By Rosa Zeegers, Fractional Chief Brand Officer

Over my 3 decades of stewardship for some of the most iconic brands in the world, I have dealt with diverse levels of understanding and acceptance within the respective organizations regarding my conviction that the brand is the main engine to drive business’ growth.

This journey led me to develop models and concepts to educate my colleagues and stakeholders, and to inspire and lead them into not only embracing this view, but successfully executing these models and concepts as the cornerstone of the business’ Brand Driven Growth Strategies. Now that I have exchanged my C-suite leadership role for a CEO advisory role, I have condensed these models and concepts into what I call the “10 Principles for an Effective Brand Driven Growth Strategy”:

1. Know Your Brand
2. Manage Your Brand
3. It All Starts with the Customer
4. Understand Your Competition, Now and in the Future
5. Understand Your Own Core Capabilities
6. Establish a Clear, Memorable Brand Promise
7. Don’t Miss a Single Contact Moment
8. Consistent Execution Defines a Brand
9. 50% of Marketing is Internal Marketing
10. Constantly Monitor Your Brand’s Effectiveness

 

1. Know Your Brand

Be clear about the Definition, the Role, and the Importance of your Brand.

The Definition of a Brand

Many people think your Brand is your name, your logo, or perhaps some combination of the name and logo. Nothing is further from the truth. As Shopify points out in their blog: “How to Build a Brand in 7 Steps”:

Your brand is how people perceive you wherever they interact with your business – both the impressions you can control and the ones you can’t.

My own definition is very aligned with this:

A brand is the perception a (potential) customer has of your product/service. That perception is derived from the sum-total of all the experiences they have with your product or service.

The Role a Brand

Because it is all about the perception your customers and prospects have of you and your product/service, your brand is your key business driver. Therefore, it should be at the center of your growth strategies. If you manage your brand well, it can significantly grow your business. If you do NOT manage it well, it can severely damage your business, sometimes even beyond repair.

The Importance of a Brand

Not only is your brand your main business driver, but it can also add significantly to your company’s valuation. As Bloomberg outlines in its 2020 article: S&P500's firms' value is powered by assets you can't see or touch, intangible assets make up more than 84% of S&P 500 firm’s value and the brand is part of those intangible assets.

Investing in excellent management of your brand will not only increase your revenue, but also the value of your business.

 

2. Manage Your Brand

Always follow “The 4 Steps of Brand Management”.

To manage your brand excellently, there is a fair amount of groundwork that needs to be done. I have developed what I call: “The 4 steps of Brand Management”. Following these 4 steps will ensure you not only have the steps needed to manage your brand excellently, but you’ll also develop your Brand Driven Growth Strategy in the most effective way. The 4 steps are:

STEP 1: Analysis

In this first step you’ll analyze ‘The 3 Cs’: The Customers (you need to perform a detailed analysis of their demographics, psychographics, attitudes, beliefs, and pain points), The Competition (you must identify your key competitors, understand their strengths and weaknesses, and foresee their next steps) and The Core of who you are (you have to be clear about your legacy, your purpose, and analyze your own strengths, and weaknesses).

STEP 2: Positioning

Based on the ‘3C’- analyses in the first step, you’ll select and describe your Target Customer and develop your Brand Promise (a short description of the benefits your brand is offering to the customer, also called “Brand Positioning”. A Brand Promise is usually not customer facing. It is used internally, to brief all stakeholders and agencies).

STEP 3: Implementation

Once you have developed your Brand Promise, you’ll translate it into briefs and guidelines for the Key Moments of Contact with the customer.

STEP 4: Monitor

As the brand and its services are in the market, it is important to develop KPIs and monitoring tools that will track whether you are, indeed, delivering the Brand Promise to your customers and conveying it to your prospects. This way, you can set up a continuous improvement system and ensure maximum customer satisfaction. In the following segments we will share some more in-depth considerations for each of these four steps with the next few Principles.

 

3. It All Starts with the Customer

Define your market and delineate the customer segments in it.

Before you even start to develop your Brand Promise, it is important to define your market and the boundaries of it, as that – in turn – defines who your customers and competitors are. Your market definition can be as narrow or wide as you choose it to be, depending on your capabilities and other factors. Whatever market definition you choose, it will define your chosen playing field, the customer segments in it and what competition you must face.

Know your Target Customer intimately and understand the difference between your Target Group and your User Group.

Once you have described the customer segments in your market and chosen the segment you think you should go after, you must describe your Target Customer. This should be an intimate description of the person you want to target: their persona, their needs, their beliefs, their unresolved pain points, etc. By intimately understanding your Target Customer and their (unresolved) needs, you’ll be able to develop your product/service such that you resolve their needs in the most effective way. You should see that Target Customer almost like the bull’s eye of a dartboard. The rings around it are your users. And over time, hopefully, the number of users will grow and become a significant part of the brand’s total number of customers.

It is incredibly important, however, to never confuse your users with your Target Customer. In one of my leadership roles, we saw the users of our brand, (a toy brand), become younger and younger. Because of that, we started to develop our brand and its products for a younger and younger audience. The result was that we became a much younger and therefore less aspirational brand. Consequently, we lost our cool factor, which in turn, led to decreasing sales and market share.

You should always define your Target Customer as an aspirational person, (not necessarily the biggest number of customers), to whom your users can aspire.

 

4. Understand Your Competition, Now and in the Future

As Sun Tzu, the famous Chinese military strategist and philosopher in 500 BC said:

If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.

