, creative director at branding and design agency Halo Media. “To form a strong brand image and message, organisations need to think hard about anything that differentiates them. Often companies will say their people make them different, but unless they have a truly unusual working culture, that’s unlikely.” Beware of using focus groups to determine what the company should stand for, cautions David Kippen, CEO of Evviva Brands. “Chief marketing officers typically brand from the outside in this way. Then, when the workforce doesn’t respond with appropriate enthusiasm for the brand promise, they work with heads of operations to flog the business into behaving the way they think it should. This, we suspect, is one of the reasons that tenure for CMOs averages about two and a half years. When it doesn’t work, when the workforce doesn’t behave, when the brand doesn’t deliver, they’re out – and off to their next marketing challenge.” Better managed organisations brand their organisation from the inside, says Kippen. “They begin by trying to discover what the organisation is already really good at, what it is proud of, and known for, and then build the brand promise around these existing strengths. “The Lexus brand, for example, is built around ‘the relentless pursuit of perfection’. As one would expect of a Toyota company, there’s a strong emphasis on quality, but this is taken to a whole new level at Lexus. It’s not simply about quality of fit and finish, but about seeking out and delivering on the little details that create as close to a perfect automotive experience as possible. For employees, this means the emphasis is on behaviours aligned to what the company’s already really good at.” Guy Tomlinson, MD at brand marketing consultancy, The Marketing Directors, and CIM member and course director, agrees it’s essential to have staff on board. “I’m dealing with a FTSE 100 company at the moment where the accounts team is, through its ‘don’t care’ attitude, undermining all the crucial brand messages of the company,” he says. “This is so common.” If possible, ensure the brand has its own story, says Craig Harries, head of planning at Farm. “We like this approach because storytelling is a fundamental part of human nature and it allows us to position the brand in human terms, rather than sterile marketing speak.” But don’t let it get too complicated, warns Keith Kirby, CEO of Wham. “Seek out the ‘big, simple, true’ idea – big, so it is unmistakable; simple, so it is as straightforward as possible; and true, so it is based on genuine insight.” Ellis believes he has done just this for his HR services client, RSG. “We used an image of John Wayne to communicate the message that as an established name, RSG is the ‘go-to’ for excellent service, the industry standard. From this base we extended the theme using John Wayne quotes as attention-grabbing web banners – if you have a strong basic message, the creative holds true whatever the medium.” Combat confusion

“A variety of brand images and messages just leads to confusion in the consumer’s mind,” cautions Giles Luckett, digital planner at marketing agency Balloon Dog. “Adapt the offering to play to the media’s strengths – on Facebook you may focus on building your brand’s ‘cool factor’, while in trade publications the quality of goods and innovation is important – but keep the core values the same.” If you’ve already gained understanding and engagement from your people as part of the brand formulation process, this will stand you in good stead, says Paula Murphy, group head of marketing at EC Harris and CIM affiliate member. “Marketing teams can and should drive consistency of presentation in design, language and brand presentation across all media channels and forms of communication. Being able to drive and support the same messages internally as you do externally will double the power and performance of your communications campaigns.” Kippen is currently working with a leading hospitality company that has been lacking consistency in its communications. “We’ve gathered samples of all the materials they produce across their corporate organisations – benefits, communications, talent acquisition, training – and across their brands. Because nobody’s been minding the shop, dozens of fonts, colours, newsletters, flyers, forms and so on exist without anchor to the master brand,” he says. “So together we have developed a corporate brand team with stakeholders from across the organisation that will make decisions informed by us, but driven by internal stakeholders, on the rules of play for each brand element. This team will then serve as a brand advisory board, reviewing all future communications and publications against the criteria established by the group’s audit. This is vital work.” Global consistency HSBC is a great example of brand consistency across the world, believes Rozita Namia, account manager at Dragon Rouge. “By using airports around the world to reinforce ‘The World’s Local Bank’ message, you feel that wherever you’re travelling you’re never far away from the bank, making you feel both at home and part of the wider world. HSBC sometimes translates its strapline to the local language, occasionally with a slight transliteration to make it relevant to the local region.” Indeed, a one-size-fits-all approach no longer cuts the mustard when it comes to different geographies, says Lisa Gregory, founder and CEO of Stormchild Ventures. She adds: “Research everything before communicating to customers. For example, companies must avoid pitfalls such as targeting a consumer with a Christmas related product when in fact that consumer doesn’t celebrate it.” Bringing meaning and resonance to a particular region often comes down to flexibility in brand design, points out Kippen. “We recently completed work for a leading multinational technology brand with a focus on India. Making the brand relevant to Indian engineers required localising the brand and sending the message ‘the most important work in the world happens right here’. Communicating that message required us to introduce an entirely new colour palette to extend the master brand. Next to the brand’s strong blue, red, grey and black tones, we added colours like rose, saffron, turmeric, hummus, marigold and coffee. Suddenly and simply, the brand’s centre of gravity shifted from ‘over there’ to ‘right here’. In turn, that shift signalled in the most tangible way that management was committed to this marketplace for the long term and that the career ladders here were real.” If you produce a newsletter, magazine or intranet, you could include dedicated regional pages, which devote entire sections to specific geographical areas, adds Paul Lewis, creative director at Summersault Communications. “It will generate a much better sense of ownership among the regions,” he says. Digital delivery “Active brand management” is the solution when it comes to getting corporate communications right in the digital sphere, believes Freddie Baveystock, managing consultant at brand and digital business specialists Rufus Leonard. “It embraces our complex, messy media landscape for what it is – a roller-coaster ride with unpredictable highs and lows – and it is founded upon a number of core principles focused on the delivery of recognisable brand attributes,” he explains.

