The 543 Group

Leadership Goes Hand In Hand With Brand

In the ever increasingly complex world in which we live, where we are now bombarded with brand messages of every type in every medium online and off, many of which we choose to have delivered to our PCs, cell phones and other devices regularly, a key challenge is getting beyond all those messages to understand a company's ability to actually deliver on their promises.  Your customers, our customers, everyone who encounters a touch point with a brand, ultimately decide whether to interact with that brand, engage with it in some manner, perhaps make a purchase, and perhaps tell their friends. 

So, what is it that drives one brand to become and maintain its status as a true market leader?  What keeps the Fed-Ex reputation for fast, reliable delivery alive, or continues the innovation and elegant user interface design coming from Apple, or fuels the Disney organization to continue to delight millions with every form of entertainment?  It's leadership, and not just the CEO of the organization, but a top down reputation enhancement strategy that not only helps companies differentiate themselves from the competition, but enables them to stay prepared to continue to eclipse them.

While personal experience is the best way to learn how much leadership matters, a new book by Dave Ulrich and Norm Smallwood, Leadership Brand: Developing Customer-Focused Leaders to Drive Performance and Build Lasting Value, leverages numerous case studies to illustrate how leading brands have implemented these six core strategies:

1. Build a case for leadership brand. "Leadership helps make strategy happen. Without the right leaders at all levels, an organization can't deliver on its brand promise to customers, its financial promise to investors, its social promises to community stakeholders, or its cultural promise to employees."
2. Create a leadership brand statement. "Leadership brand becomes the process whereby the identity of the external customer translates to the behavior of the internal employee and organization processes. When this connection of the outside and inside is made real (in terms of both rhetoric and action), we call that a statement of leadership brand."
3. Assess leaders against the brand. "When assessments are a part of a thoughtful development process, there is great likelihood that the leadership brand is realized with leaders who have the right stuff...at the right leadership stage...that delivers the right results in the right way."
4. Invest in leadership brand. "Identify and support the training, developmental opportunities and life experiences needed to encourage the specific practices that instill your company's leadership brand in executives and managers throughout the organization."
5. Measure leadership brand investment. "Over the past 15 years, the measurement of leadership effectiveness has been characterized by two divergent approaches. One is the competency approach; the other looks for a concrete return on the training investment."
6. Build leadership brand awareness for key stakeholders. "Build a long-term reputation by communicating the efficacy of your company's leadership brand to interested stakeholders — customers, employees, investors, suppliers."

All of the above reminds one of the old adage that it is not only what you do, but how you do it, that matters.  When it comes to building and maintaining a strong brand that fosters true loyalty and referral and long-term value, it does come down to the people behind the brand, and the leadership demonstrated at all levels.

Better Meetings Made Simple

A long time ago a great business philosopher offered a solution to the endless stream of laborious meetings in which many corporate staffers found themselves.  They said that no meeting shall be convened without an agenda distributed in advance, and all meetings should be conducted with everyone standing.  Legend has it that one major corporation with average meeting lengths of over an hour and a half cut that average to 8 minutes using this method.  Think of the productivity increase, albeit at a cost.

As that approach appears to be a great challenge to implement, here are a few down-to-earth suggestions that may make your meeting life in 2008 a bit more enjoyable:

• Brainstorm, with everyone.  Nothing makes for a better meeting than participants knowing their ideas are welcome, and no idea is bad.  Formalize the exercise with an exercise or use of toys to get everyone's right brain cells working better.
• Encourage laughter.  Set an expectation of something enjoyable in which attendees want to participate, and let everyone know it's OK to laugh as long as meeting objectives are being met.
• Focus.  If the proper tone is set, those present will be fine with postponing e-mail replies and other PDA activity since they will know the meeting is purposeful and their attention is desired.
• That agenda idea?  It's still a good one.  Half of good business is managing expectations, and an agenda tells those invited what to expect as well as why it is important.

It's like the old IBM adage, 'Think.'  A little added planning, and respect for the time and creative thinking of participants, goes a long way to more enjoyable, more productive and, yes, likely shorter, meetings.

Does 2.0 Enhance Your Brand Experience?

