Jennifer Rice

Maslow & Branding: Wrap-Up

In previous posts I've outlined 8 basic human needs in Maslow's Hierarchy and how they relate to branding: Security, Connection, Esteem, Control, Aesthetics,  Cognitive, Self-Actualization and Transcendence. But as Tomas commented, "such a sequential hierarchy of needs doesn't usually happen in our post-scarcity society. Rather, we should see "human needs as an ecosystem where all needs co-exist together for the vast majority of us once our basic subsistence needs are met." Exactly right... and that's the topic of this post.

As you can see from this diagram, I've changed the pyramid to a circle (I've also rephrased a few of the names to be more reader-friendly).  In the center of this example is "Web 2.0", which refers to blogs, forums, wikis, social networking, etc. You can see at a glance what's driving the massive growth of web 2.0 -- almost every core human need is satisfied through these technologies. Blogs, MySpace, epinions.com and Slashdot are all places where different types of people can converge to get their needs met. Whereas web 1.0 only offered a source of learning via one-way communication, Web 2.0 offers entire ecosystems for people to learn, share, grow, achieve, connect, and promote a cause.

I've titled the chart "Employee/Customer Engagement" for you to think about how your brand activates core needs, both internally and externally. Let's take a look at Starbucks as an example. Starbucks environment activates Belonging and Aesthetics. Ordering a half-caf blended vente latte satisfies the need for Control (I get my coffee exactly how I want it), and Ego/Esteem (pride of being an "insider" and knowing the terminology). Ego/Esteem is also stimulated by friendly employees who remember your name and exactly how you like your coffee. Starbucks is a strong brand because they meet numerous core needs simultaneously. I'd be interested to hear from John Moore or Paul  Williams on how this model works internally at Starbucks.

From an employee engagement perspective, you might think about how you can enable employees to learn, grow, achieve, or contribute to a cause of their choice. How can you give them more control over their work environment, or their career path? How can you use Web 2.0 technologies to create an ecosystem for learning, collaborating and recognition?

Everyone talks about change... but basic human needs don't change. By aligning your brand with one primary need -- Apple with Aesthetics, or Starbucks with Belonging -- then that need serves as your anchor and compass to guide business decisions over time. Then establish links with secondary needs to deepen and enrich the brand experience.

 

The Corporate Mirror

Fouro makes a great observation:

You can't change organizations. You can only reveal them to themselves. And they like what they see. Or not.

If they follow the "or not" path, you can offer suggestions as to the alternatives that fit for them, and for what they believe. If they haven't evolved to the point of knowing what they believe, you start there and the rest reveals itself.

It is really that simple. The rest consists of removing spackle and years of self-deception.

The Corporate Self

Over the past several years I've gotten uncomfortable with the word 'brand.' Branding has traditionally been associated with marketing communications: the logo, tag line, visuals and tone of voice. I've been fighting a losing battle in my attempt to broaden the definition of brand to include operations. Talk to a CEO about his brand and he immediately says, "oh, that's a marketing decision." Yet if a company's actions don't match its words, the brand is simply a facade that customers so clearly see through.

So this morning I was surfing through the thesaurus in search of an alternate word without so much baggage. It was pretty enlightening. Compare the associations with the following two words:

Brand: Classification, badge, identification, signature, symbol, emblem, stamp, label
Self: Being, essence, personality, substance, texture, distinctiveness, singularity, essential nature

Brand is associated with external 'label' words, whereas self digs deeper into essence. And essence is the true heart of a brand. Self -- used as a modifier -- also has many other meanings: self-important, self-confident, self-respect, self-control, self-centered, selfish. It's a great reminder that brand (self) can have positive or negative connotations, and that self-perception may be completely different from how others perceive you.

"What is your corporate self?" What a provocative question. It circumvents every pat, rote answer that's been spewed out to customers, employees and investors about the brand. It forces a shift in thinking from externals to essence. It also wipes out the silo mentality and departmental battles. Because the word implies one body. What is in the best interest of the hand, eye or foot is usually in the best interest of the entity. All parts work together for the good of the whole.

