Allow Personalized Values To Influence Your Brand Identity

This is Part 4 of an eight-part series featuring thought provoking insights from the Leadership in the Age of Personalization Summit. Here is Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3.

“Put your coat on, I’m cold.”

I’ve used that example before and I’m using it again because it perfectly encapsulates one of the reasons personalization can be so hard: because we tend to project our own feelings and experiences onto others, often without realizing we’re doing it. We’re not necessarily trying to be self-centered in a moment like that. It’s simply hard for us to break out of our own perspective.

That command – “Put your coat on, I’m cold.” – was something a friend of mine heard a mother say to her child as they left a store one Chicago night. I believe something, so you must, too. I think something, so you must, too. I feel something, so you must, too. The organization and brand work this way, so you must, too.

In this series so far I’ve focused largely on finding the balance between standardization and personalization in the way we lead others within our organizations. That is a monumental task in itself, but it’s also slightly easier to think about simply because that discussion revolves around a limited population of people – those within our organizations.

But what about companies with millions of customers around the world? Or a sports team with a fan base across a large, diverse geographical area? In the same way that people expect and crave a way to influence the company as employees – people also have expectations of personalized experience as customers. Even more so, now that tech companies like Amazon and Netflix have made customized recommendations an everyday experience for most of us.

How do we find balance between the identity of our organization’s brand and the identities of all the people who we are trying to attract as buyers and as talent?

That was the subject of Session 3 at the Leadership in the Age of Personalization Summit, where senior leaders from industries spanning healthcare, automotive, finance, consumer packaged goods, retail, technology, apparel and more, gathered to explore the tension we’re all feeling as our society transitions from an age of standardization to our current age of personalization. We discussed building economies of scale around human dignity, how to escape the extremes to achieve balance, and how assimilation destroys individuality and inclusion restores it.

Building relationships with consumers, patients, employees or partners has never been more challenging, with so much competition for their attention. People want to identify with a brand whose products and services give their business or life meaning and significance. But how do you build that kind of relationship with millions of people around the world?

These same challenges apply, whether your audience is global or local.

What Do You Want to Protect?

Jochen Koedijk is Chief Marketing Officer for ADT. He joined ADT in July 2018, and he is leading a radical transformation of a 145-year-old brand by changing the narrative on how the brand communicates with consumers and by bringing a data-driven, but human, approach to improving the consumer journey.

Koedijk has an extensive background working for technology and consumer goods companies, building and leading digital marketing functions for prominent brands such as Amazon and Chewy.com. He also worked in acquisition marketing at video game giant, Electronic Arts in Silicon Valley, where he led EA's in-house global performance marketing operations team as well as EA's Mobile User Acquisition Strategy.

He talked about the challenges and opportunities for nearly a century and a half old brand and taking that brand from being known for security systems to creating an identity around “ubiquitous safety.”

“ADT is a very established company – 145 years in an industry that has been business-as-usual year after year, and now this industry is being massively disrupted by a lot of technology,” said Koedijk. “On the one hand the industry is being disrupted. On the other hand, the brand is associated with trust and safety and peace of mind, which for a marketer are great attributes.”

He said ADT has 98% aided brand awareness and 58% unaided – all great stats.

“However,” he said, “when you then start asking people what does ADT mean for you? What does ADT stand for? People say, ‘it’s my grandma’s security system, it’s bells and sensors.’”

Koedijk said that over the last 10 years, from a product perspective, ADT has innovated enormously: “To the point where we offer home solutions like home security and automation solutions, we integrate with over 100 different independent smart devices, and we go to the customer to ask the customer: what does your house look like, what would you like? And we completely curate a solution to the customer’s needs. But when you ask the general population, they have no association like that.”

So how do you take a brand that’s 145 years old from standardization to personalization? What’s the journey in finding that balance? And how can individual identities influence the brand – from the outside marketplace, but also from the inside with employees?  

Koedijk acknowledged that joining ADT gave him a different perspective. “I’ve always come from the digital industry, selling stuff to people,” he said. “Then I came to ADT and thought, oh wow, this is a company that helps save lives. For me that was quite unique.”

