Growth through Journaling: Brand vitality as a competitive edge

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Brand vitality as a competitive edge

A company must be in complete synchrony with its brand values for irreplicable success

Posted online: Saturday, May 12, 2007 at 0000 hours IST

The word ‘vitality’ is associated with exuberant strength or lively vigour. Alternatively, it means the capacity for survival and/or for the continuation of a meaningful existence. Should a brand be vital? The answer is yes. A brand represents one of the most significant ways of differentiation that imparts a lasting competitive advantage.

Consider great brands like Google, Nike or Coca-Cola. What these brands have in common is their consistent personality. Consistency, though, is typical of a ‘machine’, whereas ‘personality’ is a human attribute. So, on the face of it, the desire to achieve a ‘consistent brand personality’ sounds somewhat like an oxymoron.

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Branding is all about humanising products, and lending them a personality. For instance, Mercedes-Benz has a distinct personality. In case of services, the service experience has a personality of its own—this should be evident as soon as one enters a hotel lobby, for example.

It is not easy. Companies struggle incessantly to create a consistent brand experience and personality because while they would like to humanise their offering (which usually is an inherently intangible experience), they would want to ‘mechanise’ their people (without making robots out of them) to deliver consistency. A front office manager of a hotel, for example, is most compelling from the individual customer standpoint only when s/he behaves with the warmth of a human being, but across multiple customers, consistency of delivery is what counts.

Then, there are other touchpoints as well. Many brands use advertising as a primary customer engagement device. The difference between an average brand and a great brand is that the latter not only captures the customer’s imagination with its advertising but also delivers on the communicated promise. Sometimes, in their enthusiasm to create powerful brands, companies focus so hard on external communications that they forget the difference their own staff’s conduct will make to the space in the customer’s heart and mind that the brand will eventually occupy. Although the brand is nurtured and managed by the marketing department, it is represented by the organisation as a whole. That’s why a strong brand requires that each person in the organisation has a complete understanding of, and ability to express, the brand values and all that the brand promises.

For a brand to spring to life and create a bond based on values that are backed up by performance, brand values need to become the invisible thread that runs through the organisation, and in doing so, project a culture of oneness

Hollow promises get exposed even faster by advertising that is noticed more for reasons ranging from cleverness to shock appeal. A brand cannot be built in isolation of a company’s business strategy. It is no exaggeration that a brand is simply an outward manifestation of the strategy. For it to work, all employees have to ‘buy in’. This necessitates the development of a structured approach to ensure full awareness of the organisation’s core values and their relevance to the business and the customer, so that they are able to determine their behaviour in accordance with the strategic orientation.

A key benefit of adopting a brand driven approach to business, both internally and externally, is that it fosters customer loyalty that ultimately translates into increased profitability—and a sustainable competitive advantage. A strong brand identity sustained by its people is the company’s most important asset. This is because other aspects of the business, and especially the tangible assets, are easily replicable by competitors.

The brand, as it exists in inner depths of the human mind, is ‘vital’ to the business if employees ‘live’ the brand values in their daily transactions. In their book, The Power of Cult Branding: How 9 Magnetic Brands Turned Customers into Loyal Followers (and Yours, Too), Matthew Ragas and BJ Bueno say that, “Cult brands aren’t just companies with products or services to sell. To many of their followers, they are living, breathing surrogate family—filled with like-minded individuals. They are a support group that just happens to sell products or services.”

The relationship between employee and customer satisfaction also underlines the value of internal branding. This needs effort. It is important to first ensure alignment of business and brand strategy, create brand advocates ‘within’, empower them, and to cultivate employee participation. It is important to energise the force within by nurturing ‘dialogue’. Such an initiative could potentially turn the entire service organisation into a team of brand advocates. Customers would then be met with clear, consistent and coordinated communications and service.

A ‘vital’ brand is not just another piece of abstract marketing jargon. It is an executive challenge. Making employees actually believe in a brand, its values and its commitment to its values, especially when it comes to the internal functioning of the company, its actual processes, and its actual performance onstage and offstage, takes considerable management effort. A front office manager at a hotel in my example needs to be not just any human being—but one who understands what the brand stands for, why it appeals, believes in its appeal, and then acts to reinforce that belief.

—Mukta Kampllikar designs and delivers executive training programmes in the field of marketing at the Tata Management Training Centre, Pune. These are her personal views