Business of Healthcare: The 7 Paths of Great Branding!
Does your organization have a strong brand? It ought to, for a brand both identifies and differentiates you in the marketplace. It defines the unique value your company provides. It clarifies how your company is really different from competitors. It pinpoints how your company is better and more special, and why it is worthwhile for a prospective customer—or investor-- to form a lasting relationship with your company rather than with anyone else. Finally, a good brand tells the marketplace how reliably, efficiently, authentically and quickly your company delivers what it promises.
Unfortunately, most organizations don’t approach branding in a disciplined, strategic way. Rather, they tend to approach it from a narrow marketing perspective: They focus on logos, slogans, color schemes, online sales tools, PR campaigns, ad rollouts, and such.
Good logos, ads, and color schemes will certainly help any branding efforts, but on their own they add little sustainable value. Consider Kodak, Levi Strauss, AT&T, and lately even Coca-Cola. Great logos, great ads, great identities—and poor returns. Even the most recognizable brand identities, like the McDonald’s arches and the Nike swoosh, could not prevent their organizations’ downward slides over the past few years. This year both companies are making a turnaround, but it’s not because of better “recognizability”; they were always recognizable. My point is simply that the goal of great branding today is not just to be recognized and publicized , but to be successful—in terms of building customer loyalty and profitable growth.
In that spirit, allow me to dip into the manuscript of my upcoming book and condense seven strategic paths that leaders can follow in building a great brand. As you ponder these paths, ask yourself: to what extent is your organization really and truly prepared to journey these paths via daring planning, budgeting, and leading?
1. Great branding is about discrimination.
The first step of branding is to define what space you want to fill. It is critical to make explicit choices about what your business is, and isn’t; who your “customers” are, and aren’t; what kinds of business you will pursue, and what you won’t; what business you currently have on the books that you want to build, and what you want to let go.
No organization can ever fill all spaces effectively, which is why many of the “one-stop-shopping” corporate strategies look much better on paper than in reality. The moment an organization tries to be all things to all people (think about HP and Schwab, for example), the focus in innovation and delivery blurs, identity and priorities become confusing, and efficiencies plummet. Branding involves choosing the specific terrains one will compete in, and avoiding or exiting the others.
2. Great branding is about dominating.
Discriminating is not enough. You want to selectively choose the areas that you can dominate. If it’s true that you can’t be all things to all people, it’s doubly true that you can’t be great in everything. An organization that offers a wide, diversified menu of mediocre or commodity products and services is not in a value mode. Dominating doesn’t necessarily mean being biggest; it means being exceptional, distinctly better, bold, compelling ,and exciting—as recognized by customers and investors. Dell, Toyota, Pixar, and Whole Foods are not the biggest players in their industries, but they dominate in the spaces they’ve chosen to compete in, and their remarkable financial returns show it. So combine paths #1 and #2 and ask yourself this question: What arenas, sectors, competencies, products and services have you carefully selected that you commit to doing state-of-the-art, better-than-anyone-else, beyond-conventional-wisdom work in?
3. Great branding is about startling value.
Think about the time you received extraordinary customer care or service delivery. How did you feel? When extraordinary customer care and service delivery generate a “wow!!!” reaction from people, you’ve created startling value. Startling value is a kind of “Gosh, I am amazed/I didn’t think it was possible/that’s cool!” sort of reaction. It’s a great brand builder. How do you create startling value? There are many ways, but in the interest of conserving space in this website, here are two:
- Personalization. Mass (as in mass production, mass marketing,
mass distribution) is steadily diminishing as a value driver. An organization
that can build a reputation of delivering unique excellence to market
units of one (each customer), is on its way towards building strong
brand equity. When someone believes that “this company really and truly
cares about me, knows me, knows my business, knows my problems, knows
(and can demonstrate) what I might need even before I can articulate
it, and presents me with innovative products and services that meets
those requirements--I’m hooked.” Creating this kind of personalization
requires care, empathy, a rich database on each customer, and a customer-obsessed
culture. Even more, it requires the capacity to quickly and efficiently
build anything to order—or better, to provide customers with the capacity
to quickly and efficiently “build” what they themselves need.
- Turbo-speed. Organizations that can radically reduce customers’ waiting time for anything (a response, a proposal, a suggestion, a document, a completed project, time spent on hold on the phone, etc.) through effective use of talent, systems, information technology and customer partnership wind up creating strong brand value. They also wind up staying lean, flexible and cost-efficient in the process.
