Level 5 Blog

Changing the world is no easy feat. Heaven knows we’ve been working to make adjustments to our own little patch of turf for a very long time, and we’re always thrilled by glimpses of others who share our point of view. As in the example of a recent Harvard Business Review article, in which a senior associate at Harvard Business School’s Institute for Strategy and Competitiveness takes aim at those wrongheaded moves managers make that critically derail their companies.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                              It’s the first managerial misstep the author nominates that most profoundly reiterates our mantra (although she’s bang on with the others as well). Too often, she laments, managers confuse marketing with strategy, a deadly generalization that ignores corporate fundamentals with abundance. “What the marketing-only approach misses,” goes the piece, “is that a robust strategy also requires a tailored value chain, a unique configuration of activities that best delivers that kind of value.”

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            Tell us something we don’t know. Apart from her use of “strategy”, where we would use “brand,” it’s the same saw we’ve been leaning on since the lot of us were in senior executive roles on the client side. People see brand and think marketing — full stop. It’s a limiting oversight that will surely trip up any organization bent on market domination. “To establish a competitive advantage, a company must deliver its distinctive value through a distinctive value chain,” the author instructs.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                          True enough. And an organization only identifies that differentiating force by adopting an approach that embeds brand throughout: from top to toe; first contact to last; human resources to accounts payable (to, yes, marketing). Imagine you’ve got your brand covered with marketing efforts alone, and the only thing you’ll change about the world is your company’s downgraded ranking within it.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               Of course, nothing could ever downgrade the holidays and we wish you and yours only the best – see you in the new year!

Time was when a CEO would bristle at being labeled a “brand guy.” Over the years, however, our brand as a business system™ approach has made inroads into changing that outdated stigma and, much to our delight, we’re increasingly discovering that we’re not alone on the mission.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            The merger of CEO and CMO is a point eloquently made in a recent Forbes piece, “Great CEOs Are Always Great CMOs”, in which the author convincingly argues that great CEOs understand that building a stellar company and building a stellar brand are inherently and utterly indivisible pursuits.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            The article submits that “CEOs and CMOs must be two in a box, sharing the responsibility of defining and fulfilling their organizations’ purpose.” A chief executive who provides scant attention to the identification, dissemination and management of his brand, thinking it the nuts-and-bolts business of the marketing department alone, is overlooking a tremendous opportunity to profitably grow the business. 

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                              As we’ve long endorsed, the best CEOs are masters of all things, with the brand — historically assigned to marketing only — most prominent among them. As such, we endorse the notion that a great CEO should be not only a great CMO, but a great CBO (chief brand officer), as well, assuming responsibility for the brand’s implementation throughout the organization, not just in marketing. The brand, if fully leveraged, has the capacity to provide guidance on aligning and managing all aspects of the company to drive profitable growth and excellent CEOs who are not  also brilliant CBOs are only fulfilling a fraction of their responsibilities.

Looking to inspire a kind of religious fervor among consumers for your brand? You couldn’t do much better for reference than to take a page from the good book itself. There, the ancient ingredients for stirring devout followings are laid bare. Adopt some of these doctrines, and your brand can transcend the earthly bonds of a mere brand, and become a way of life.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                In a classic Ad Age article, branding guru Martin Lindstrom wrote about this very subject in which he, having determined by MRI scan that the same regions of Christians’ brains respond to religious symbols as to powerful brands, laid out 10 essential components that brands with fanatical followings share. They were: a sense of belonging, a clear vision, power from the enemy, authenticity, consistency, perfection, symbols, mystery, rituals and sensory appeal.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                          From those commandments — and our experience — we see a common element that is critical to brand (and organizational) success, one that we’ve been proselytizing about for a while now: the element of emotion.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             Each of the identified components are strongly tied to emotion. It’s an aspect of brand that all leaders need to understand since it’s those sentient drivers that enable an organization’s leaders to spread the word among both believers (i.e., employees) and yet-to-be-believers (the market). The importance of understanding the underlying emotional attributes your brand possesses (as our BrandMap™ tool demystifies) cannot be understated in all efforts to convert souls to your particular dogma.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                   Observe these tenets and enjoy newfound devotion to your brand, forever and ever, amen.

Just when you thought you had a handle on everything, another bug in your ear to remind you that you don’t (and that, p.s., you never really did).

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                              As much as the C suite players might like to imagine that they and their team alone manage the message that circulates about their various plays, the reality is that it’s as much the domain of the folks in the stands as in the head office. The point is well described in a recent piece about sports brands  in which the author makes the case for relinquishing control—or at least the perception of control—to those folks in whose hands it most meaningfully rests.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           “The brands that are most comfortable are the brands that allow fans to talk,” the piece points out, quoting Brian Jennings, executive vice-president of marketing for the NHL, speaking at the Sports Media Marketing Summit and Awards in New York in November. “The biggest thing we can do is keep our ear to the ground to our fans, because 99 times out of 100, they’ll drive you to a good place.”

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                It echoes a sentiment we’ve long endorsed: namely, that an organization is best served by understanding the value of an outside-in approach to developing and managing its brand. As we explained in our discussion paper, The Emotional Science Behind Effective Branding, it’s critical to acknowledge “gaps between the true market beliefs and the internal interpretations of the brand.” Only by understanding the brand’s position in the market place (where current and potential consumers reside) versus the market space (where the people responsible for managing the brand every day live) can brand managers recalibrate and refocus their plans such that they better drive revenue and profitability.  Tools that provide perspective into the emotional drivers of the market create alignment between those two sets of beliefs and directly drive your organization forward.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               In other words, don’t deceive yourself into thinking you have all of the answers when you haven’t even asked the market the questions.