Building Winning Brands – 1 Of 16

Having spent the majority of my adult life building, managing and leveraging brands and then having written a 320 page book on brand management, it is actually quite difficult for me to “net out” the 16 most important things to know about building winning brands. For instance, I started out trying to do so for my book, Brand Aid, but ended up with one chapter on the 40 most common brand problems and another chapter summarizing the 70 most important things that can be said about brand management.  So, over the next few weeks, and In the spirit of brevity, I am for the first time, “netting out” the 16 most important things to know here on Branding Strategy Insider.

The first most important thing to know about building winning brands is that top management support is crucial. In 1998, The Conference Board conducted a study on “Managing the Corporate Brand.”  In that study, they discovered four organizational support factors were critical to brand strategy success. They still hold true today…

•CEO leadership and support
•A distinctive corporate culture that serves as a platform for the brand promise
•The ability to obtain support from a broad spectrum of employees
•The alignment of brand messages across functions

Top management’s understanding and support of brand management principles directly affects all four factors.

I have conducted numerous “Creating a Brand Building Organization” workshops in the last few years. The participants have been brand champions from hundreds of organizations.  Of the toughest obstacles that these brand champions have encountered in creating brand building organizations, three of the top nine involve the lack of top management support:

•Senior management is not focused on the brand
•Senior management has a short attention span and fails to provide the ongoing support and resources necessary for effective brand building to occur
•Some senior leaders do not believe in the brand management concept

At the Institute for International Research’s The Branding Trilogy conference in Santa Barbara, California, Kristine Shattuck, Los Angeles Area Marketing Manager, Southwest Airlines put it well when she said,

“Enthusiastic employees spread enthusiasm to customers. Market to your employees as much as your customers.  If your employees don’t ‘get it,’ neither will your customers.”

This can only happen if top management aligns all of its organization’s processes and systems in support of its brand’s promise.

Here is a now classic illustration of what happens when top management does not align its organization’s behavior with its brand’s promise.  Do you remember United Airlines “United Airlines Rising” advertising campaign in 1997?  This campaign was meant to communicate to the public that United was aware of their problems and was making an effort to raise their service to meet consumers’ expectations.  But, the campaign backfired on them when they first launched it.  Why?  Because, just as United was making promises about its new customer satisfaction philosophy, its flight attendants were threatening a labor action called CHAOS™, or “Creating Havoc Around Our System™”. The Association of Flight Attendants stated, “No raises, no rising.”  To add insult to injury, United’s customer relations department was also so unresponsive to complaints that a disgruntled customer created the website www.untied.com, a site featuring complaints from other United Airlines passengers.

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