How brands help customers understand WIIFM
We’ve all heard it before but it bears repeating: people are fixated on WIIFM (What’s In It For Me). So to succeed in business all we have to do is provide something that makes life better for customers – some brilliant new “that’s-for-me” product or service. Simple, right?
Not so fast.
It’s not enough just to have an offer. If we want to be successful, people must also understand what we’re proposing to do for them. To create that understanding, it helps – actually, it’s essential – to do two things: 1) articulate the customer proposition clearly (i.e. write it down), and 2) communicate the proposition in a compelling manner.
Typically the writing-down part comes in the form of a strategic value proposition, also known in various dialects of biz-speak as the purpose, mission, vision, UVP (ultimate value proposition), and so on. Whatever it’s called, the value proposition is an organization’s why – its promise to customers, its customer-focused reason for existing.
Expressing the value proposition in a simple, convincing way is the job of the corporate brand. The brand takes the strategic essence of the proposition, which in most cases is basically rational, and invests it with urgency, emotion, personality and the supra-rational power of symbols, archetypes, pictures and poetry.
BMW promises its customers an enjoyable driving experience. The BMW brand delivers that promise in more than just words, although “the ultimate driving machine” tagline has been part of the effort. The promise is implicit in everything the brand does, from showroom décor and photographic style in its communications to the sound of the cars’ engines and the company’s internal culture and sports sponsorships.
Brand-driven organizations like Disney, Apple and Caterpillar are the same way. The more single-minded and compelling those brands’ activities are across all touchpoints, the more the more likely customers will be to internalize the essence of the value proposition.
When the brand is strong, customers understand WIIFM.
Brands are also essential in transforming an organization’s strategic value proposition into something its own employees can understand and relate to. Effective internal branding keeps the organization customer-focused by providing everyone with a measuring stick to assess how well internal actions deliver on the promise to customers. This can start with a simple strategic question: before taking any action, employees ask “does this contribute to delivering [value proposition] to our customers?” By linking the organization’s sense of purpose to the entire spectrum of internal operations, the brand provides a common goal and a motivating sense of purpose to individual employees.
An alarming number of companies never get around to defining their strategic fundamentals. Or else they formulate a value proposition but then fail to put their brands to work getting the proposition across to customers and employees.
What a waste of potential. A brand’s most important function, its greatest contribution to business success, is to create understanding of the organization’s fundamental purpose.
Brands have two other basic functions besides creating understanding: building awareness and creating empathy. I discussed the three brand functions in a recent post and argued at some length that a brand’s most important role is not understanding, but creating empathy.
So I contradict myself. Sorry about that, but brands are large, they contain multitudes.
There’s been a secret agenda all along: to demonstrate that a brand’s several functions are all essential and all highly productive in a profit-making business sense. So yes, brands create value for the organization when they promote understanding by means of a powerful promise to customers. And they also add value when they create empathy by making the organization more human. These two brand functions are interlocking and mutually reinforcing. You can’t separate them, and why would you want to?
And while we’re at it, let’s not forget the third brand function, building awareness, without which neither understanding nor empathy can happen.
What’s not really open to question is whether brands do, in fact, add value to an organization. For many brand-driven B2C companies, the value of the corporate brand is assessed at well over half of overall market value. For B2B companies, brands may account for 20% and more of total value.
Brands aren’t there to look pretty. They’re a strategic asset with a job to do: creating growth and profits. But for that to happen, you have to put your brand to work.