I recently was involved in two research efforts that looked at the effectiveness of specific Web 2.0 features various brands include in their online experiences.  While many of these types of content and functionality do not, in my opinion, really fall into the Web 2.0 category, it is worth considering how many of the following might reach and engage prospects and customers better and should perhaps be a part of your own online marketing strategy:

• 360 degree spins and alternate views
• Blogs
• Color swatching/colorizing
• Designing your own 'product' or look and mixing and matching components
• Interactive catalogs
• Mobile commerce
• Monogramming or engraving tools
• Microsites
• Personalized messages embedded in the Website based on embedded cookies
• Product tours - interactive or linear playback
• Quick looks and rollover views or fast zoom in, etc.
• RSS feeds
• Shop by category - type of room, outfit, look, etc.
• Stored personalization through areas like My Account, My Profile, or site favorites
• URL and Widget sharing - also embedded on other sites
• User rankings and ratings and comments and feedback
• User-generated visual content - photos/video/audio/graphics
• Videos - used for demonstration, advertising, merchandising, or other promotion
• Videos based on user remixed content
• Visual filtering and advanced search on product features or actual visual product configurators - often referred to now collectively as RIA or Rich Internet Applications
• Web to print
• Wikis

The key is not that any of the above site enhancements are generally more effective than others, but how effective any in particular may be to reach and engage your visitors to compel them to make a purchase or otherwise take the actions you desire as a result of your investment in online marketing.  And the key to that determination is how you measure their effectiveness.

I have said many times that almost every action online can and should be measured.  And how you measure is just as important, so your business can know as precisely as possible that specific new content or functionality enhancements, or online advertising or search or database efforts, or any online marketing initiative, led to direct increases in purchases, average order size, upsell incidence, site traffic, time spent on site, or other key metrics that provide upper management with the ROI they likely require for all marketing.  Did visitors click through from that e-mail campaign? Did they go to the new rich media demo that was promoted on the home page?  Did they watch all of it and then click to learn more, or leave after ten seconds?  Did they send a referral to their friends, or leave positive feedback on their customer service experience?  These and many like them are the right questions to ask.

When you have a strategy supporting every online brand experience and marketing component, and a plan for measuring, analyzing, and learning from the ROI from each, then you can know what Web 1.0 components are working well, which are not, and what new or Web 2.0 features should be considered.

Curiosity Fuels Innovation

When I was a kid, my big 'thing' to play with was Motorific Slot Cars made by the Ideal Toy Company.  They were battery-powered cars and trucks of all makes and models, and the track was the snap-together variety that included long straight-aways, big curves, test track sections, bridges, and even crash-through barricades.  As I was rather enamored with Motorific cars, I received more for each birthday and at Christmas until it seemed I could fill the entire basement floor with endless configurations.  I never ran out of ways to put things together based on my own curiosity about what was possible.

When developing online marketing strategies, or conducting any brainstorming sessions for your business, it is beneficial to bring that same type of curiosity to the table.  All participants should be encouraged to look at all the 'parts' available to address the issues of the day, and to consider numerous possibilities about how they could be assembled or put together to create something innovative, something differentiated from the competition that is compelling and drives desired action by customers and prospects.

Keep a child-like (not childish) curiosity as you collaborate to build that better mousetrap for your business, and anything is possible.  Cultivate that culture in your business, and your teams will always be looking to build something better.

Avoiding Moral Bankruptcy

As part of our process for developing compelling online marketing and branding strategies, we often go through an exercise that prioritizes the 'Measures of Success' of the organization.  This is a pre-requisite to determination the measures of success and key perfomance indicators for evaluation of online marketing initiatives.

For one recent client, the top measure of success stated was Business Ethics and Integrity.  It was deemed to be more important than sales growth, profitability, product or service quality, customer satisfaction, and a host of other measures.  In fact, the President of the organization stated that business ethics were considered so high on the success measures that, if lacking or sub-par, would prevent any other measures from carrying any weight.  This is hard to argue with, but often it is challenging to see how some companies practice what they preach.

The truth is that ethical standards, high morals, personal integrity - core values in life as well as business - matter a great deal, every day.  Most organizations have stated core values, but it's what they do with them that matters, how they follow them that makes a difference, to their employees, to the clients, and to all those that come in contact with them.

It's not enough to say that the client's interests matter most - that must play itself out in how strategies are developed, contracts are written, and ongoing expectations are managed.  It's not enough to say you cultivate an environment that fosters creativity and new ideas; you have to demonstrate trust and support for your staff so they will deliver the impossible repeatedly, and enjoy it.  And, if the leadership of an organization does not set the right example, it is easy to see how all the other measures of success suffer and become barometers of failure.  It's a terrible spiral for some organizations, especially those too naive, inexperienced, or complacent to see what is happening and take action.

Some go bankrupt through circumstances beyond their control.  One way to at least decrease the odds of it happening to your organization is to make sure your ethical account is never bankrupt.

A Simple Vision

It sounds like a simple idea - Organize and digitize all of the core accumulated wisdom of the world, and place it online for everyone to use, in multiple languages.

That's the aim of the founders of the World Digital Library.  Their specific plan?  To "make available on the Internet, free of charge and in multilingual format, significant primary materials from cultures around the world, including manuscripts, maps, rare books, musical scores, recordings, films, prints, photographs, architectural drawings, and other significant cultural materials. The objectives of the World Digital Library are to promote international and inter-cultural understanding and awareness, provide resources to educators, expand non-English and non-Western content on the Internet, and to contribute to scholarly research."