He’s overseeing a brand transformation anchored around building on this identity of what they call “ubiquitous safety.” They are anchoring that transformation around this idea to enter the dialogue with customers and with employees by just asking them one question: “What do you want to protect?”

“The thought behind it is that every single person has unique things they care about,” said Koedijk. “And every single person wants to keep those things safe. Things, ideas, everything. Whatever you want to keep safe, no one has more ways to keep it safe than ADT. Your house, the things you care about in your house, your identity, or your teenage child who just started driving, and you want to make sure they don’t go 90 miles an hour across the 101. We have all of those offerings.”

“They are anchoring that transformation around this idea to enter the dialogue with customers and with employees by just asking them one question: “What do you want to protect?”

For employees, this exercise has helped people connect to the brand and connect with each other in new and deeper ways.  

“We did a gallery of valuables inside ADT,” he said. “Employees contribute symbols of what they want to protect. For example, we have one employee and she’s a veteran. And she had a child that has passed away, and the child had drawings. And so she donated those drawings, because she never wants these drawings from her child who passed away to be caught in a house fire. You end up with these profound stories.”

I asked Koedijk what he thinks it will take to really have that new brand identity take hold.

“I think it ties to the emotional connection, which lives internally and externally,” he said. “Emotional connection that our employees have of a purpose-driven working culture to a purpose-driven organization that helps keep people safe and saves people’s lives. But then, of course, we have about 6 million residential customers. Those are all people who are completely unique. Having that emotional connection with the customer that means the customer feels heard, they feel like we understand them. And that’s hard to do for millions of people. The way to get there is have a more course-grained story of the brand. What do you want to protect? Having that kind of question entering the dialogue immediately.”

“Emotional connection is probably the most important thing,” he said.

Indeed.

A Shared Belief That You Can Pursue More

For another take on building emotional connection, I turn to professional sports – an industry in which emotion abounds.

Ronalee Zarate-Bayani is Chief Marketing Officer for the Los Angeles Rams. In this role, she is responsible for defining and building the Rams brand, serving as a key member in shaping the experiences and value proposition of the new 300-acre Los Angeles Stadium and Entertainment District at Hollywood Park, and creating a modern LA entertainment experience for the next generation of fans.

Prior to joining the Rams, Zarate-Bayani was Head of Global Integrated Marketing Communications and Digital Advancement for the Hershey Company. And before Hershey, she worked in multiple leadership roles at Visa Inc with an emphasis on leveraging consumer insights and digital experiences to create effective consumer marketing campaigns.

I was curious how she was approaching her task of defining and building the Rams brand in a city that the Rams abandoned twice. The Rams were born in LA, moved to Anaheim (though still known as the LA Rams even though, I’m sorry, Anaheim is decidedly not LA). Then they moved to St. Louis, and now they’re back. They left their fan base twice!

So my question to Zarate-Bayani was this: How do you build a brand identity through individual identities, especially these identities of people they disappointed in the past?

“One of the beauties and challenges we’ve had is that we have a fan base from before,” she said. “What’s great about that is when we came home there were those who were disappointed, and there were those that were cheering us on. There was a reason to come back, and in many respects, for our diehards it was a lot about the Prodigal Son returns. It was important for us to make sure that as we built our identity going forward that we captured the essence of who we were, who we are, and then marry that with who we want to be and what we want to represent.”

They’re starting off with a big statement.

“As we think about coming back home, we’re making a big statement in investing in what is well-known to be a $5 billion project in Inglewood,” she said. “We’re not going anywhere, this is home. And when you invest in your home, you do it very thoughtfully, very intentionally, and you do it in a systematic way. So one of the things we did was going deep to identify what it was that made the Rams the Rams, and then more important – what is it that makes LA, LA? What is it that makes Angelenos and binds us together?”

She said they purposefully started with a bit of standardization.

