The First and Final Step of Branding

by BJ Bueno and Scott Jeffrey
About this author

When Ivan Pavlov did his famous experiment in 1904 and rang a bell, our best friend, the dog, began to salivate. Most of branding’s enigma is solved with this study: Connect the bell (the newspaper) with the meat (the consumer’s needs) and branding occurs. Despite the theatrical ease with which branding is created, most company’s fail in their brand efforts for one simple reason: They forget to sell in. Brands cannot live on a white paper or inside a company memo, but is expressed each day by everyone in the organization. In reality, each member of your team is building the brand or tearing it down.

I believe a major misconception in branding is that only the marketing department is responsible for building and managing the brand. In truth, when a brand fails it means the consumer never embraced the whole business (and went to the competition to meet their needs). Brands fail at an organizational level, not on a single department, or individual. Customers buy the whole business—not just the pricing, or distribution, or even the graphical interpretation of the brand. Branding is only a word used to describe the customer’s experience and marketing is what reflects that experience to the consumer. Put simply, branding must be a company-wide initiative.

Each team member must clearly understand how he or she contributes to the customer’s experience. American Airlines nearly never reports to baggage claim agents and mechanical staff the overall health of their business, a cause of endless entanglements between management and associates, in many cases leading the company to a non-operational status. In contrast, the loving folks at Southwest Airlines purposely create their annual financials reports in a 3rd grade reading level. To anyone observing the airline business, it’s obvious if the team members on the floor are not packing the right bags into the right planes, the customer are going to have a horrible brand experience (no matter what the company promises in their advertising).

Before you can go tell the world about your brand, your entire company must have a clear understanding of your brand’s meaning. When Southwest Airlines advertises that you are free to move about the country (referring to their low fairs) they can only say this thanks to those who actually fulfill their brand’s promise: the ground crew. If everyone in Southwest Airlines was pushing for a different agenda, the brand would die (since the planes would never leave the ground). Southwest Airlines clearly understands the value of selling in, and continues in a 30-year run of profitable returns on their people.

Four Questions Before You Begin

As the Rabbit in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland aptly noted, “When you don’t know where you are going, any road will do.” To help us gain clarity and direction before selling-in to your organization, you must answer the following four questions:

1- Where is your business today?

2- Where does your business want to be tomorrow?

3- How does your business define success?

4- What has to transform in the company in order for your products and services to embrace its best customer?

While these four questions seam simple and straightforward, what I generally find is they are very difficult to answer as a whole. These are critical questions and must be answered by every brand.

Tips on Selling-in to Your Enterprise

Each organization has its on culture and ways of synthesizing new information. This is important to note in the context of selling in. You must carefully consider which tools best fit your organization.

1- Inspire through conversation. Building successful brands deal a lot with how much attention you are paying to your associates, marketplace, and customer. If you want to grow quickly, start having meaningful conversations with your people. Soon you will find those conversations will fill everyone’s minds with inspiration.

2- Teach your teams. Don’t just write stuff down in a memo and expect people to do anything with it. Every brand needs advocates—people who defend it and teach it. The more internal and external evangelists, the better. Make sure you are teaching your brand and not just hiding it in some white paper.

3- Bring the brand to life. Create a video, post pictures of your best customers around your office, pass on compliments from clients to the entire staff, etc. Whatever you do, never stop your brand from coming to life. The more ways you have of showing your brand alive and growing, the more likely everyone on your team will know what to do next.

4- Bring your customers to life. The easiest way to do this is spend a day in your customer’s life. Another easy way to help everyone understand why your brand is around is to show your staff a day of your customer’s life. Show everyone in your team what it might be like to be the customer. Have everyone imagine this day and how the product plays a part in their day. Next, ask each person to think how he or she affect the customers day even though some times the customer doesn’t know it’s them (like in the Southwest Airlines mechanics, you don’t see them but without them the ultimate brand promise is not filled).

5- Create a customer definition. One of my favorite ways to help sell in is to define the customer your business serves. By giving your customers dimension and depth, you team members can have more empathy for the customer. Once everyone in your organization is servicing your customer, most of your branding efforts happen spontaneously.

You must create a vision that your entire organization is willing to give their passion to. Stop “business as usual,” look at your own team, and start selling in. When you sell in, you are setting up the most important part of your marketing plan: having your people ready to serve a customer and create a brand in the customer’s heart. If you want your customers to love you, you have to love everything that makes them love you first. This includes your product, of course, but more importantly, the people that put your products in the customer’s hands each day.

Like always, my wish is that your plans move forward and onward!

BJ Bueno

This article was originally published in Idea Magazine.