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August 21, 2013 In Blog, Identity By Carlie Danielson

Secret Sauce As a Brand

Special SauceLast week, I wrote about B2B branding: Your audience may not be comprised of “consumers” per se, but it’s still made up of people. People have preferences, loyalty and affinity for certain brands.

So how do you make sure your brand communicates what’s unique and special about you? In essence, what’s the secret sauce that sets you apart?

Making Your Own Secret Sauce

Many clients hire us because they’re having trouble articulating exactly what it is that makes them who and what they are. A lot of our identity work gets to the heart of this—helping clients tell their stories. Even if you aren’t embarking on an identity project, you can still follow some simple principles:

  1. Realize that you never have nothing: If you aren’t widely known for your secret sauce, that doesn’t mean you don’t have it. It can be difficult to pinpoint, and even harder to communicate (and often it’s easier to engage someone to help you find it—which is why it makes up a lot of the work that we do). But there is something worthwhile that sets you apart, and finding it is worth the effort.
  2. Don’t try to be something you’re not: If what you’re attempting feels inauthentic, it’ll be hard to make a shift that will turn employees (likely your most important audience) into brand ambassadors. Take Marshall, for example. We may not the hippest kids on the block, but we’re thoughtful, strategic and big-picture thinkers. Because we know this, we’re able to focus on what we do best.
  3. Don’t be afraid of aspiration: You may need to consider how well your identity tells a clear and cohesive story about your company. When you set out in a direction that is aspirational and authentic, you’ve turned identity into a strategic priority, not just a communications tool.

You’ve got a secret sauce baked in there somewhere, and it’s an essential component of your identity that you should use to your advantage.

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August 14, 2013 In B2B, Blog By Carlie Danielson

B2B Buyers are People, Too

You might think that in the business-to-business space, brand awareness and loyalty is less important than it is for consumer brands.

VMware tattoo

One of VMware’s customers tattooed the company’s logo on the back of his head, a move that demonstrates a pretty personal commitment.

But some branding experts believe that brands matter even more in B2B than in B2C. Why? Many B2B companies compete in a confusing or fragmented marketplace. Often they’re trying to differentiate highly technical offerings by focusing on functional aspects. It’s a cliché of B2B marketing that it’s all “speeds and feeds,” and that connecting on a more personal level is for the consumer realm.

But initiatives that focus on creating value for B2B brands can have tremendous payoff. A Harvard Business Review study on B2B brands concluded that the corporate brand is responsible for an average 7 percent of stock performance. Depending on your market cap, brand equity can mean hundreds of millions of dollars.

People Make Emotional Decisions

Preference and loyalty decisions are not unemotional, logic-driven events—even in the B2B space. Forrester analyst Laura Ramos, who blogs about areas of concern to CMOs, wrote that many B2B marketers still don’t understand that “B2B is really about the people.”

When I was studying integrated marketing in graduate school, one exercise came up time and again: Answer the question: “Do you have a favorite brand, and why?” Responses were mostly consumer brands, and explanations were always fascinating. Ask yourself about anything “Why do I want this or not want it?” Is it the color? Is it the ingredients? Is it what you feel in your hands? Is it the price? Is it the name? You can apply what you learn even to complex B2B products. A client of ours sells sophisticated scientific instruments and faces a competitor whose arguably inferior product has benefited from significant brand investment, best demonstrated by its sleek-sounding name. Even a marketplace filled with highly logical and analytical thinkers can be swayed by the sense that a cool brand makes the product inherently more desirable.

Some of our B2B clients inspire fanatical loyalty that most consumer brands can’t match. One of VMware’s customers tattooed the company’s logo on the back of his head. A tattoo is a pretty personal commitment, but the product enabled this person to feel like a rockstar in his professional life. Professional decisions are emotional choices. What matters in the end is that you’re offering your customers something that matters to them.

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August 6, 2013 In Blog, New Work By Marshall Strategy

Allegheny Health Network

Allegheny Health NetworkWe are pleased to announce the launch of Allegheny Health Network, a revolutionary model for healthcare delivery developed by our client, Highmark, with brand strategy, naming and identity development by Marshall Strategy.