4. Great branding is about deep reservoirs of knowledge.
Great branding occurs when your company (and website) is seen as “the” place to visit for state-of-the-art empirical data and information. I’m referring to a branded status where any outsider might say: “If I want to get the best information on subjects XYZ, there’s only one place to go”: Your organization. Your organization is the place to go for the complete, most up-to-date white papers, data bases, reports, links, experts, and practical advice, and everyone knows it.
And let me briefly expand on the “experts and practical advice” comment above: When outsiders can count on seeing talented individuals who are affiliated with your organization regularly writing columns in reputable publications and speaking as experts at public meetings, seminars, TV shows and radio interviews, then your organization has further branded its status as a reservoir of the best knowledge. In today’s “knowledge economy”, that sort of brand carries real weight.
5. Great branding is about intimate relationship.
In today’s chaotic political and economic landscape, the strength and quality of an organization’s relationships with valued constituents is as important as the strength and quality of its official products and services (some researchers would say even more important). In Great Britain, both Virgin and grocery chain Sainsbury each successfully launched financial services businesses even though they had no previous experience in the field. But they did have a robust brand built on strong consumer relationships.
Now take it a step further. Trust, authenticity and intimacy of relationship often trumps other, more “rational” considerations (like price or location) when customers make decisions. In other words, an individual’s belief that your organization is a strong, reliable advocate, protector, confidante, partner and helper is an excellent predictor of brand loyalty. The more intimate the relationship, the stronger that belief. Intimacy is a difficult subject to broach in the rough and tumble arena of competitive markets. Yet it’s important to do so, for it’s a place where economics meets psychology, where rational decision-making meets love. In today’s tough, unstable environments, people hunger for intimacy and love, and if you can build those into your relationships with your customers (rather than just simply “selling” to them), that translates into profitable branding. Kevin Roberts, the CEO of global advertising powerhouse Saatchi & Saatchi, argues that now more than ever, consumers hunger for “lovemarks”: emotional connections far beyond actual “products” or “services.”
6. Great branding is about community.
A branded community is a growing eco-system of participants who come together for common purposes. Organizations like eBay and Amazon, in fact, are no longer simply companies; they’re “viral” communities, perpetually replenished by the groups (especially small businesses) and individuals drawn to it. When a company can create a genuine feeling of community among its customers and partners, those constituencies are as interested in keeping the community successful as is the company itself, and willingly take on responsibilities to do just that.
How is community formed? Well, answer this question: If I, a customer, am part of your company’s community (assuming you have one, of course) how do I benefit? How do I feel continually informed, up-to-date, in the loop, engaged, cared for? How can I participate and be involved in whatever the organization is doing? How can you connect me to “the right people”, or to other customers who have similar, or compatible issues that I and my business are facing? If I have a question or a business problem, how can your company help me connect to the best answer, or the best person to answer—whether it’s an employee, a supplier or another customer? In short, how does your company mesh concerned employees and cutting edge technologies to create a “hub” for seamlessly connecting individuals, companies and information to each other?
7. Great branding is about legacy.
Legacy is the mark your organization leaves behind. Legacy for branding is about striving to achieve a noble cause that will profoundly impact the market you deal with, if not the world itself, for the better. At Whole Foods, the cause is to change the way America eats. If Whole Foods continues its current success route as the fastest growing, highest-margin player in the retail grocery arena, it may well leave that extraordinary legacy.
Going the route of legacy binds employees towards a common cause. It inspires and mobilizes people to achieve extraordinary goals. As Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer says: “What makes morale good or bad is the sense of the future. Are we working on something important? Are we changing the world? Is that an opportunity to benefit financially? Those are the kinds of things that make a difference to people.” Making a difference is the core of branding for legacy. A company ups the ante and says: We’re more than discrete products and services. We’re here to change the world in a concrete and significant way, and here’s how”.
Final note
I am certain that in every organization, these seven paths periodically appear. But they do so sporadically and idiosyncratically. One of the seven paths temporarily emerges because an individual or group in an association decides to make it happen at that time. What branding does is institutionalize these seven paths as critical and consistent drivers of the organization’s work and its relationship with its customers. As a leader, if you really want to reap the payoffs of a great brand, you’ll strive to institutionalize the paths I’ve outlined so that they clearly, and unequivocally define “the way we do business.”
Association Management, February 2005