brand strategy

Apr 25, 2017

Is it time to put your brand promise to work?

Is technical and functional proficiency enough to sustain and build your brand? Admittedly, it’s vastly important that your elevator maintenance crews not make mistakes. But, ultimately, customers don’t keep choosing you only because you don’t make mistakes. They engage with you because you also offer a positively memorable experience. This experience is what we call the brand promise and it is what separates adequate companies from the true market leaders.

Especially in consumer-facing businesses or B2B enterprises with a heavy service component, your team always has the option of wrapping what you’re selling (and adding value) with your brand promise. But they can only do it if they know what your brand promise is and how important it is to continually promote it.

A brand promise is the foundation of your bond with customers.

Essentially, it is who you are, in addition to what you do. Like any other promise, your brand promise establishes an expectation. Traditionally, training courses prepare your people to deliver on the functional… “We said we’d deliver six dozen by Thursday, and here they are.” Educating your people to become brand ambassadors takes a more strategic and sustained training approach that links your people with your corporate strategic plan and focuses on relationships rather than transactions.

Instilling brand promise across your company takes more than formal training events. It also depends on informal learning through follow-up conversations, team building moments, employee communications and recognition for ambassadorial behaviour with customers.

Developing brand ambassadors should begin during the hiring and on-boarding process. Your recruitment team must build an understanding of the greater strategic goals of your organization from day one. It’s great to have people with diverse skill-sets, backgrounds and personalities on a team, but it’s also important to have values that align with one another and with those of your company. Hiring for ‘fit’ (in addition to credentials) isn’t simple, but it’s the single most important ingredient in keeping your brand promise. When you hire kindred people, the on-boarding and brand indoctrination processes follow much more naturally.

After all, believing in the promise makes it that much easier to keep the promise.

By John Paulo Cardoso

Category: Blog, Icicle, Spyder Works

Tags: brand, brand advocacy, brand promise, brand strategy, customer experience, customer-centric

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Jul 21, 2016

In Touch with the Female Side of Branding

My esteemed business partner, Ken Tencer, is a thought leading advocate of innovation. He recently published an article in the Globe & Mail urging entrepreneurs to get in touch with their feminine side in order “… to remain relevant in this age of empathetic opportunity and emotion-driven entrepreneurship.” I started to wonder if the same advice might also apply to male marketers. Wouldn’t our brands benefit if we listened better, asked for directions more often and acknowledged how much we appreciate our customers?

In his Globe article, Ken quotes psychologist Dan Goleman, author of Emotional Intelligence, who says, “Women tend to be better at emotional empathy than men.” Given that emotional empathy is one of the bedrocks of successful relationships, maybe it really is time for male marketers to get in touch with our feminine sides.

I’ve made the point in the past that building brands has a lot of similarities with tending personal relationships.

I also believe that how much energy you put into it determines how successful you’ll be. Getting in touch with our feminine side may tell us where to invest that energy and how to crystallize our relationship-building priorities. It may also give us some additional insights into what facets of our brand are most appealing to women.

Business Insider had an informative piece by Kate Taylor about Kat Cole, the group president of billion dollar consumer corporation Focus Brands and a bit of a media darling because she used to be a server at Hooters. Focus Brands is the parent company of Cinnabon, Auntie Anne’s, and Moe’s Southwest Grill. Ms. Cole revealed her three top business tips.

1. Be honest, authentic, and confident in what you stand for.

According to Cole, your values and transparency are what differentiates you in the marketplace.

2. Stay incredibly close to the customer.

Cole responds to every single person who tweets at her, as just one small way to stay close to the consumer.

3. Do the right thing for the right reasons.

This golden rule should guide your partnerships, product launches, and funding decisions.

It seems to me that these tips are not only valuable for brand building… but also for life in general.

And while we’re on the subject of gender, should more of our brands intensify their focus on women? Should traditionally male or gender neutral brands make a greater effort to develop relationships with women? As a brand strategist and designer, my concern is not the politics of gender, but rather the purchasing power of gender. And when it comes to making purchasing decisions, it is pretty clear that women are not the weaker sex. They are goliath and their influence has the clout to make or break brands.

Ken originally published this on July 5, 2016 as a Guest Column in The Globe and Mail: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/small-business/sb-managing/why-getting-in-touch-with-your-feminine-side-is-good-for-business/article30675493/

By John Paulo Cardoso

Category: Branding, Spyder Works

Tags: brand expression, brand strategy, customer experience, feminine side, market competition, relationship marketing

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Oct 22, 2015

Your brand should add something to consumers’ lives

The Canadian Business Top 25 Best Brands in Canada list for 2016 says to me that it takes more than size and huge resources to win loyal customers. I admit to being surprised and heartened that brands like Imax, Saputo, Lululemon, Cirque de Soleil and Mountain Equipment Co-op have earned recognition. Movies, cheese, yoga, mountain climbing and the circus… all of them friendly lifestyle brands.

It made me ask myself, ‘What do good brands and good friends have in common?’ They are both honest with you. You can count on both of them to be consistent. They’re available when you need them. They make you believe that you matter. And maybe most significant of all: spending time with them leaves you feeling better for the experience. They add something to your life.

We know, as consumers, that our bank, our gas station, our grocery store and our internet provider are not our friends. They are businesses who are beholden to their investors. But we do have relationships with them and they can strengthen those relationships with us by modelling their ‘behaviour’ on the same qualities we look for in our friends.

As you develop or re-invent your corporate brand, you will be well served by surrounding your customer transactions with honest, reliable, supportive experiences for them. If your customers can count on your brand and trust your brand, the chances are much increased that they will come back and also tell their friends. In the end, a brand relationship is a people relationship forged between your people and your customers. The rules of engagement aren’t really that much different than friendships.

By John Paulo Cardoso

Category: Branding, Spyder Works

Tags: brand advocacy, brand expression, brand strategy, customer engagement, customer experience

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