Although it will begin n late 2008 or early 2009 with only a 'few hundred thousand items,' the plan is to ramp rapidly as more countries and libraries offer up their archives.  Cool.  One more site with great content to counter balance the thousands of forgettable ones.

It's The Interactivity That Matters

As the vast majority of e-mail being sent to consumers falls into the category of spam that is automatically discarded, it is challenging enough to even make it through the clutter and actually be opened.  When an e-mail salvo is fortunate enough to be read, it had better reach and engage the consumer in the first few precious seconds or it is immediately sent to the trash.  Even trusted brands don't garner significant levels of loyalty to click through if the offer is not compelling.

Thus, the more engaging the message title, the initial headline, and the graphics, and better.  But interactivity trumps rich media much of the time.  If the offer is intriguing, the message 'wrapper' does not need to be competing with it.  Case in point - a recent message Kodak sent me.  In the first second, it leverages my curiosity to find out what I have won:

I've got children; it was timed to the first day of school, and it takes a half a second to click through for the pay-off:

I imagine the pay-off would be the same no matter which backpack I chose.  And, in this instance, Kodak is lucky as I have heard about their service and wanted to compare it to Snapfish and Flickr anyway.

A good rule of thumb for your e-mail marketing.  Make it as interactive as possible, and match the pay-off experience to the e-mail message. 

HP On Target

HP's new printer campaign takes their already aggressive marketing to a new level, with new celebrity alliances like singer Gwen Stefani:

HP - What Do You Want To Say?

The campaign is certainly on target in one respect:  it gives consumers more reasons to print something from their computer.  The degree to which it spurs a measurable increase in sales is certainly important.  But, even if it does not, it uses ink, and lots of it.  The ink they are getting in the trade press isn't hurting them either.

All Media Is Social

Industry buzzwords are fascinating, partly because some tend to define a new phenomenon in terms laypeople can understand, but also because some try to do exactly the opposite - describe what might otherwise be considered ordinary or common in some extraordinary way as to render it special.

Such is the case with "Web 2.0" and "social media" - the current buzz phrases given to all things new and different on the Web, whether they involve more than one person at a time or not.  Blogs, mash-ups, viral events, wikis, and such.  Are the ideas really that new?  Or is it just  technology that has made them new to the online world?  I recently advised an agency, in jest, that they begin to claim the 'Web 3.0' space before someone else grabs hold.  They considered it for a while. 

What does 'social media' mean anyway that makes it that new?  The word "social" is derived from the Latin word "socius" meaning to associate or create a bond between people.  Hence, societies are groups living and doing things together, and why all simultaneous group activities online seem to be marked as social.

Since the beginning of advertising and marketing, the goal has been to establish a bond or association with the prospect or customer through messaging and content.  Today many call that creating a brand dialog and, thus, all forms of marketing media, online and off, are intended to create a social relationship with prospects and customers.  Since most such Websites today are associated with some product or service trying to generate that same bond with consumers, it is worth considering the idea that all media is social.

This in no way detracts from the many new and amazing forms of online, dynamic and interactive experiences being put forth for both commerce and amusement, but their goal of making social connections and establishing bonds is not new.  What is groundbreaking, however, is that the tools and technologies now available are actually letting consumers create and influence brands themselves, and the messages those brands are sending out to attract others.  Lest we forget, gaining that kind of insight from consumers, while still engaging them with compelling experiences, is very smart social business.

Building Stakeholder Consensus for Marketing Initiatives

In building any significantly new interactive or online brand experience, part of the challenge to ensure success of the initiative is to gain stakeholder consensus before anything is created.  This is not always easy, and is often overlooked during the strategic planning process. 

If we are conducting formal branding exercise or brand planning sessions, there is usually good participation from those with a significant stake in how their brand is perceived.  However, when it comes to participating in customer-focused research, stakeholders are often nowhere to be found, preferring to review the results in a nice PowerPoint presentation.  However, if you really want them to look past their departmental responsibilities and see how their customers really interact with their products or services, get them to be 'in the room' and observe that interaction first-hand.  There is no substitute.  Third-party findings can always be disputed, but if they see and hear what customers have to say first-hand, reaching consensus on recommended responses usually follows.  Suddenly the needed budgets free up, the value of customer research is no longer questioned and, if you are lucky, a stronger sense of urgency exists to respond with the right solutions.

This isn't brain surgery.  It is, however, creating the proper rationale and atmosphere for stakeholders to see the truth, and then act on it.  For some, those that regularly interact with their customers, results may not be breathtaking.  But for so many executives, who seldom have any direct contact with live customers, the revelations can lead to major shifts in brand marketing and advertising.

There are also many forms of such research.  Assessing all the options and choosing the right method is paramount to make sure that the research really fosters insights on true and unbiased needs, attitudes, and behaviors that lead to predictable purchase behavior.