As I play around with this idea, I'd love the thoughts of my fellow bloggers!

Organizational DNA

The Strategy+Business' Resilience Report looks at organizational DNA and identifies the causes of failure or success:

“Execution” has become the new watchword in board rooms around the globe, as CEOs and directors watch sound strategies fail at the hands of organizations that cannot or will not effectively implement them. The ability to execute is not something you can recruit or mandate. It is inherent—embedded in the management processes, relationships, measurements, and beliefs that constitute an organization’s DNA. Like the DNA of living organisms, the DNA of living organizations consists of four building blocks, which combine and recombine to express distinct identities, or personalities. These organizational building blocks—decision rights, information, motivators, and structure—largely determine how a firm looks and behaves, internally and externally. Unlike humans and other organisms, however, organizations have the ability to change their DNA by adjusting and adapting these building blocks.

Booz Allen Hamilton has developed a short, online self-assessment tool called the Org DNA Profiler™ that assesses an organization’s relative strength in each of these four areas based on individual employees’ responses to 19 questions. Survey responses are fed through proprietary software to generate one of seven prototypical organizational profiles. In December 2003, more than 4,000 profiles were completed online at www.orgdna.com.

The Org DNA Profiler tool is still live, so hop on and see how your company fares.

By answering a few short questions on your organization’s structure, decision making, motivators, and information processes, you can learn whether your organization is resilient or passive-aggressive, overmanaged or just-in-time, military or outgrown.

Whatever the result, this assessment will help you better understand your organization, and put you on a path to improved performance.

New role of marketing

John Moore at OurHouse expands our blog dialogue on Engaging Employees (original posts here and here) and offers a wonderfully concise definition of marketing's role in the 21st century:

...marketing might think of its task as resolving the conflicting needs and interests of stakeholders. I suggest this because a focus on the word customer risks oversimplifying the real challenge... And as Jennifer's comments suggest, if marketing is limited to pleasing customers, without having either the power or responsibility for squaring that with everyone else at the party, then it is likely to waste resources.

A role like this would certainly redefine marketing's place in the company and (if executed successfully) enable more marketing pros to move up the ladder to C-level positions.

Along these lines, here's the process I went through in my last full-time position:
1. Learned the unmet needs of our customers through qualitative/quantitative research
2. Created a brand position that was meaningful to both customers and employees
3. Translated the brand promise for every customer-facing department within the organization. Presented "this is your customer," here's why we're making this brand promise, and here's what you can do to make it happen. (BTW, employees on the front-line were thrilled to think that they could actually make a difference in building the brand. People like to feel part of something bigger than their own job or department).
4. Worked with customer-facing departments to realize the brand promise. This included simplifying billing statements, rewriting customer service scripts, rewriting billing/collection letters, producing standardized sales presentations, etc.
5. Worked with the agency to translate the brand promise into marcom tactics & Brand ID
6. Published weekly/monthly results of ongoing, online customer survey to each department head, which indicated how well we were delivering on the brand promise and what improvements needed to be made

Unfortunately the product didn't work and the company was sold to a competitor before we could track key brand metrics (customer attraction, customer retention, sales efficiency, etc). So although I have no tangible results to share with you, this was a very effective process flow. For future reference, I'd also add what John mentions in his post: work hand-in-hand with HR to align policies and hiring practices with the brand promise, and measure employee loyalty as well as customer loyalty.

The good news is, no area of the business is exempt from marketing's influence today. It's now up to marketers to step up to the plate and make it happen. Done correctly, marketers shouldn't run into many territorial, departmental roadblocks; simply position yourself as someone who can help them do their jobs better. You're bringing valuable information about customer needs, likes and dislikes. I've found no one inclined to argue with customer data. Ditto for HR: by offering to do an employee survey, you're making yourself a valuable ally to the HR team.

