Integrated Branding Blog | Movéo

Building a Brand---It Starts on the Inside

"The essence of branding is promising and delivering." It's a simple, yet incredibly powerful notion. A company or organization makes a promise to its customers. The most successful companies understand that if employees are aligned with the brand strategy, including the promise, they will deliver a consistent expression of the brand to their customers. Powerhouses such as GE, UPS and Apple are prime examples. Each has dedicated itself to helping its employees understand the power of its brand and have reaped the benefits of a consistent brand expression delivered at every touch point.
Conversely, if employees are not living the brand everyday, then growth and success of that organization will be fundamentally impeded. So what does it take to "rally the troops" and ensure that every team member is delivering on the brand promise? In this series of posts, I will identify five essential steps to a successful internal branding effort.
Step 1: Get C-Level Support
A successful brand begins at the C-level. From clearly communicating a vision to being the spokespeople, leadership must be seen as the "driver" of the brand. An integrated campaign that enables leadership to effectively communicate with every employee on an ongoing basis should be developed. This may initially include a series of brand "road shows" in which leadership visits all the facilities/departments to discuss the brand. A road show is one of the most important and effective events for building awareness and commitment to the brand. It also facilitates employee buy-in and understanding of their role in delivering the brand to the marketplace. More on this next time.

Looking to buy or just browsing?

For some time now Yahoo! has been working on an "Intent-Driven Search Engine" called Yahoo! Mindset . The slant, if you will, is this engine allows you to sort search results for your query based on whether you're shopping or just researching. The idea being that if you're out there researching a topic, you would probably appreciate not being bogged down or distracted by ecom sites. Yahoo! Mindset is still in beta, but now is your chance to "play" with it and even shape its future because Yahoo! is encouraging participation and asking for your feedback hoping to levarage the power of the collective mindset.

CMO: Chief Marketing Officer or Complexity Management Officer

At the iMedia Brand Summit earlier this month, Wenda Harris Millard (formerly Chief Sales Officer at Yahoo! and Executive Vice President of DoubleClick) addressed an audience of senior level marketing executives with her presentation titled "How Did We Get Here?"  Currently serving as President, Media for Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, Ms. Millard presented a perspective on the current condition of the advertising industry.

Quoting Jonah Bloom from a recent article that appeared in AdAge, she suggested that tomorrow's CMO will be renamed Complexity Management Officer. 

At first, I found this merely a clever way of emphasizing her point.  As I thought about it more, however, I realized that this is a very plausible notion, especially given the profound changes taking place in media and marketing today. 

Today's marketers need to consider literally thousands of ways their companies can interact with customers.  And, today more than ever, they need to continually reevaluate their customer & prospect segments. 

The media universe has transformed itself, and it's imperative that marketers stay informed about all the innovations that are emerging and changing the rules of advertising altogether.  And, they're getting increasing pressure to directly associate an ROI with every dollar spent.

According to David Court in an article he published in The McKinsey Quarterly, "With more countries, more customer segments, more media, and more distribution channels, companies and their CMOs are waging a battle with complexity."

That just about says it all. 

Super Bowl Vampires

Tom Brady and Eli Manning aside, the Super Bowl is also a shootout of the creative type, with major brands giving it their best shot. This year did not disappoint and there were some real winners. As is also usually the case, there were spots that fell prey to “vampire creativity,” a phenomenon that occurs when creative is too original, too entertaining or too involving – the story of a commercial can be so mesmerizing that it gets in the way of the brand. A perfect example of this was a third quarter spot that showed a car driving at night, first avoiding the proverbial deer in the headlights and then, in rapid succession, Alice Cooper and Richard Simmons (although the driver thought long and hard about avoiding poor Richard). I laughed out loud during the spot, but talking with someone about it the next day, neither of us could remember whom it was for. Can you? There are other creative spots that ran during the game that did not suffer from vampire creativity. Case in point, the “Battle of the Balloons” ad for Coke. This was the one where Underdog and Stewie parade balloons fight over a balloon bottle of Coke). Loved the spot, and remembered the brand (which was, interestingly, the very object on which the spot’s creative revolved, literally). What made the difference? The spot – it was for Bridgestone tires –featured late brand identification (a second or two at the end of the spot). Sometimes late brand IDs are used to build suspense in hopes of capturing attention. However, in this case, by withholding the brand name until the end we are invited to make our own associations during the spot. The result is that we may – post viewing – associate the spot with another brand (Michelin?), another category (was it an ad for how well the car handled?), or worse yet, make no association at all. Next year we’ll see another round of great and not-so-great Super Bowl advertising. Hopefully Bridgestone’s agency will remember the brand, because if they don’t we won’t.