After acquiring the West Penn Allegheny hospital system, Highmark assembled a patient-centric, progressive new network for delivering affordable, high quality healthcare within western Pennsylvania. Highmark chose to name this new model Allegheny Health Network, to take advantage of existing equity and a tradition for excellence at Allegheny General Hospital. In its new incarnation, we recommended communicating the key attributes of expertise, progressiveness and teamwork.

In partnership with renowned designer Jerry Kuyper, Marshall developed a cohesive brand strategy, naming architecture and visual identity system for Allegheny Health Network. The resulting system is fresh, engaging, and immediately recognizable. The new symbol arches upward, suggesting optimism and a fresh, progressive approach to health and wellness–its green and blue diamonds compose a larger mark that conveys both teamwork and patient-centricity.

When used in combination with a hospital or service name, the symbol, color palette and Allegheny Health Network endorsement create an immediate sense of presence and connectivity, enabling a variety of distributed facilities, services, and physician groups to build awareness for the overall network. The new system will connect seven hospitals, multiple specialized outpatient care centers, and 7,900 professionals from more than 200 physician practices into one of the strongest networks in Pennsylvania.

So far, local business press has been positive. We look forward to seeing how Allegheny Health Network’s new market presence helps transform health care delivery for the better.

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June 5, 2013 In Blog By Ken Pasternak

What If Your Brand Isn’t “Cool” Enough?

cool sunglasses
A large enterprise software client of ours recently decided to make a big bet on a new business direction. People internally were concerned that the new direction would never be successful unless it had a different brand as well—because the corporate brand just isn’t “cool enough.” Is it true that it’s uncool to be big and established? Does the small, “cool” newcomer win every time? And what makes a brand “cool” anyway?

Our opinion—your “cool factor” is not the point. Instead of worrying about being cool enough, established brands should focus on establishing clarity about who they are. Nobody is going to be enthusiastic about something they don’t understand. Large companies often become too complex to be easily understood or related to. Brands that have been acquired, or new “skunkworks” projects, want to get out from under this complexity, just to have a little breathing room.

In our experience, enterprise software customers are more concerned with effectiveness and responsiveness than they are with “coolness.” Is the product easy to use? Is service easily accessible? Does it save time and resources, and increase profitability? In other words, what matters is fulfilling a meaningful promise to customers.

3 Cures for the Uncool
A large organization can easily begin to feel slow, bureaucratic and hard to do business with. If that’s the case, how can you shift perception of your brand? Three things you need to demonstrate are:

• Responsiveness
• Relevance
• A sense of inspiration

Sometimes a new brand initiative with some link to the parent may be appropriate. But don’t underestimate the value and credibility a brand with longevity can lend.

Lessons From Established Brands
A few years ago, we worked with Boeing, a globally known brand founded nearly 100 years ago, to refocus its internal positioning. A number of internal groups, essentially acquired companies, were clinging to their old brands to try to carve a special niche for themselves within giant Boeing. We succeeded in convincing these brands that they were much better together than they were apart. As Boeing, they were the undisputed global leader in aerospace. Individually, no single brand could claim anything near that stature.

Other large companies have managed to maintain clarity about who they are, and to deliver what their customers want in highly responsive and relevant ways. As a result, they retain a cool factor, not because they are the shiny new object, but because they are relevant, responsive and inspirational. Think about Disney, Apple, Nike and Coca-Cola. The latter was recently awarded the first ever CLIO brand icon award. Not bad for a 100+ year-old (not to mention huge) brand!

The bottom line—if you make your brand relevant, responsive, and inspirational, your customers make it cool. As long as you are fulfilling a meaningful promise in a unique way, you have a great start. Just be sure you communicate that promise as well as you deliver it.

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May 30, 2013 In Blog By Philip Durbrow

The ROI of Identity

ROI
Can thinking strategically about brand identity translate into bottom line results? Our experience is that it can. The benefits of identity projects—such as greater employee satisfaction, increased clarity of purpose and a stronger culture—have been shown to correlate with improved corporate performance. Some authors have suggested that these cultural aspects can account for a difference of 20% to 30% in corporate performance.