As she put it: “You have to understand the glue that connects everything together. Los Angeles is an amalgamation of diverse cultures, of diverse cities, of different pockets of identities. But the thing that we found that binds everyone together – those that were born here and those who migrated here – is this notion that there’s a greater belief living here, being here, existing here, that you can pursue your dreams and have a greater shot of making it happen. It may be the weather, it may be the diversity, whatever the case may be, there is a sense that you can pursue more. So that’s what we anchored on when thinking about what is the shared value across this very diverse place. Because it’s so important that who we are today and who we manifest ourselves going forward is reflective of those shared values.”

Everyone lives those shared values in their own ways.

“When you think about aligning yourself with a team, there is something about that that you’re prideful because of some sort of identity, whatever that is,” she said. “And that’s very personalized for each individual. And it’s about making sure that that continues to carry through regardless of where we’re playing. But to ensure that there’s a way that we can connect emotionally and from a value system.”

In professional sports, the players themselves can have strong brands – sometimes even stronger than the brand of the team. I asked Zarate-Bayani how she connects the team and their brand to the individual identities of the players. With two forms of individual identities to be considered – the fan base but also the players – how do you temper those players’ occasionally “disruptive” identities? And how much room do you give players to influence the brand?

“I don’t think it’s about tempering,” she said. “It’s about allowing them and enabling them to thrive. We communicate with them often. I think it’s very much about ensuring that those who are most affected are part of the decision-making. We do pulse checks with our players, we do pulse checks with our coaches, and we have fan councils both new and old. So those who were fans 20 years ago as well as new fans who just joined this past year. We’re constantly communicating with those who are affected.”

She gave an example.

“There is a big Latin community here in Los Angeles. A large part of our community celebrates Día de los Muertos, which honors the loved ones who have passed away. We always try to do things with authenticity. So last year we put these Día de los Muertos shirts in the locker rooms of our players with a note explaining what the day is. We didn’t force them to wear it, we didn’t force them to do anything with it. The very next day on their way to the Seattle game half of them wore the shirt. And then within hours we had many people trying to buy a shirt, but we didn’t sell them at the time because at the time we were just sharing the culture and trying to be inclusive of what is happening here in our community.”

She said this year the team participated in the East LA Parade and the team launched its own Mariachi band: Mariachi Rams.

“So now we have a Mariachi band that is just a Rams Mariachi band that plays at all our games and at our Fan Fest. It is the biggest hit at Fan Fest – people have their phones out, they’re so excited. We try to be sensitive to what is real and how do we participate, versus trying to bring us and our ways to the community.”

Ultimately, she said, “We don’t own the brand. The fans do. We shepherd and steward it.”

“We don’t own the brand. The fans do. We shepherd and steward it.”

For both ADT and the Rams, finding ways to let individual identities impact the brand can be powerful. We all have different things we want to keep safe for very personal reasons. In the same way, we might have very personal reasons for being a fan of a particular team. Maybe we had an early life experience that stays with us today – going to the game with mom or dad. That experience gets embedded in our DNA and becomes part of us, and we remain devoted fans long after we’ve moved out of that city and even if the team hasn’t won a title in decades.

Our reasons are very personal, but our fan experiences and team identity are shared.

Both of these stories involve big organizations and massive change. But don’t think that just because you’re not a global company or a professional sports team that the lessons don’t apply.

A few months ago I needed a button, so I called Joann’s Fabrics and the person on the phone greeted me and asked: “How can I inspire you?” A few hours later I walked into the store, and while I was making my way to the buttons someone asked me: “How can I inspire you?”

I thought, wow, that’s consistent.

This person took me to the button section, found exactly what I needed, and made some recommendations. Then the person who rang up my purchase asked me: “Did you have an inspirational experience today, sir?”

You bet I did! For something as seemingly small and simple as a button.

Whether your brand is global or local, involves life-and-death stakes or a button – any transformation requires disruption of a status quo. And any disruption requires us to take a step back to proactively seek the individual identities of others. To discover our shared values but to know that it’s not enough to stop there. We need to make those shared values personal.

We need to realize: We both may have a shared value of being comfortable. But just because I’m cold doesn’t mean you need to put on a coat.

Are you ready to lead in the age of personalization? Click here to take the assessment.

Click here to read Part 5 in the series: Wall Street Alert: Companies Are Not Prepared For What Is About To Hit Them.