Level 5 Blog

So you get it. Your brand is more than just advertising aimed at interrupting your target’s day. Your brand applies to your entire business system and you’re ready to change your organization to align with it in order to establish competitive advantage.

So with everything on the table, where do you begin?

Start by asking each member of your management team for his or her opinion about the degree of organizational change required for success. The results, which often reveal disparate perspectives about what’s really involved, provide an unwitting catalyst for creating alignment within the team and in establishing the role your brand should play in your change efforts.

Ask your management team whether they feel the change needed is:

• Operational. Here, individuals believe that what they’re doing is essentially right—they just need to do it better. No change is required to the stated corporate mission, values or strategy; just better implementation of your current brand.
• Strategic. With this approach, a person considers the fundamentals of the organization to be well in hand—but in need of some refocusing. Tweaking your brand’s objectives, strategies and possibly even mission are required. Continue reading »

With its announcement last week that it means to re-position its cheap-and-cheerful image into one with a decidedly more “premium” bent, Hyundai Motor expresses its intention to position itself as the new Apple. Such a powerful ambition, though, has to go more than skin deep.

The South Korean operation took the occasion of the Detroit auto show to unveil a new brand slogan that promotes a concept of exceptional quality while maintaining its established reputation for manufacturing affordable cars. Inside the slogan, “New Thinking. New Possibilities,” Hyundai seeks to duplicate the trick pulled off by such premium products as Apple’s iPhone and the early bird’s best friend that is the Nespresso coffee-making machine. The Veloster is its first entry into what it calls “the new premium segment” that takes root “somewhere between the mass market and luxury segments.”

But a pretty new motto and a flurry of dealership renovation do not a revolution make.  If Hyundai really wants to emulate Apple, we would encourage them to address these below-the-waterline issues in order to up its chances of a successful repositioning:

• Tight control and management of the customer experience Hyundai will need to become fanatical about managing the customer experience from cradle to grave.  This has implications for functions throughout the business, including HR (training, hiring, incentives), client service (online, on phone, in dealership, in car bay) and overall organizational culture. Continue reading »

What would happen if you handed over your primary weapon to your mortal enemies? And let’s say the fallout could have financial, social, structural, political and cultural implications for an entire country?  It’s not a theoretical question—just look at the Oil Sands.

An article in The Calgary Herald a few weeks back pointed out that this is essentially what the Oil Sands have done—ceded control of their brand to the NGOs to let them manage it.

The solution, the article suggested, is for the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP) to take back control of its brand and actively manage it.

Great idea.

Certainly there’s abundant value in establishing a strong brand from a shareholder perspective. As we discussed before, a powerful, well-defined brand—whose presence is an integral part of an organization’s entire business system as opposed to being simply a function of marketing communications—produces tangible benefits to the balance sheet and income statement of each oilsands member.

But exactly how does CAPP create this strong and positive differentiated brand for the oilsands in the context of its business system?

We’d suggest the following: Continue reading »

How much does a logo impact a company, especially if it doesn’t say anything at all? It’s a question Starbucks is poised to explore now that it has unveiled a modification to its mermaid icon that removes its words—including the chief identifier “coffee” and even the corporate “Starbucks” name.

We can only hope that Starbucks has considered its logo from the context of its organizational iceberg. An organization’s logo, after all, is more than just a graphical brain stamp of its existence. It’s a critical part of its overall business system, and should therefore always be a reflection of the operational, as well as marketing, elements of any business.  Many business leaders mistakenly consider their brand and logo as above-the-water entities related only to marketing, and fail to acknowledge the importance of tying them to the operational elements that fall below the waterline – elements that arguably have the largest impact on the brand. It’s an omission that hampers an organization’s ability to unleash its full power.

It’s early days, but we’re encouraged by CEO Howard Schultz’s comments during a webcast last week: “What is really important here is an evolutionary refinement of the logo, which is a mirror image of the strategy.” [emphasis ours] That strategy includes a move to broaden product offerings beyond coffee and to expand into more international markets—both below-the-waterline decisions. We can only hope that Schultz and his team have considered other operational factors as well.

Continue reading »

We talk a lot about the importance of uniting your entire organization’s business system around apromise to the market that guides every decision and action. But how, exactly, do you do that?

One of the most important ways is by ensuring your client service department is fully aligned with your brand, since this department often talks to more current and prospective clients than all other departments combined. Two recent experiences will demonstrate what this means—one to learn from and one to emulate.

Here’s the first experience, this with one of Canada’s national newspapers:

• In attempting to sign up for a full-year subscription (valued at approximately $200), a would-be customer recently learned that the client service department closed at 2pm EST every day.
• After eventually signing up, he experienced delivery problems due to an incorrect address. In a phone call (placed before 2pm) to resolve the problem, the client service department acknowledged that it knew of the issue with the address, thus revealing itself unmotivated to resolve it on its own. Only after the client initiated action was the problem cleared up.
• After placing four phone calls over the course of two weeks, the newspaper client at last received an e-mail receipt.

Continue reading »