Form Follows Function–Environmental Branding

As a branding firm, we’re naturally concerned about our physical environment and how it reflects our brand. We transformed an ordinary conference room into an idea-inspiring space we call “The Mindshare Lounge.” Using a combination of magnetic and chalkboard paints by Benjamin Moore, we maximized the functional use of two walls, creating a useable and inviting atmosphere conducive to creative brainstorming. The furniture, with clean minimal lines, can accommodate a number of people but doesn’t compete for attention—a must, because in this room, the focus is the work. The lighting is dramatic and the use of low metal lockers is appropriate for housing a full library of creative resource materials. Movéo's Mindshare lounge serves as a nice example of a brand-inspired environment; clean, smart, sophisticated and forward-thinking.

Strong Brands In A Weak Economy

Every day the news seems to get more dire.  There’s the sub-prime crisis, dramatic drops in the US stock market, as well as European and Asian markets, and rising oil prices.

The Fed’s recent rate cut failed to have the desired impact.

Every financial prognosticator is throwing around the “R” word.

So what should marketers do in such an unstable environment?  Focus on your brand(s). Companies that have built, or are building, well-focused, differentiated brands will fare much better than others who take short cuts that jeopardize the equity they have created.

In a downturn, companies analyze their tangible assets in an effort to determine where cuts can be made. Unfortunately, many companies are much more aggressive at making cuts with their intangible assets, including their brands.

The result in an accelerated decline in brand equity, which can have ramifications that extend beyond the market recovery.

Informed brand owners view brands as strategic assets, well beyond taglines, logos and campaigns, which can be leveraged in good times and bad. This begins with continuing to use the corporate Vision and Brand Promise as guides. These key components of the BrandCore™ should provide direction for every functional area of the organization, including marketing and marketing communications.

While all of us will continue to watch the markets with great interest, we will also need to keep an eye on our brands and leverage their power to drive business results.

Sports and Brands. What’s the Connection?

I’ve been a big sports fan my entire life.  Growing up in Chicago, I watched the Cubs on WGN, cheered the White Sox from the right field bleachers at Comiskey Park, thrilled at Walter Payton’s sudden bursts, celebrated every one of the Bulls’ championships, and screamed as the Star Spangled Banner reverberated throughout Chicago Stadium minutes before a Blackhawks’ game.

So what makes sports, or more specifically, a team, resonate with fans?  The answer is simple. It’s the brand.  At Movéo, we say a brand is a commodity wrapped in experiences.

A football team is a football team.  A baseball team is a baseball team, etc.  What’s the attraction?
It’s the sum of many, many “experiences”.

Let’s look at a simple example, the New York Yankees. There’s Yankee Stadium, an icon among all sports stadiums, the pinstripes, there’s the Babe, Lou, Mickey, Yogi, the drama with Billy, Mr. October, the Championships, the overbearing owner, and so much more.  Wrap it all together and you have a brand.

The Yankees are arguably one of the most successful brands in baseball, and perhaps in all sports.  The Yankees annual revenues are $277 million and the stated value of the franchise exceeds $1 billion.  Of that amount, Forbes attributes $190 million to “Brand Management”.  George Steinbrenner purchased the team in 1973 for $10 million. That’s right, $10 million.  Not a bad ROI.

Over the years the Yankees have carefully managed their brand.  The same attributes associated with the team 50 years ago, are present today--winning attitude, driven, tradition, drama, and excitement.

The next time you take a seat at a stadium, or turn on the tube to watch your favorite team, think about the brand.

What is it about the team that resonates with you?

What does the Net Promoter Score (NPS) have to do with John Lennon?

We’ll get to that…

I have just returned from the 2008 Net Promoter Score Conference with many thoughts buzzing. It was fascinating to see the breadth and depth of attendees, NPS evangelists and practitioners, from B2B and B2C and B2B/B2C companies, business insurance providers to makers of kids toys, research wonks to CEOs, global Fortune 500 brand names to American middle-market manufacturers…

Speaking of global… companies who have employed NPS around the world put forth an interesting insight. And this finding impacts and informs all global marketing research, customer satisfaction and CRM efforts: Beware of making cross-cultural, international comparisons.

If AON Insurance, Symantec or GE finds they have lower NPS scores in Japan or Germany compared to the rest of the world, this doesn’t necessarily mean these regional units are underperforming. Why? Based on reams of NPS data collected by NPS methodologist Satmetrix (and just the common sense of anyone who has been involved in focus groups or studies conduced internationally), we know that customers in different countries respond differently to uniform NPS and brand perception questions, based on local cultural norms.

