Level 5 Blog

Level5’s hot-off-the-presses white paper, “The Story Behind the New Approach to Winning: Where Brand, Business and Culture Intersect,” offers C-suite dwellers (and their compadres) a fresh perspective on the successful management of an organization. The trick is to identify the point at which your brand, business system and culture intersect, and to pitch a tent precisely there. Much of the wisdom on organizational culture found in the paper is based on work done by John Burdett, founder of Orxestra Inc., and author of Myth, Magic, Mindset: a Template for Organizational Culture Change (2008).

It’s the first leg of this stool that typically gives folks pause, most of them stymied in their efforts to conceive of what “brand” might entail beyond a blow-out advertising campaign or a snappy package redesign.

In fact, the concept of “brand” extends so far beyond these limiting dimensions that it entails nothing less than an organization’s entire business system, the second leg. Your brand is the central purpose and principle around which your company’s entire business system should be united, and it needs to influence the way you run it from top to tail. Continue reading »

In commoditized markets how do you use your brand (i.e. your business system) to create competitive advantage?

This was the question posed last night at a reception hosted by LEVEL5 and The CMO Club.  Senior marketers from a variety of industries – including asset management, pharma and retail banking – attended to share their thoughts and learn from each other, and by the end of the night several ideas had emerged:

To avoid commoditization, you need to take an outside-in point of view

Every company has, somewhere, an aspect to itself that can be differentiated from its competition and that offers value to its market.  The real problem, then, is not the product or service but rather the choice of audience.  By targeting those prospects that value the unique value offered, you move from a highly competitive, broad and commoditized market to a narrow one that values your brand.

Creating a unique customer experience will offset generic products or services

There are few sectors presumed to be more commoditized than credit cards or automobile gas but by enhancing the customer experience, as Mastercard has with its Pay Pass or Esso has with its Speed Pass, you can create an experiential reason for customers to choose your commodity.

Culture change is key to standing out

The extent to which organizations view their product or service as a commodity is a cultural mindset and in order to differentiate and create competitive advantage, a culture shift is necessary. There are many ways this can occur but two were identified:  create purpose for every employee that will drive enhanced behavior (what one participant termed “discretionary effort”) and focus your organization on how you provide your solution, instead of what the solution is.

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When you think of social media, does your mind travel to a key-tapping obligation that is your marketing department’s alone? If so, give your head a shake. You’re missing out on a huge opportunity to contribute to the bottom line of your entire organization.

That was the gist of a Social Media Week presentation we recently gave based on our whitepaper, Forget Social Media: Think Social Profitability, in which we argued that social profitability is the best way to think about how social networking can help your company (we prefer the term “social networking” to “social media” because networking suggests actions to be taken toward a goal, whereas media is just a channel or medium).

Given our perspective that your brand is your business system^TM (i.e., it needs to be embedded into your entire organization, not just marketing), we define social profitability as: the set of technologies, processes, capabilities, behaviours and cultures that relate to social networking but have value only in terms of their positive impact on overall brand health and corporate profitability.

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We are all of us—miners, gunrunners, astronauts—a product of our workaday surroundings. The professional landscape in which we hang our hat has a profound influence on how we conduct ourselves there. Put us in a garden, and we’ll grow flowers. Set us up in ironclad silos, and we’ll behave like solo operators.

The Globe and Mail touched on this phenomenon recently, in an article that lauded an office workplace evolution that’s seeing cubicles go the way of the dodo.

Their abolishment is a critical development to the traditional workspace for the impact it has on the work that goes on within it. Knock down dividing walls and foster collaboration; unfetter lines of sight and provide the means for coworkers to engage in ready association and for innovation to find easy play.

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