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By Jennie Grimes, VP of brand and demand marketing, NetApp
Who owns your corporate brand? The marketing department? The executives? The employees?
The answer: [D] All of the above. But that ignores the most important owner: Your customers.
It's often your customers who know what your brand really stands for—and long before you do. There can be a vast difference between who you think you are, and who your customers think you are.
Here's why, and how to fix it...
Start With Data, Not Assumptions
What's the difference between your customers' perception and the brand promise on your office wall?
To find out, ask one simple question:
As a rule of thumb, your unaided brand awareness should roughly match your market share. For example, if I ask you to name a hybrid car, 60% of you will mention a Prius—that's what unaided brand awareness means. You'll do it without me prompting you, because the Toyota Prius has a 60% share of the hybrid-car market.
If your numbers don’t match, don’t launch a multi-million-dollar marketing campaign to "fix" your brand image. Instead, look at the numbers to see what they're really telling you: Your brand message and your market position might not be aligned.
So maybe look at your message before deciding you need more ads?
But This Isn't Easy To Admit
You have to be willing to know when you're wrong about something as fundamental as your brand's position and message.
Marketing people can fall into a false sense of ownership when it comes to their brand. They develop messages and send them out into the world, with the belief that they're received exactly as intended.
But, like the children’s game of Telephone, people aren't always hearing the message.
Positioning Is Not Messaging
An organization’s message around its brand and an organization’s position in the market may seem to be the same thing, but they seldom are.
- Our brand message is what we inform our customers with: It's what we want them to think about us
- Our market position is what our customers actually feel about us
These two are often very different. The former invokes a cognitive process. The latter, an emotional one.
Rich Karlgaard, author of The Soft Edge, refers to these emotional connections as Taste. To accomplish the right taste profile for your brand, Karlgaard says, “True taste kindles a products’ emotional touch points.” Steve Jobs famously said that taste was what Apple had and its competitors didn’t.
This involves customer intimacy, at a level that's anticipatory: Taste is about market-making of customer desires, rather than market-following.
But emotional touch points can be highly subjective. They're like opinions: Everyone has them, but you can't measure them.
So what can you do, if you feel the emotional connection of your brand message and market position aren't properly aligned?
Back To Basics
Step one is to launch a brand study. But don't think you can do this yourself: Instead, invest in professional consulting to give it to you straight.
There's a good chance your brand study will expose a lack of unification somewhere within your organization. It may be between engineering and marketing, or sales and executives, or in any combination.
Different departments within your organization will have created different emotional understandings of the brand. They'll all have wildly-differing opinions on what the message should be—and the customers will have their own.
But once you've identified where the problem is, you next have to decide if it's important enough to fix. The CEB recently published some useful guidelines when thinking about testing and tuning your brand (they're aimed at B2B brands, but they also have plenty of relevance to B2C).
The real win happens when you get every executive team member behind the fix. They must sponsor the changes needed to overcome various teams' differing personal tastes or opinions.
Pitfalls To Avoid
I see one organization after another fail to align position and message because one group or another thinks their opinion, taste or preference is shared by their customers.
It's easy to confuse your own biases with customers'. It's a classic psychological case of projection: A slippery slope and a trap we've all fallen into at some point. It takes discipline to resist.
And it takes courage to admit you're wrong. So take a cold, hard look at the data, without shaping it to fit your own perceptions.
Making The Change
There are three parts to bringing messaging and positioning in line. These are the classic change-management stakeholders:
- Change Sponsors: Executive staff members, who provide authority and support
- Change Agents: Professionals brought in from outside and internal people, who are tasked with driving adoption of new messages
- Change Targets: Those within the organization, who you want to bring around to the new way of thinking (the broader the target group, the greater chance of adoption)
It Isn’t Easy, But It's Incredibly Valuable
Large organizations are typically resistant to change—they're made up of thousands of employees who all think they know what their brand stands for. But smaller organizations can be equally resistant—led by strong founders who "know" what the customer wants. (Yes, there are exceptions to this rule, but we can't all be Steve Jobs.)
Good taste—and truly understanding your customers' perception—will bring a huge competitive advantage. That advantage simply can’t be replicated. It's an essential component of tomorrow's business.
Rich Karlgaard, publisher of Forbes and author of The Soft Edge, has examined a variety of enduring companies and found that they have one thing in common: All of them live their values, which alongside great strategy and execution, allow them to fuel growth and weather hard times. He identifies Trust, Smarts, Teamwork, Taste, and Story as the five variables that make up this “soft edge.” Comment below, and follow @jrgrimes1 (Twitter).
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• Look Who Really Owns Your Brand (Hint: It's Not You) ~ @jrgrimes1
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