Articulating The Brand Promise

I was talking with a business associate of mine today. She is working with an organization that has grown from a start-up to a company with more than 1,000 employees. The organization produces high quality products and is growing rapidly however to the CEO’s credit, he is noticing chinks in the company’s armor, chinks that are due to organization growth and size.

In the past, he managed the organization by selecting the right people and modeling the right set of values, attitudes and behaviors. Business growth was the result of intuition, trial and error and agility. But now the company is starting to experience unacceptable employee turnover in its manufacturing plants (among other issues). The company has not formally articulated its mission, vision or values. It has not crafted a brand promise and it does not have an elevator speech. Employees on the plant floor are not quite sure what the organization’s broader mission is. They don’t know how what they do contributes to some larger vision. For them, it is a job.

But aren’t missions, visions and values and brand promises and elevator speeches just collections of words? Yes they are. But they are a strategic collection of words that create a shared vision, motivate people to a higher calling, and rally them around what they need to do for the organization to succeed. Words can be very powerful. Leaders have inspired revolutions with their speeches and they have gotten their followers to take on seemingly impossible tasks successfully.

When we conduct mission, vision and values workshops or brand positioning workshops, they not only lead to a set of inspiring words, but they also achieve leadership team consensus on advantageous business models and strategies. It is a way to rally the troops starting at the very top of the organization. The larger the organization is, the more important this becomes. Many entrepreneurs do not realize how important it is to put these sorts of things in place when their organizations reach a certain size in which they can no longer personally interact with every employee on a regular basis. If you lead a rapidly growing organization that has not yet established its mission, vision, values or brand promise, know that at some point in the future it will be important to do so to enable further growth and success.

The Blake Project Can Help: Please email us for more about our brand culture expertise and purpose, mission, vision and values workshops.

Branding Strategy Insider is a service of The Blake Project: A strategic brand consultancy specializing in Brand Research, Brand Strategy, Brand Licensing and Brand Education

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