My proposition is pretty much where you’re coming from……brand experience has greater impact on brand equity – and so on corporate profitability – than brand image. Marketing functions, focused as they usually are on marcomms, have little impact or influence on brand experience. So how can they be guardians of the brand?

To me, it all seems so a-b-c. I cannot believe (I’m resisting the caps lock button here!) because to me it seems so blindingly obvious! Brand experience is, of course, a cumulation of many things, many customer touchpoints. But these are weighted and the direct customer/company interface – sales rep, telesales caller, checkout girl, delivery van that cuts you up at the traffic lights, whatever – weigh in far heavier. (I just emailed Richard Branson because I’ve been trying to get Virgin Holidays to give me a quote, via web or phone, and they are working their butts off to avoid me! No-one ever calculates the dents in brand value)…….

All the blue chips continue to focus on the marketing, aided and abetted by their marcomms suppliers, most of whom don’t get HR at all. It’s the boiling frog syndrome. They just don’t know it’s over. Marketing was a 20th century invention for an industrial age and for manufacturing-based economies. The classic marketing tools and the classic marketing departments (i.e. most of them) are less and less effective for more and more cash. Your average marketing department now has influence/control over a < 1% of brand experience. Some of the current top global brands were built with little or no marketing (google, starbucks), So what the hell do they really know about their brands?! How many opportunities are corporations missing by working this old, dated paradigm?

Meantime, HR is a function looking for a cause. It knows that its role is becoming increasingly commercially imperative, but for all the ‘strategic HR, business partner’ (don’t’ get me on that one, I hate that phrase!!) HR is a long way from establishing its core value in a business, mainly because the level of commercial consciousness in HR folk is close to zero. They love a good law to wrangle with, a good process to enforce – but are they passionate and knowledgeable about their businesses and their customers? Rarely.

The answer, I think, is to re-define both. Keeping a finger on the consumer pulse is obviously critical. That’s marketing (with a bit of HR, possibly…. I always wonder why the checkout clerk isn’t trained to ask me 5 key questions while he’s scanning my groceries!). HR’s job is to guard the value set. Values will be the defining measure of the 21st century. Values will be the brand.

For many months I’ve been googling to try and find anything that really enhances my thinking. There’s a bit about how marketing and HR should be new best friends; lots about how either function needs to establish their respective seats at the top table. Whenever I talk about HR being new guardian of the brand, I get endless employer branding stuff back in my face. Marketers just want to talk about their brand digitally – for that, read online advertising. Misses the point altogether. Seems my passion has little voice – yours was the first to articulate it at all. How come you’re there?!