7 STEPS TO SUPPORT YOUR BRAND PROMISE
A brand promise must align with corporate behavior
Living the brand promise is more about doing than knowing. Companies are discovering that that:
- brand communication is not enough
- a CEO championed process to drive brand support company-wide has become an essential success factor.
The deeply-held personal beliefs of employees must be tapped in order to build a brand-supportive culture. Culture is best defined as, “a collective set of habits used by a group of people to get things done”. Corporate habits can be transformed into behavior that will get the right things done.
by LSI Publisher Art McNeil
A balanced approach to inspirational-leadership and process-discipline takes brand awareness to the next level—beyond communication to an attitude and behavior altering tool. Organizations that are truly brand focused not only attract customers, they know how to enhance the customer’s total experience and at the same time, maximize shareholder value.
The challenge is to get all departments and every employee committed to consistently supporting the brand promise. Values are capable of much more than declaring expectations and making feel good statements in the annual report—brand supportive cultures use cultural values as powerful performance tools.
Tapping the deeply help personal beliefs of customers, employees, and suppliers, requires an understanding that every human harbors within them, a five year old that will never grow up. This dimension of the human experience houses passion, creativity, and trust—but it can also fill with skepticism, anger, or fear. A meaningful brand promise must shape the attitude and behavior of both customers and employees. The following outlines a stepwise plan to do so.
Seven steps to support the brand promise:
- engage senior management as brand support champions
- inspire the five year old living in every customer and employee
- establish behavioral boundaries that will hold people accountable
- use the brand as your corporate north star
- focus a vision of the preferred future (help employees paint themselves into the picture)
- develop signaling skills—learn to:
- recognize a cultural-value contribution
- maintain the momentum by making brand support everybody’s business
- eliminate brand damaging behavior
- deliver a brand supporting elevator speech
7. engage all levels of the organization by providing:
- ongoing reinforcement of the brand promise
- a means of effectively on-boarding new employees