The ROI of Branding and Corporate Identity

Brand Identity and the Bottom Line
Corporations consider identity projects for a number of reasons:
• They want to increase awareness
• They want to enhance perceptions of their company
• They want to eliminate malaise and have higher-performing teams
• They want to position themselves in a way that’s more compelling for the times they’re living in

But what’s the real reason underpinning all these efforts? Simple. Companies want to increase sales. They want to increase profits, shareholder value and market capitalization. Our clients understand that by working on identity they are actually addressing their bottom line.

So how should you look at the potential ROI of identity work?

How Identity Increases Value
The long-term ROI of communications efforts are hard to quantify. But by clarifying what the company is and what people can expect from it, identity strategy has the potential to engage and motivate employees as well as capture the attention of customers, shareholders and funders.

For example, we might have a client with $10 billion in sales who is currently suffering from numerous symptoms of identity problems: The company isn’t well understood, people aren’t attracted to it, employees aren’t happy and leaders are spending so much time putting out fires they’re not able to set a course for the future.

We go in and fix that. Now everything’s firing on all cylinders and there’s a new excitement about the company, its products and services and its people. This new energy and shared purpose takes the management burden from executives, freeing them to lead. Employees require less management, because the company’s purpose is clearer and what’s required of them is better understood. From a change like that you might expect anywhere from a 1% to 10% increase in sales. But even a one-tenth percentage point increase in sales will be a return of $10 million in added revenues every year.

I believe there’s nowhere else that you can get return like that. Legendary investor Warren Buffett buys companies with strong identities for a reason: They represent a future stream of revenue he can count on. Identity is an investment that pays multiple dividends.

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May 22, 2013 In Blog By Philip Durbrow

3 Ways a Strong Identity Benefits Leaders

chain with red link
Recently I wrote that your organizational identity is not your brand. It’s also not the responsibility of your marketing department.

Identity is a leadership issue that should reach into the highest ranks of the company or institution. The marketing team’s work revolves around identity,  but in the end identity is the leader’s responsibility, because if it’s made clear what the organization stands for, then everything about leading the organization becomes easier.

Identity Is the CEO’s Tool
A CEO can run around in the organization and say, “Why did you do it that way?” or “What’s this about?” or “I don’t like that.” And CEOs can exhaust themselves doing this—especially if they are running global organizations. But when there’s clarity around identity, the organization manages itself more knowledgeably and effectively.

Strong organizational identity:

  1. Clarifies communication: It enables CEOs to clearly convey their vision for the organization to critical audiences, such as employees, customers, partners and shareholders or funders.
  2. Sets direction: With clear identity, employees know how to act, customers know what to expect, and shareholders and funders understand the value the organization creates.
  3. Makes decisions easier: Employees need less supervision and can be more productive because they intuitively know what’s right … and what’s not.

An example I always think of is Walt Disney. You can go to Disney World and talk to one of the janitors sweeping up the grounds and say “Disney is thinking about a movie that has some hard language and violence and nudity.” And they’ll say to you, “That’s not us.” Everyone there knows what Disney stands for and how to represent it. No one has to micromanage the entire team company. That frees up the CEO to think on a higher level.

When Can Identity Help Management?
Often when we work on identity strategy we’re going into organizations where there is some kind of malaise or confusion. Maybe the company is in trouble: People don’t understand it or are confused about it. Maybe there are disruptive forces in the market that make what they used to do no longer viable, relevant or compelling. Or maybe they’ve acquired a lot of companies, and people with different mindsets have joined at different times with different perceptions and capabilities, and pretty soon no one knows what the company is all about.

The lack of a clear organizational identity can interfere with everything. One person may have a grand idea and start going off in that direction and others say, “No, we don’t do that.” Which direction are they going in? Nobody knows. And everybody’s at cross purposes and unhappy.

But with thoughtful and strategic work on clarifying who you are, what you do and why you matter, it’s a different story. When we leave our clients with a strong, clear identity we leave them energized and motivated by who they are and what they do. Everybody knows what makes them special.

That’s the power of identity.