The big body of data says that Japanese respondents are less likely to recommend a company than their Chinese counterparts (and they tend to be more reticent in focus group settings). Other Asian respondents are more inclined than Western subjects to offer positive feedback on brands in surveys. Europeans, especially Germans, tend to rate brands they use less favorably than Americans. Latin Americans give he highest Net Promoter Scores globally.

So the big takeaway here: Use NPS to measure your company brand within a region or country, over time, vs. competitors, but not to compare your sales or customer service unit performance by geographic area. Each country and region has its own unique environment which impacts NPS performance. Actions taken based on NPS feedback need to be localized. Also, pitting country against country within a company, score vs. score, ala World Cup soccer, is not the best way to build a powerful, unified global brand, inside and out.

So when developing an NPS strategy around the world… “think globally, act locally”—a famous comment that has been attributed to many including John Lennon, a strong Net Promoter of World Peace, as well as Buckminster Fuller, renowned visionary, designer, architect, poet, author and inventor. (Remember though that NPS is a proven, effective business tool not a utopian vision).

Author:  Kevin Randall, Director of Brand Strategy & Research

Browser Experience Design

User experience design, AKA UX design is hot topic in web design and rightly so, but I want to take moment to blog a bit about an unsung area that is often overlooked and misunderstood yet critical to UX design--browser experience design. 

For years web developers and web producers have been including browser support requirements in their scope documents and programmers have been pulling their hair out trying to replicate the same experience across all browsers. Many in the web development community, Movéo included, believe in and push for increased compliance with web standards, but unfortunately not all browsers comply with or support these standards. So, try as we might to comply with web standards, developers have to "hack" their code to support multiple browsers. What's most troubling is the fact that MS Internet Explorer, the most widely used browser, is the least compliant. 

So what do we do? The answer, browser experience design. Instead of hacking code in an attempt to deliver the same experience across all browsers, web developers should seek to build a stable and accessible foundation that ensures accessibility across most, if not all, browsers and then increase the richness of the user experience as the browser's compliance to standards increases. Think of it like you might television, you can watch the super bowl on a B&W TV but the experience on a hi-def TV is just way better.

Want to see how your browser stacks up? Take the Acid 2 test below:

First, click here to view a rendering of what a standards compliant browser should output.

Now, click here to test your browser's compliance with standards.

View Acid 2 test screen grabs of how most browsers stack up. Note I.e. 6 and 7. Ugh!

The good news for MS Internet Explorer users and all the programmers who have to "hack" their compliant code for it to "work" on Internet Explorer is that version 8, "scheduled" to release sometime during the first half of 2008, promises to be standards compliant. The bad news, most end-users won't upgrade right away as they are not aware of how bad their browser is and businesses are typically slow to rollout upgrades . But who knows I could be wrong. Here's hoping!

Launching a New Brand; Raise the Curtain!

Much like opening night on Broadway, where excited cast and crew come together after countless rehearsals, a brand's debut must be a perfectly orchestrated event. Certainly, such an undertaking requires strategic thought, careful planning and consideration to timing. A nice example of how appropriate timing, paired with a company’s shift in vision and fueled by C-level involvement, is AT&T’s refresh of an already strong existing global brand. 

A couple years back, AT&T made the decision to unveil their new global brand immediately following a merger with SBC, making them the nation's largest telecommunications company. Their new logo, created by Interbrand, was engineered to represent “telecommunications revitalized for new era of integrated communications and entertainment.” The mark has evolved to symbolize innovation, integrity, quality, reliability and unsurpassed customer care.

"Today's shift to a new brand and a new look symbolizes the strategic transformation under way at the new AT&T. It also reflects the fact that, while our brand has a long and proud heritage, the attributes that bring it to life for our customers are as fresh and new as ever," said Edward E. Whitacre Jr., former chairman and CEO of AT&T Inc.

The revitalized globe adds new life and dimension to one of the world’s most recognizable marks. This new element was made transparent to promote clarity and the company’s vision and the type was made more approachable by shifting it from upper case to lower case. One element that remains unchanged is the dominant use of the color blue.

The new brand was launched at AT&T’s headquarters in San Antonio where then CEO unveiled the new signage and asked employees to embrace the company’s vision.

This initiative was supported by a multimedia advertising and marketing blitz communicating the idea that this company has dedicated itself to making a difference in the lives of their customers. Over the course of several months, the new brand was applied to everything from building and truck signage, stationery, website, uniforms and monthly customer invoices. 

Click the link to see how this logo has evolved over time.

Download logo_evolution_factsheet.pdf