brand equity Tag

December 12, 2017 In Acquisitions, Brand Advocates, Branding, Consumer, Corporate, Cultural, Higher Education, Identity and Brand Strategy, Mergers, Positioning, Positioning Strategy By @MarshallStrategy

How to Turn Your Employees Into Brand Advocates

Your employees are your biggest marketing opportunity. Why? Because if they are engaged with your brand, they can be your number one marketers and boosters of brand equity. How do you convert this potential business-changing force into brand advocates? Achieving employee brand engagement was our topic at the last Silicon Valley Brand Forum.

Empowering employees as brand advocates is critical to successful brand evolution. When you change or evolve your brand identity, your internal audience is just as important as your external audience. Ideally, your employees are the engine driving brand transformation. For that reason, we ask every client to engage their employees when changing their brand identity.

Engaging your employees

To be effective, brand identity work must inspire employees as an idea they can rally behind. Quantitative research can give you data, but qualitative research helps you hear and feel culture from the key voices and the personalities who make it real. You can’t just change your logo and tell employees, “All right, everyone, fall in line and be part of this.” Your brand essence starts within your company, and employee brand advocacy requires investment, cultivation and authenticity. It also must capture your employees’ spirit and passion. If your employees are engaged, you will have a firm foundation for moving forward with change.

Four factors for empowering employees as brand advocates

A new brand identity should be both aspirational and authentic to employees. It’s essential that employees:

See themselves in the new positioning
Believe in the vision and aspiration behind the new identity
Understand that the new brand has meaning and value
Feel recognized for their part in adding value to the brand

June 2, 2016 In Acquisitions, Airlines, Branding, Corporate, Cultural, Identity, Identity and Brand Strategy, Mergers, Technology By @MarshallStrategy

One word is critical to M&A success – CULTURE

We learned last week that Hewlett Packard Enterprise is merging its enterprise services unit with Computer Sciences Corp (Read the full story). This is a perfect opportunity to talk about the consequences of mergers on identity and brand, and how having a solid strategy for both is key in your merger’s success.

Research has shown that as many as 83 percent of mergers fail to achieve their original business goals. Brand value, or goodwill, suffers right along with business value, often destroying the appeal and premium that might have inspired the acquisition in the first place. Why is this? Because culture, and the purpose behind each organization being combined, is often ignored in favor of the numbers.

These deals are put together by attorneys and investment bankers, who fail to consider the cultural implications of the merger. These people think in terms of “synergy” and 1 + 1 = 3, when the real goal should be 1 + 1 = 1.

February 21, 2014 In Acquisitions, Brand Architecture, Technology By Ken Pasternak

4 Questions to Ask When Developing a Brand Architecture Strategy

4 Questions to Ask About Your Brand Architecture as Your Organization Grows Let’s imagine you are Facebook. When you first started, you had a clear idea. You created messaging, a user experience and an identity platform to guide it as it grew. You made the hard decisions to whittle your brand’s message down into one clear, coherent thought.

But now, you’re acquiring additional brands at a very high cost, adding complexity to your brand. Now you’ve got Instagram and WhatsApp. You say you are committed to preserving their independence. We say it’s time to revisit those hard decisions, to keep your brand architecture intact and your brand strong.

We see organizations—especially those in the technology and digital fields—take a “ready, fire, aim” approach to acquiring brands and working them into their brand architecture. As a result, any of the following situations may occur, creating a complex and unwieldy environment:

You’ve brought in a little monster that’s unlike the rest of the monsters in your zoo, but you love it anyway.
You decided to preserve the equity of an acquired brand because you don’t want to “mess it up.”
You are developing a new brand in response to a short-term market need or competitive threat.

So how does a growing company develop a brand architecture strategy?

Developing a Brand Architecture

There are four questions you can ask of your company that will guide your brand alignment through this transition:

“How many promises do we want to make to our audiences?”
“How elastic is our current brand in making these promises to these audiences?”
“How many brands do we eventually want to have, and need to support?”
“How does the introduction, or cancellation of a brand, affect the rest of our portfolio?”

These questions must not be thought of in a vacuum; rather, they should be thought of as a connected part of the organization. While some organizations are disciplined about this, others could stand to use some help. Even the most disciplined companies have to revisit this over time.

IBM, for example, is a technology giant and appears to be a master-branded company, but if you look at IBM over time, they have struggled with supporting the master brand in exchange for some autonomy at the sub-brand level. IBM acquired a number of sub-brands over time, such as Lotus, Rational Software and Tivoli. Progressively each company began using more and more of IBM’s resources until the organization made a decision to rein these brands in. Lesson learned: when they acquired PwC Consulting, it rather quickly became IBM Global Business Services.

On the other hand, GE has done a remarkable job of maintaining the GE brand. It’s very simple; it covers everything from light bulbs and toasters to aircraft engines and nuclear reactor services. How did they manage that? GE focused its brand promise on excellent management and ceaseless innovation. Anytime you see that GE brand, that’s what it means. That’s a pretty powerful model. If I were Facebook, I would take note.

Learn more about our brand architecture services.

December 11, 2013 In Naming By Philip Durbrow

Corporate Naming Lessons From Naming People

Many Hollywood stars have changed their names and gone on to successful careers that would be hard to imagine if they hadn’t made the switch. For example, Marilyn Monroe’s real name is Norma Jeane Mortensen.

Back in the 1970s, Herbert Harari, a psychologist at San Diego State University, found evidence that teachers discriminate against “oddly” named pupils. Eighty teachers were asked to grade four different papers written by fourth and fifth grade students. No matter which papers the names Elmer and Hubert appeared on, they averaged one full grade lower than the same papers attributed to Michael and David.

Since that time, other researchers have noticed the strong first impression that names create and demonstrated their role in creating expectations for the people they’re attached to (“What’s in a Name? Maybe it’s a student’s grade!”).

Corporations can also have loser brand names, something that can be confirmed by research or general intuition, and such names can unfairly and negatively influence perceptions of their performance or potential.

Changing a “Loser” Name
Many Hollywood stars have changed their names and gone on to successful careers that would be hard to imagine if they hadn’t made the switch. Archibald Leach became Cary Grant. Marion Morrison became John Wayne. Norma Jeane Mortensen became Marilyn Monroe.

While name changes in the corporate world are possible, the process is more complicated. New corporate names need to be accepted and supported by employees, customers and investors, and they can’t infringe on the good will of other corporate names.

Professional firms and corporations often get consumed by trying to preserve equity in existing names. Advertising agency Batten, Barton, Durstine & Osborn had a name that was a tongue twister, so they switched to the initials BBDO, just as PricewaterhouseCoopers became PwC.

But if thoughtful enough, corporate name changes can benefit corporations as much as—if not more than—they benefit individuals.

Lessons Learned
Through the work we’ve done with past clients like GE, Disney and Adobe, we’ve put together a list of tips that may help you through a name change:

Individuals and companies have a choice in how they name themselves
Some names can be perceived as losers and some as winners
Loser names can be successfully changed to winning names
It’s important to live up to the conveyed or implied promise of a name
Short names are generally more impactful than long names
There is a fine line between names that are unique and names that alienate
Don’t let “equity” in ineffective names prevent you from developing better names

The main reason companies give for not fixing a sub-par name is that they don’t want to lose their “brand equity.” But, you have to give up something that’s not working to gain something that’s better. Advertising and promoting an ineffective name is throwing good money after bad.