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May 15, 2013 In Blog By Philip Durbrow

Your Identity Is Not Your Brand

Philip Durbrow, Marshall Strategy
As identity strategists, we work all the time with corporate and nonprofit leaders who come to us seeking the benefits of identity work: improved loyalty and preference, increased sales, an energized workforce and so on. But one of the biggest misperceptions is around the idea of identity itself. Most people confuse it with branding, when in fact your identity is different from your brand in key ways.

A brand is a promise. When someone sees the brand they should know what they’re going to get. Branding is doing everything humanly possible to ensure that the brand promise is fulfilled. That’s what branding is about. But branding is often aimed at specific target audiences: people who want whiter whites or brighter brights. Brands are what I call outer driven. They’re driven by trying to please people out there.

Identity to us is a bigger idea. It’s about the essence of who you are. You might have several brands that make various promises and are aimed at different people. But your identity should be inner driven.

Identity and Authenticity
The power in identity comes from being who you want to be, not who others want you to be.

Your identity shouldn’t be constructed the way some politicians run campaigns—running around the country doing various focus groups to find out what people care about and then giving speeches tailored to very precise groups. That’s all outer driven.

The most powerful identities come from thinking about who you are, what you care about, what matters most to you, what you want to accomplish and why people should care that you exist.

The Six Elements of Identity
As you undertake identity work it’s important to understand what identity is not. It’s not your vision. Your vision is how you see the future. It’s not your mission. Your mission is what role you want to play in that future. It’s not your goals. Your goals are what you want to accomplish. It’s not your logo (your logo identifies you, but it’s not your identity). It’s not a short-term initiative—that’s a tactic. And it’s not a marketing responsibility, it’s a CEO’s responsibility to deliver on your unique sense of self.

So those are the things we think identity is not. But what is identity?

  1. It is the essence of your organization
  2. It is your organization’s sense of self
  3. It is what the organization stands for, is committed to
  4. It is what the organization cares about, its driving force
  5. It is what you want to be, not what others want you to be
  6. It is why your organization matters

You can go on the web and easily find a number of how-tos that promise you can create an identity in five easy steps (give or take). But the reality is that determining your identity is a matter of deep exploration. It requires you to see yourself from new angles, think about possibilities, understand where your industry will be in the future. It’s hard work, but it’s the key to motivating your employees and changing the way your customers, shareholders and competitors think about you.

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October 30, 2012 In Blog, Politics By Marshall Strategy

With No Apparent Brand Strategy for this Election, Is “Hope” a Failed Brand Promise?

With the election looming, and Obama and Romney neck and neck in the polls, each is trying to maintain momentum in his base and influence the undecided voters out there – especially in swing states. But something critical has been missing.  Throughout this drawn-out campaign, both candidates have lacked a single clear idea that voters can rally behind, a true brand strategy. Instead, it’s been an election season filled with attacks, memes and rhetoric, like Romney’s “binders full of women,” but no emotional core.

In a recent blog post, “The Election in a Word,” Daniel Pink talks about how in the final days before the election, both campaigns are trying to keep a single, simple idea in voters’ minds. With Obama, “Forward” is appearing in almost every speech, photo or sound bite, and with Romney it’s the platitude “Believe in America.” Both are hollow, because it seems as though they’re being forced on voters, and because they seem to be more about de-positioning the other candidate than delivering an idea for the future.

2012 Election Brand Strategy

2012 Election Brand Strategy

The rules for political communication have changed drastically. In the past, campaigns like Reagan’s “Morning in America” could frame a candidate emotionally instead of rationally, and broadcast this emotion through television advertising, essentially the only game in town. Contrast that with Obama’s message of “Hope” from the 2008 election. Shepard Fairey’s iconic “hope” image didn’t come from brand experts and political strategists, but from the groundswell of political dissatisfaction with the status quo. It spread virally across the social media landscape in part because the Obama campaign so deftly took advantage of the message of “hope,” and in part because people connected with it. It was a clear idea, and it spread because it connected emotionally.

In today’s world, it’s no longer effective to simply craft a positioning and stay on message – you need to connect with voters emotionally, so that they’ll spread your message for you.

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