MJ Braide on Brand Strategy

How strong is your corporate brand? Important question. How can you do better than guess at the answer? Well, you could spend six or seven figures on some quant research on reputation (which will do little more than confirm your gut about what people think of you), you can invest in a brand valuation (which will give you a nice round number that isn’t reliable and won’t tell you much about how well your business is performing) or you can put a PR resource on retainer to track the interweb for mentions, sentiment and buzz. Or there is Net Promoter Score, and no doubt myriad other ways to extract your dollars and distract you from what matters.  Even after all this expenditure of time and money, I don’t believe you’ll be any better informed than you are now.

But wait, there’s hope. Wander over to HR and ask them to give you the last three years of your company’s employee engagement data (and if they don’t have employee engagement data tell them to get busy and start collecting it).

My hypothesis – and I am about to launch a research initiative to test it – is that organizations with low employee engagement scores have weak brands and those with high employee engagement scores have strong brands. I have observed this pattern in every organization I have worked with that has had the data available. Naturally I cannot name names as we are talking about confidential data but there are winners and losers.

Ya, sure I get why we matter.

This makes so much sense. Time and time again, engagement surveys tell us that one of the most important motivators for employees is the image, reputation and brand of their organization; followed quickly by whether or not the employee can see the link between what they do and that central purpose.

If your employees don’t get it, I can assure you that your customers won’t, and not just because it means that your value proposition is not clear – but because it means that your employees are not clear on how to deliver the brand. Compare a WestJet to a Delta, a Tim Hortons to a Dunkin, an Apple to a Dell. A Google to a Yahoo.

The natural question follows: if my engagement scores are low, do I focus on fixing that or on building the brand? My belief is that you focus first on getting a winning external proposition, then you work with employees to help them figure out how what they do contributes to its achievement.  Too many organizations get caught up in creating “employment brands” that are remote from their market brands. Big mistake, and usually the source of a lot of ugly confusion.

Get your brand story right and create the line-of-sight that every employee needs to make it happen. And watch both your brand and the engagement of your workforce increase in lock step.

Stay tuned for more as I head out and start testing the hypothesis with my clients and others. And let me know if you’re involved with an organization that would be good to talk to about this.

From Peter C. Newman going on about power games to Naomi Klein dissing brands altogether to Andrea Mandel-Campbell telling us why Mexicans don’t drink Molson beer, we just have not had a lot of optimistic discourse on Canadian brands in the last 40 years. Jeannette Hanna’s and Alan Middleton’s new book Ikonica has changed that. In short, Hanna/Middleton show that brands=values and that Canadian values=good brands and that Canadian companies can win globally on the basis of our own particular brand genius.

Full disclosure: Jeannette is a long-time collaborator of mine, and my sister-in-law, and I was very lucky to have been able to watch and cheer from the sidelines as the ideas in Ikonica took shape. The end product – which I hope is really just the beginning of a national discourse – is a treasure.

The book – structured as a field guide, beautifully designed by Paul Hodgson and written to be read with pleasure – opens by putting Canadian brands into their historical and cultural context. The authors propose an 11-point model of what makes Canadian brands Canadian. I love this part. Communitarian, chameleon-like, sceptical, collaborative….for example. When I think of the great Canadian brands I’ve worked with, these attributes are not just accurate, they are at the heart of what has made them successful.

Then come the stories. 24 interview-based stories – some with the usual suspects (Timmies, WestJet, Roots) – but also some lovely surprises (Dynamic Funds, TIFFG, Environics, McCain Foods). All the stories come across as intimate reflections by these organizations’ leaders about what has motivated them and the values they have built and modelled in order to succeed. These stories are at times funny, moving and silly but always persuasive.

The book will not disappoint practitioners with its very tidy little model that uses Community, Culture and Commerce as filters for values-based brand strategy. It’s just such great and useful stuff.

Ikonica is not going to change what it means to be Canadian. So much of what is in this book feels like us and is reassuringly familiar. What it could change is how we see the potential of our values to change the way the world thinks about brands, about Canada and about our role in shaping modern commerce.

The world is looking for what comes next after the monolithic all-about-me phase of American-style branding. Look no further. The future of the truly global brand starts here.

I am fascinated by the presence of intense contradictions in organizations. It may be possible that the highest performing, most innovative organizations are the ones that can manage the greatest degree of internal paradox, and not spin out of control, or lose their centre. (Read on …)

I was reading Richard Florida’s latest book Who’s Your City? and really liked the chapter on how the Big Five personality types (Openness, Conscientiousness, Extroversion, Agreeableness and Neuroticism) cluster geographically by region and in doing so, create geographic personality-scapes that one should be aware of when choosing a place to live. In other words, if you are a high Agreeable you will eventually feel out of place in a high Neuroticism place. Florida does not say that nice people shouldn’t move to New York, but that is what he means.

The “Big Five” types have been proven through extensive research and testing to be highly accurate descriptors of human personality. Florida says cities have personalities too….that stem from their economic structures and inform and constrain their futures.

So, I asked myself, as someone who thinks about how organizational values and culture drive brand, do organizations have personalities too? And I don’t mean the Aacker-style brand personality profiles that all seem to run together into the same words over and over. Everyone seems to be Innovative, Caring, Bold, Assertive, Rugged. I mean deeper personalities that determine what the organization can and cannot do well. And do these personalities also stem from the organization’s economic structures and inform and constrain their futures (brands) as with cities? (Read on …)