Great Brands have Great Souls

A CEO is sick and tired of being outmaneuvered by the competition and decides to hire a consultant to 'position' and 'brand' his company.

A few months and half a million dollars later, the consultant presents a brand blueprint that would be the strategic way forward. It has everything from brand architecture to rejuvenation tacticals. Impressed, the CEO immediately orders a department to be set up to execute the plan.

A year later, the CEO finds out that while the new brand management department has been working overtime, brand tracking studies show a very different picture. Market perception towards the company and its products have not improved. Customer complaints have not reduced. Competitors are still ahead in most key areas. The only thing to show is a tidied-up CI manual, better relations with the press and a string of disappointing projects. The CEO is at a loss for words.

Tales like this are all too common in Asian companies. The good news is that CEOs generally understand that in as far as markets go, perception is reality and is subject to manipulation for profit. The more up-to-date CEOs take it one step further to appreciate the link between customer experience and strong brands.

The bad news is that many still shrug off the link between brand experience and personnel, preferring the view that it is the process that delivers the experience. Because people come and go, so the wisdom goes, you must avoid situations where people can become the issue.


The Process View

Let me build on this perspective first. A process is basically a series of steps designed to achieve an outcome. Take the pizza business for example. To guarantee delivery in 30 minutes, you'll need a process to describe how to assemble the ingredients, bake, package and send the product within that time window. In this view, the whole system is seen as an assembly line that moves on demand, the assumption being that if all things - and people - are in place, everything will move like clockwork.

That all-important assumption is usually where these companies fail. What can go wrong? Apparently plenty. The pizza may in fact arrive early but the customer can be unnerved by a lot of things - the rude agent that took your phone order, the appearance or attitude of the rider, a product that doesn't live up to expectation, an erroneous bill.

Its no secret that people are very often at the core of brand failures. Companies sometimes make poor hiring decisions. Employees can be demoralized by poor working conditions. Incompetence on either side can be debilitating. Product quality and billing errors are also indicative of management problems. Maybe controls are lax. Maybe the internal systems cannot cater to changing needs. Maybe nobody cares.


The People View

In this perspective, the focus shifts from process to people. It does not discount processes but assumes they are present. It proposes that at the end of the day, it is people that will make or break your brand. How? Through simple acts of process compliance or non-compliance, warmth or rigidity, brilliance or dullness, commitment or detachment on their part, applied at every level of the organization involved in the process of delivering a product or service.

In a view which I call branding from the inside, regardless of how fancy your strategic marketing blueprint may be, if your employees behave inconsistently with your brand values, you can forget about your grandiose branding plans. The stark reality is that you have no control over your brand. It is your customers who do and how they rate your brand depends entirely on the quality of experience you expose them to.

This challenges a common view in Asia where many companies still believe they have full control over their brand destiny. Many continue to believe brand success can be reduced to a simple formula which can be made independent of human factors. Any proposal to change this view tends to draw people into unfamiliar territory where the science and art of management converge. Some will maintain they should not be linked. Others will find change near-impossible in entrenched work cultures. As the confusion continues, employee and customer apathy continues to reign and winning branded experience continues to be elusive.

In The Branded Soul I hypothesize that great brands have great souls. I also hypothesize that there is such a thing as brand karma. I will share my views of the equilibrium of forces that make up the brand universe and how it all seems to fall back to people. I will dissect articles about mindsets and habits, values and cultures in which great brands flourish.