What this means is, you must understand who your competitors are, what their strengths and weaknesses are, and what you can expect from them today, and in the near and mid-term future. As a marketing trainee, I have been trained with Sun Tzu’s wisdoms, which he wrote down in his book The Art of War. We would be sent on competition field trips where we would be parked in front of the competition’s factory and had to count the number of trucks going in and out. That way we were able to dissect the competitor’s formula and production capacities. Throughout my career, I have used Sun Tzu’s wisdom. Competitive ‘what-if’ scenarios have been a critical datapoint in how we developed our brand strategies. Understanding your competition is an instrumental component in the development of a truly differentiating value proposition.

 

5. Understand Your Own Core Capabilities

Once you understand how you can be relevant in resolving the needs of your Target Customer, in a way that differentiates you from your competition, you need to ensure you can deliver it profitably. This means you need to know what you set out as the purpose of your business, and what your true core capabilities are, your own strengths and weaknesses in relation to the needs of your Target Customer and versus your competition.

In my role as head of brand management of KLM Royal Dutch Airlines, I had to convince the airline to not always blindly copy the competition. Based on a thorough analysis of our core capabilities, our strengths and weaknesses, we understood that - given the quality of our revenue and costs vs. the competition - we didn’t have the capability to create a competitive advantage with a unique, very expensive, First Class product. That led us to outsmart the competition. We eliminated our First Class altogether and developed the first ever Premium Economy Class Product. This was a true turnaround for the airline and a direct result of understanding our own core capabilities.

 

6. Establish a Clear, Memorable Brand Promise

With the insights from “The 3 Cs”, gained in the analysis step, you are now ready to formulate your Brand Promise. A successful Brand Promise delivers on 3 criteria:

• It is unique and differentiating from the competition.

• It is relevant for the Target Customer.

• It can be profitably delivered by the organization.

 

7. Don’t Miss a Single Contact Moment

Create the “Circle of Key Contact Moments.”

As we have defined the brand as “the perception in people’s mind, derived by the sum-total of all the experiences they had with us,” it is important to define what the Key Moments of Contact are between our customer and our brand. To that end it is advisable to create what I coined as “The Circle of Key Contact Moments.” Today, this is often called the “Customer Journey.” I like to call it a Circle, because you want your customers to come back, after a good experience. These Contact Moments will consist of a mix of visual and verbal communication, potential staff interaction and usage moments, depending on the product or service.

In one of my leadership roles, we were able to correlate all Contact Moments with our customers to their re-purchase intention. That enabled us to define the true KEY Contact Moments: those that had the biggest correlation with the repurchase intention. Understanding and defining the Key Contact Moments with your customer is instrumental in ensuring consistent delivery of your Brand Promise.

 

8. Consistent Execution Defines a Brand

Understand the importance of consistent execution across the “Circle of Key Contact Moments.”

After you have defined those Key Contact Moments, you need to specify the exact guidelines for the vehicle of interaction between the customer and your brand at that specific Key Contact Moment.

This can be anything from a color palette and font type for the logo, to a service manual for service frontline staff. It should all be developed with the same goal in mind: the consistent delivery of the Brand Promise. Consistency is paramount, so that the expectations raised with marketing efforts are being consistently delivered by the experience.

 

9. 50% of Marketing is Internal Marketing

It is just as important to ensure consistency in the customer’s experience as it is to ensure that your own organization understands, is inspired by, and lives and breathes your Brand Promise. To ensure this, you should spend just as much time interacting with your organization as you do, interacting with your customers.

When we introduced our new Brand Promise at KLM Royal Dutch Airlines, I spent months traveling around the world. I met with all the worldwide staff, not only the local marketers in every country, but also check-in crews, cabin crews, cockpit crews, even the technical service. We explained and inspired all employees with the new Brand Promise, and we sometimes had feisty discussions about what this brand promise meant for their particular line of work. As a result, we didn’t only change the local marketing communication and the cabin hardware, but we also adjusted guidelines like cockpit checklists, and check-in and cabin staff manuals, so that all staff would deliver the Brand Promise in the same, consistent manner.

Achieving the complete embrace of your Brand Promise by your staff is the best insurance that your customer’s expectations of the brand are in line with and satisfied by the experience they have with the brand. That is a key tool for customer retention.

 

10. Constantly Monitor Your Brand’s Effectiveness

To that end, it is of vital importance to continuously monitor if your Brand Promise is still effectively solving your Target Customer’s need. Tools like customer satisfaction surveys at those Key Contact Moments, Brand Image monitors, but also internal employee satisfaction monitors can be invaluable for this.

Good Brand Leaders are lifelong learners - they continuously monitor and listen to their customers, their competition, and their employees and they seek continuous improvement. evolving the brand as their customers’ needs evolve.

In closing, let me use this as an important message to all CEOs out there: Please listen to your brand managers, especially when they come up with yet another new idea for your brands and products. They might have listened to your customers. They might have new intel on your competition. They might know something you do not yet know; Let your Brand and your Brand Managers be the clear voice of the one that pays all your bills: the customer.

 

About the Author

For over 3 decades, Rosa Zeegers has successfully led global Fortune 500 brands at Unilever, KLM Royal Dutch Airlines, Mattel, and National Geographic. She led multibillion dollar global P&Ls to greater growth and profitability, launched numerous innovative product concepts successfully around the world and (re)-designed organizations for greater effectiveness and profitability. Currently, she is a partner at Newport LLC, where she advises mid-market CEOs on brand driven growth strategies.

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