If anyone has experience that's run counter to this, please post a comment. Let's work together to figure out how marketing can best evolve and expand its role within the corporation.

Semantics, continued... Internal Branding

In an email dialogue with Tom at Sandbox Wisdom, we were debating the use of the term "internal branding." Tom posits that internal and external branding is one and the same thing:

The best seem to just "get it." They know that every employee impacts—in some way—how the world encounters their company's promise and personality. And so, they're obsessed with the details. They know that every action helps build or weaken their brand. They're intuitively aware that their company's brand is the strategic differentiation of their promise and personality, AND the inspired actions of a team of people to make it happen. It's the actions of their entire team, which informs choices by customers, employees, investors, et al.

So let me ask again: why the brand distinction? I'm really not sure, so I say . . . "Internal Branding" be damned. Distinctions like that tend to confuse, more than clarify. Divide, rather than unite. Plus, there's really no such thing as an "internal" brand anyway. Just as there's no such thing as "nature" separate from "man." We—you, me, the air, water, trees, et al.—are an inseparable whole. Sure, creating the distinction allows us to better categorize and understand it, but it also allows us to exploit it for our own gain.

I'm so glad for Tom's comment because I hadn't really looked at it this way before. I'm a big proponent of the ecology of business -- the interconnectedness of things -- so I really don't like arbitrary distinctions. They do tend to divide related ideas into distinct little boxes. Easier for us to manage (which is why we like our little boxes) but hide the big picture. Conversely, as Chris Lawer and I debated a few weeks ago about the semantics of customer-centricity vs. buyer-centricity: "Since words are abbreviations for concepts, new concepts require the use of new or different word choices."

So I do believe that the term 'internal branding' has its place. Successful companies don’t need internal branding because they’re already living the brand. The challenge comes when we’re dealing with a company that doesn’t start out with this holistic mindset. They’re not born with a well-defined promise of value… so in a corporate mid-life crisis we (marketers, agencies, brand consultants) must work backwards from identifying customer needs to defining the best brand promise that the company has the capabilities to focus on. The next step is integrating/aligning internally before communicating externally. In this scenario, we need to do ‘internal branding’ (ie… create a new culture/mindset aligned with the newly defined brand promise) before creating a new ad campaign. So…. What do we call that process? Is internal branding the best description? I'm certainly open to ideas.

On a tangental note: I’ve had a strong desire to eliminate the word ‘brand’ altogether because it’s so ambiguous. It’s become the big buzzword but there’s no consensus on the definition. For example, it really bugs me when a design firm says they do branding. No, they do logo design. That’s not branding. But… that’s another rant for another day.

Engaging Employees

John Moore at OurHouse posts an article on lack of employee motivation. A Gallup poll found that 80% of British workers lack any real commitment to their jobs, and there have been similar findings in the US. John comments:

I think (the findings) are a sad measure of the failure of marketing to create genuine engagement for stakeholders in organizations. What hope is there of a brand engaging customers if it can't engage its own workers?

I agree in principle with his comment, but I don't think that marketing has failed to create engagement for its stakeholders. The fact is, marketing is usually not allowed to participate in creating engagement for its stakeholders. The employee stakeholder is in HR's territory, and all too often the HR director/team is busy with paperwork and not with engagement. The other problem is that employee motivation is often at the bottom of management's priority list. A C-level client recently said to me, "Why should we motivate employees to do what they're already paid to do?" Ouch. Employee engagement happens during the brand-building process, when the brand promise is actively infused throughout the corporation by the entire leadership team.

John's right: it's impossible to engage customers without engaging employees first. Passion is infectious. Good brands are viruses. The key today is, how can marketers widen their sphere of influence within organizations to make sure the virus takes hold internally? I know of a few companies who are putting their training function under the Marketing umbrella; that's a good start, but it's usually done to make sure that the sales pitch matches the advertising pitch. I'm becoming fascinated with internal branding, because it's a prerequisite for good external branding. More posts on this topic to come...