The first of these principles is “learn by experience”. “No one can truly stay on top of the exponential rate of change coursing through our culture,” says Baveystock. “Nor can anyone afford to sit back and wait to see ‘how it all pans out’, or expect existing strategies to remain unchallenged. So brands simply have to roll their sleeves up and get stuck in – experimenting with new ways of doing things to accumulate firsthand experience of how their brand works in these environments.” The results should be regularly reviewed and acted on rather than codified into “best practice”, he says. “We’ve been doing this at Rufus Leonard by opening up our blog to a wide range of staff who can post directly onto it, bypassing the old-fashioned model of editorial control.” The second of Baveystock’s principles is “be innovative”. “Customer perceptions are strongly influenced these days by a brand’s readiness to innovate. Not everyone has to have an app, but if you’re not trying something new each year your brand is standing still or, at worst, stagnating. Our client Lloyds TSB was the first to market in the UK with mobile banking, after which brand consideration increased. Its recent launch of Money Manager, its online banking tool, looks likely to repeat this success – certainly the level of consumer interest has been massive,” he says. The third principle is “keep it real”. “Acknowledge that social media makes it untenable to promote a corporate image or message that is disconnected from what people think and say about your brand,” says Baveystock. “So customer insight needs to be placed at the heart of your brand strategy, and corporate communications need to be rooted in demonstrable or defensible truths about the brand. “Our client FCO Services found that despite being an essential part of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, few of its clients understood the range and diversity of its offer. So we placed the diversity of expertise they offer at the heart of the rebrand we delivered for it.” Legal limitations From March this year, the CAP (Committee of Advertising Practice) Code was extended to the online world, meaning marketers must now ensure that the purpose of the language they use in any marketing material gets to the heart of the intent. All material posted on sites like Facebook or Twitter, as well as your own website, must be treated as marketing collateral with the same careful consideration as direct mails, flyers and print ads. Social media has enabled brands to get much closer to their audiences to gain insight and ideas. Take advantage, says Kippen. “While some organisations are, inexplicably, barely paying attention to online dialogue, others are working hard to improve their listening ability and using the information to shape their customer outreach, products and even their business operations. They are listening with purpose to engage with their customers, critics and fans online.” Computer company Dell has expanded the concept of a community manager – the model for many companies engaged in social media – to that of a social media command centre, says Kippen. “This command centre not only provides a more robust, integrated structure to monitor, analyse and moderate online dialogue, which can be a challenge for organisations with a global profile and thousands of daily mentions, but also helps the team to internalise and respond to the various inputs.” The team at sports drinks maker Gatorade, says Kippen, adjusts online marketing campaigns in real-time, based on analytics and user comments. “Dell’s command centre provides a centralised platform to coordinate the outreach of its online ambassadors, expert authors and customer service activities. Issues and potential emerging PR problems are quickly identified and assessed,” he says. “Various social media platforms and programmes are integrated and managed without attention to traditional silos and functions. In other words, you listen, you learn, you react and you adapt.” It will be interesting to see how many other companies manage their social media activities in the coming months, he says. “My guess is the gap between leader and laggards will only get wider.”

Are you ready to communicate? 1. You’ve been tasked with bringing some consistency to your corporate communications. You see this job as: (a) A waste of time – it takes different messages to reach different audiences. (b) Somewhat worthwhile – you could do with some continuity across the growing number of channels you’re now involved in using. (c) A fantastic opportunity to go back to the drawing board and inject some new life into your brand messages. 2. Your boss has told you the brand message is the remit of marketing alone, so you: (a) Shrug your shoulders – s/he does have a point that branding is your job. (b) Explain that it does involve other teams, such as IT and PR. (c) Stop them in their tracks, insisting that it’s up to the whole business not only to help develop, but also to deliver the brand message. 3. Your job increasingly involves communicating in overseas markets, so you: (a) Deliver the same key messages that you do here – why not? (b) Accept that a one-size-fits-all solution may not be best, but you have other more pressing concerns in a recession. (c) Get reliable, in-market advice from someone who really understands the culture and language in order to balance brand consistency with market relevance. Mostly (a)s Wake up and smell the coffee – brand communication is becoming increasingly complex and if you don’t introduce some new strategies your marketing efforts are doomed. Mostly (b)s You seem to accept your brand’s credibility requires you to make some changes, but there’s no time to waste. Mostly (c)s You recognise that whether corporate communications hit the mark doesn’t have to be a game of chance and you will reap the benefits as a result.