About 15 years ago while I was still floundering around in the pool of corporate bureaucracy, I told the Monsterco I was working for that we needed to find out more about how great service brands were built (my company not being one of them).
I suggested an extensive itinerary that would take me around the world to meet some brand pioneers working for outperforming brands to understand what was behind the building and sustenance of their success. I met with Virgin, Singapore Airlines, British Airways, McDonald’s, IBM, Southwest Airlines, Ford and Peninsula Hotels among others. Pretty cool — get paid for learning others’ brand secrets! So off I trotted to Europe, the States and beyond, and a fascinating and eye-opening trip it was too.
On my return, the deputy chief executive asked me what the single most critical success factor was for building sustainably successful service brands. Despite the number and complexity of brand-building elements across the organisation and customer-facing experiences, the answer was pretty consistent: the desire and ability of the CEO to assume the role of CBO – chief brand officer.
What, you might ask, is this? Well, if one accepts the argument that a company’s brand is its most important competitive weapon (and therefore key financial driver), then surely it follows that the task of managing it would be the most important role in the company. So why leave that in the hands of anyone other than the Big Kahuna?
But what is managing a service brand all about? It’s primarily about shaping and managing people and the nature of the relationships created between them, both within the organisation and between the organisation and its external stakeholders.
It’s those relationships that are the key driver of perceptions of a service brand. So says the hotel industry, which across three separate brand admiration studies The Brand Company conducted in Asia over the last seven years has ranked “people” as the No.1 driver of hotel brand perceptions, way ahead of products, services, environments and marketing.
So what does brand-cum-people management entail? Like all good management systems, it has to have a clear focus, and this comes in the form of a Brand DNA that clarifies the brand’s function, promise, benefit and attitude. The process of defining this cannot be offloaded — as so often happens — to the head of marketing. If chief executives are not an integral part of defining or evolving a brand, they will never make effective brand managers, as they won’t feel a sense of ownership or leadership in what the brand is all about.
Second, the chief executive must ensure all the systems, policies, processes and the structure of an organisation inspire and free the brand to flourish. For example, budgeting processes need to be focused on those elements of the organisational and guest experience that support — or at the very least don’t undermine — the long-term cultivation of the brand. Recruitment processes need to identify those whose mindset is aligned with the brand’s attitude. The office environment needs to exude the personality of the brand in order to encourage and provide tangible evidence of the desired brand personality.
You may feel various departmental heads can look after these issues, and it’s certainly true each senior manager has a vital brand-building role to play, be they in finance or engineering. But the most important single argument to support the chief executive adopting the brand guardianship role is that if he or she does not do so, it gives other senior managers a reason to say that brand is not their responsibility either. And the likely result is brand management ends up back in its habitual marketing home.
Does this mean that to outperform, service brands need to have high-profile leaders who are strongly associated with the brand by the outside world? No. In fact, such an interconnection comes with a significant health warning: what happens when that individual moves on? There’s a danger that part of what made the brand distinctive moves on too.
What’s needed is a chief executive who understands that the power of the brand starts from within the organisation, not from a billboard. The chief executive’s organisational brand focus must have both an attitudinal and an executional bias — the way the organisation both thinks about and delivers what it does to support the desired brand focus. I see the former as being of fundamental importance, as attitudes shape what is executed and how. So a chief executive who is not attitudinally aligned with the brand has a fundamentally negative impact on how the brand is crafted within the organisation and delivered to customers.
Most of the successful brands I had the privilege of talking to on my global journey recognised this, and it was clear there was a golden strand connecting chief executives’ attitudes and behaviour, organisational behaviour and ultimately the unique attitude each brand expressed in building unique relationships with its customers.
In today’s business world of short-term-focused financial targets, it would be easy to dismiss such thinking as peripheral fluff, but for any service organisation to sustain success, it must focus on nurturing its sustainably unique attributes, and these emerge from its distinctive organisational way of life. No one can copy that, and so it becomes the unifying driver of what makes the brand different over the long term.
That means a chief executive cannot just “manage better” but must “manage differently”, and that difference stems from crystallising and crafting a company’s distinct brand attitude from the inside out.
As an article in The Economist early this year pointed out: “It is becoming clear that while a brand alone can create fame, it is this culture inherent within a business which creates legacy and permanence. Indeed, the culture of a company is becoming as sought-after a selling point as invention. Culture can be the best brand tool you have.”
And who is the single most important guardian and driver of cultural (and therefore brand) reality? The chief executive.
James Stuart provides branding guidance to companies throughout Asia, specialising in the hospitality and service industries. He is the managing partner of The Brand Company and can be reached by email at james@thebrandco.com. For more information see TheBrandCo.com