The Minder

The creative brief. What a curious way to cap off a brand strategy initiative. You mean you’ve spent months asking yourselves and others who you are, how you are different and what your unique opportunity is in the market, and the ribbon you tie around it is a creative brief to inform the design of the visual identity? What about the 900 other ways in which your brand will be experienced, expressed and supported? What about the Organizational Brief™?

I’ve been working with the idea of the Organizational Brief™ to focus attention on the internal brand agenda. So in the same way that the creative brief will define the mandatories for marketing communications, PR and advertising, the Organizational Brief™ outlines the work that has to go on inside the organization to better align to and support the brand promise. What’s in the OB? Not everything. In my experience wholesale programs that attempt to convert every employee to brand championship waste time and resources and do more to generate “corporate initiative fatigue”. Think of it less as a blanket that you wrap around the organization and more as a planting of trees that will eventually form a thick canopy. The trick is to know where to plant the seeds and how quickly to encourage the spread.

The Organizational Brief™ works with a set of tools that are present in any organization of any size. Corporate mission, core business processes and investment priorities, cultural norms, values and behaviours, partnering strategies, recruiting and retention, compensation, training and development, internal communications, corporate responsibility initiatives, physical space and geography. Please, don’t try to change everything! These are just examples of levers that can be selectively and delicately worked to help employees will better understand and influence how their everyday choices affect the delivery on the brand promise; employees from the Board Chair and CEO to the part-time store clerk and the plant engineer.

The recent surge in interest in “living the brand” has tended to focus on the need to steep the so-called front line employees in the brand. “Turn your customer service staff into brand ambassadors in these five easy steps.” Well if you’re running an energy company whose brand promise is around the minimization of environmental harm and your procurement team buys cheap rivets that allow pipelines to burst, then your issue is not getting the gas station attendants to smile more.

So the challenge is to use the brand strategy to help you pick the sweet spots where the brand lives and dies and to invest heavily in connecting those parts to the brand. This will be different for every organization. It tends to have a lot to do with what the competitive issues are in any given environment. Is your competition more intense in labour markets, capital markets, customer markets; are some parts of the organization further behind than others due to a merger or acquisition or a geographic anomaly; do you have an aggressive growth objective that demands shorter innovation cycles? These kinds of priorities should influence where you invest in your tree-planting and how aggressively you spread change across the organization. You can go big and broad or start small and hope for natural germination. In either case, with the help of an Organizational Brief™, you’ll know what you’re aiming for.

In Part Two, coming soon, I’ll talk about the Experience Brief™: The Blueprint for Creating the Branded Experience.