I'm annoyed by what I see as the black box at the centre of most large-scale corporate brand strategy initiatives. Especially when there are outside advisors involved there always seems to be a dark cloak of mystery over the key points at which the brand idea is developed. Yes, there is interviewing, and reputation surveys and sometimes workshops and the dreaded "validation research" but are these really proxies for true involvement? Can they begin to tap the deep organizational wisdom that exists around competitive position, values and brand opportunity? Can they begin to set the stage for a brand that helps the organization focus on key business-bulilding priorities? Not in my view. We need to move brand strategy out of the wizardry of brand consultancy and into the belly of the organization where it belongs.I'm inspired in this quest by a new generation of business thinkers who understand that there is a dangerous gap between strategy formulation and execution, and that employees need to be more meaningfully engaged in developing strategy, not just executing it. Nilofer Merchant's Air Sandwich (described in The New How) and Dan Pink's plea for automomy in Drive are testaments to the untapped power of high-involvement processes in organizations. How can we apply these insights to brand strategy?
Learning from my clients
Over the years I've developed a brand strategy philosophy of using high-involvement and open dialogue to ensure that the work does not just become litter for the CEO or CMO file cabinet. But I'm not yet where I want to be. I've learned a lot by watching my clients embed the process in the normal information and power flows of their organizations, adapting it to unique cultures and habits. It was incredible to watch 1000 leaders at SunLife connect to the brand in global workshops to explore the business impact of brand; it was a big lesson to watch Laura Matthews at The University of Toronto Scarbourough put the brand question in front of every meeting, every forum, every context she could - to get input and sensitize the organization to the meaning of brand, and it has been a delight to listen to thousands of employees in six langauges at State Street tell us what characteristics they think should define the company in the future in a huge online values exchange fielded to over 20,000 people. How do we take these learnings and use them to revolutionize how corporate brands are built?
The white-box essentials
In my effort to bust open the black box, I now consider it essential that my brand projects include a few key components: hands-on involvement of the executive team, not just at key project milestones but in informal ways that fit with their natural decision making flows; all-employee engagement around values, culture and brand opportunity, preferably in the form of an online, interactive exchange with feedback loops in real time or through follow-up focus groups and town halls; scenario-based brand workshops that don't recommend brand ideas, but rather engage leaders in exploring brand options and their business implications; leaders' brand implementation workshops to help key decision makers use the brand as a filter in day-to-day choice making and; full-on employee engagement around establishing a line-of-sight to the brand promise and their role in delivering it. By engagement I do not mean "communications" but real dialogue about the promise and its meaning - for what products we develop, what channels we serve, what people we hire and how we reward and recongnize people.
The imperative to open up the black box, to make this YOUR brand not mine, is not just a moral tale about how to be a good consultant (although it does have profound ethical implications). It is above all a business issue because a brand strategy that only looks good on paper - and I have seen many that have never made it beyond the report stage - is no help to the business. And any brand idea that was developed behind closed doors will almost certainly be rejected as irrelevant, conceptual and wrong.
Where to next?
So where can I go next to get beyond the black box? One of the first things we need to do is make brand strategy a core competency of leaders, not a sometime thing that oddball consultants do to us every few years. Embed brand in the planning process with the same profile as other aspects of asset management, risk management and scenario planning. Second: establish more opportunities for employees to engage in brand dialogue at a local level in contexts that relate to the business challenges they face every day. How can the brand help employees make choices and decisions, solve problems, break up silos and serve customers better. Whether it's a brand war-room, workshops and town-halls, online collaboration or embedded in training protocols, the brand idea should be ever-present for employees - both to give them business focus and as an inspirational north star to drive engagement.
Brand surely has matured enough as a discipline that we can move it beyond the brand-guru phase into a new role as a core instrument of corporate strategy. As we explore open systems for planning, design and problem solving, let's grapple with making brand formulation more high-involvement, more a part of the tool-kit of business more accessible to the people who make it true, every day.
