As the renowned brand experts David Aaker and Erich Joachimsthaler elucidate, the last two decades mark an imperative shift from classical brand management to brand leadership, as globalization and digitalization accelerate, channel dynamics and brand structures change, and emerging markets and competition become ever complex.
A broader, multi-part—but consistent and holistic—brand identity needs to be collaboratively architectured by internal and external stakeholders. This also marks a shift from transactional to transformational leadership when it comes to managing brands.
The leadership of brand identity needs to be collaboratively architectured by internal and external ... [+]
On-brand Leadership
Laurie McGrath, the chief marketing officer of Tecsys, cites the importance of authenticity in a brand as the keystone for growth. It is both what inspires employees to understand and believe in their product and what resonates with customers as a true reflection of their brand experience.
“Strongly branded companies effortlessly create brand champions within their organizations,” concludes McGrath. “This is impossible to achieve if there is a disconnect between the brand promise and the company’s ethos,” she argues. That’s where brand integrity comes in. The efforts of effective marketing teams will be hampered if the underlying brand is fragile. Marketing leaders, therefore, should regularly reflect on the clarity of their brand message.
In an omnichannel world, that means carrying your brand into the digital space without losing the heart of what that brand stands for. It bleeds into every piece of content that your company puts out, every campaign and advertisement, every spokesperson and ambassador with a touchpoint with your market.
Only once your house is in order with a strong and authentic brand can you build on that footing for market growth. A substantial part of your corporate brand is constructed and delivered by your people from all functions and ranks, and how they experience your company themselves, says Selin Kudret, an assistant professor at Kingston Business School. Employee experience is evidenced to be closely associated with customer experience; therefore, employer brands must go hand in hand with corporate brands, she continues. They stem from the same source—your company’s ethos and values. When your people highly commit to and enact your organizational ethos and values, their own experience will be reflected on the experience they directly or indirectly deliver to your customers through various digital and actual touchpoints.
Your people’s commitment is maximized when they feel that you walk the talk to them; your ethos strikes a chord with what they value in life; and your company provides them with a unique and positively distinctive work experience, she says based on her research into a leading financial brand operating across the globe where she developed her perceived employer brand (PEB) model. The alignment between your corporate and employer brand forms a vital part of your brand integrity; therefore, delivering a consistent, value-resonating, and unique employee experience is key to your brand’s integrity, Kudret concludes.
The Role of Digital Marketing and Content
In a digital world, the consumer controls a brand’s reputation, while the company merely influences it. As we communicate, engage, sell, implement, and service in the name of our brand, we are influencing our market’s perception of us; if these touchpoints are not a consistent reflection of your brand, the cognitive dissonance created in the eye of the consumer will damage your reputation. To avoid this, value creation by the organization must become value co-creation with the consumer, says Lebene Soga, a lecturer and programme director at Henley Business School. This involves keeping the feedback loop open to bring in what your consumers have to say without judgment. In so doing, we extend ownership of the brand beyond the organization and allow it to be owned by those we wish to serve by it, says Soga.
Interlacing your brand across a digital ecosystem must be done judiciously. We are in an era where we can use data and analytics to understand our target market and build more focused communications. Deeply connected to branding, digital content is a potent reflection of your brand and must be harnessed as such; to be meaningful, it needs to be the correct information at the right time in the right place. Like branding, this is a science. To be a respected voice in your industry and assume that leadership position, you need to respect your market by tending to your content and ensuring it is an honest and substantive representation of your brand. This ensures consistency in the message you wish to carry with your brand. Having created value for your market, you need to ensure delivery of that value so that you can ultimately achieve value acceptance. This is where your leveraging of the digital ecosystem plays a role.
To do this, we must understand that it is not a waste of time to be present in the digital space. Brand leadership in the digital era is not one without a brand presence in the digital space. By presence, we mean being actively present. Futurist Alvin Toffler was ahead of his time when he saw a point of convergence between the producer and the consumer. Today, not only is the consumer co-creating their experience with you in the same digital space, they are right there behind the office desk shaping what they want their experience to be. To not actively engage with them is to ignore their voice in your ears while they sit behind your desk. This also means that “we risk excluding the customer if we are so busy with the internal processes that we do not participate in the digital domain of the customer. Our internal busy-ness with all its good intentions can end up suffocating the brand as an unintended consequence,” argues Soga.
In a world of chaos, influential marketing leaders carve out a clear message, an explicit value, and a clear path to a future state. Recent global events have magnified this, but the underlying power of effective branding remains unchanged. It hinges on the co-creation of value with consumers and employees consistent with organizational ethos and multiple stakeholders’ expectations.
