Level 5 Blog

In our November 11 post, we swooned over the importance of living your brand to secure a competitive advantage, and urged passionately the idea that molding an organization’s culture was a profitable way to go about that. Ergo, the ability of a company to manage its culture is inextricably tied to its ability to score competitive dominance.

A November 18 article in The Financial Post—naming Canada’s Top 10 most admired corporate cultures—endorses this philosophy. In it, the author points out that this year’s winners outperformed the S&P/TSX by an average of 600% in terms of three-year compounded revenue growth—double last year’s.

And so culture spells competitive edge spells success. And what does all of this have to do with brand? Nothing less than everything.

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What can an iceberg teach you about how to run a business?

The image, thanks in no small part to the efforts of James Cameron, is an iconic one: an iceberg, its uppermost tip alone poking above the surface of the water while its great bulk lurks mysteriously beneath, utterly invisible to the naked eye.

It’s also an important symbol for how companies should consider their brand.

Above the water, you find those aspects of your brand that you might previously have imagined  defined it—those things that give obvious cues to your target market about who you are, what you stand for, what makes you different and why anyone should do business with you: packaging, marketing, PR, sales, price, logo, client services work, even your name.

But it’s underneath the waterline where things get interesting. Continue reading »

How do you define competitive advantage? Now ask your colleague the same question. Get the same answer? Probably not. Business-speak is awash in ambiguity, and nowhere more so than in tackling the question of competitive advantage.

According to Michael Porter, the Harvard-sprung authority on all things competitive, “competitive strategy is about being different.” At LEVEL5, we would add that your differences should be crystallized in your brand. Not groundbreaking stuff—but there’s more.

It’s also, Porter elaborates, about “deliberately choosing a different set of activities to deliver a unique mix of value.” And then: “The essence of strategy is in the activities—choosing to perform activities differently or to perform different activities than rivals.”

Aha. Continue reading »

Why can’t General Electric hold a light to United Technologies, even though the former basically invented electricity? Because, say the authors of a recent Branding Strategy Insider blog post, the latter has implemented this laser-focused marketing approach that defines successful firms:

1. Make sense of the context.
2. Find the differentiating idea.
3. Have the credentials.
4. Communicate your difference.

Nice work. But this is only the start of the enlightenment.

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Who should be responsible for your firm’s digital strategy? That, assuming you’re the CEO, would be you. But unless you’re a technical whiz with a digital background, you’ve probably delegated the ordeal to the department that applies the technology—i.e. marketing—or the one that manages and develops it—i.e. IT.

The result?

The folks in your marketing department think your technology guys are morons and your IT chief calls your marketing staff laggards who couldn’t lead a horse to drink.

It’s into this fractious, fractured environment you seek to launch a digital marketing revolution.

An article from cio.com discusses new research from the CMO Council and Accenture exploring the CMO-CIO relationship and the currently troubled part it plays in ushering in the digital marketing age. In spite of an expressed mutual appreciation for its importance to their firm (nearly 80% of marketing and 68% of IT executives call it so), CIOs and CMOs are at odds significant enough to topple the initiative altogether.

Why? Continue reading »