Brand Coaching aligns business operations to your brand’s strategic purpose
The key to unlocking brand potential lies in recognizing your brand not as a marketing initiative, but as a set of customer perceptions and expectations that arise from interactions with your company and products.
This understanding revolutionizes the job of brand management. No longer just a marketing function, branding becomes the far-reaching task of aligning all corporate actions, processes and investments towards delivering what your customers expect from the brand.
This process is known by the ungainly term “brand operationalization.” For the sake of simplicity, we call it Brand Coaching.
Getting employees on board with the brand.
Brand coaching is the art of translating your brand promise into a customer experience. If you’re a B2B company, chances are the customer experience is largely determined by personal encounters with your sales or service people or other representatives of your company. So it’s essential that your employees be on board with the brand.
So before you can begin to align processes and procedures with the brand, employees must not only understand the brand but be willing to live the brand, represent the brand – even fight for the brand. This doesn’t happen by itself. You’ll need a dedicated program with its own goals, resources and success metrics. Typically, brand coaching proceeds in 3 stages:
1. Knowledge stage
Everyone in the organization should share a common knowledge of what the brand promise is and how the company intends to deliver the promise (see Brand Creation). You can immerse the organization in brand knowledge through an ongoing program of training workshops, team-based brand coaching and collateral material deployed at all levels of the organization.
2. Attitude stage
It’s not enough for employees to know the brand – they have to believe in it. Incentives and motivational activities can help reinforce brand knowledge and action. These may come in the form of HR performance evaluations, coaching, internal communications, team activities, competitions and rewards.
3. Skills stage
This is where the rubber meets the road in brand coaching. It’s really the key to the entire Brand Activation process.
The first task of the skills stage is to overhaul business operations with brand in mind. This requires a thorough, fine-grained effort to look at everything the company does and ask the simple question: what can we do to make this better support the brand promise to customers? The next task is to modify employee behavior in line with brand-optimized processes and practices.
Brand coaching involves the entire organization but focuses especially on customer-facing functions. These include sales and customer-service, marketing and external communications and any internal business processes that directly affect outcomes for customers. In B2B companies, sales is typically where you’ll find brand coaching yields the most dramatic and positive results.
It’s a journey, not a destination.
Brand coaching is an on-going effort to focus everyone’s efforts on delivering the brand promise to customers. Many companies are aware of the need for internal branding as a way of insuring a general understanding of the brand among employees. Brand coaching takes this a step further by actually building brand in to the operational fundamentals of the organization.
Every successful company has a strategy for delivering value to the customer and a set of operations to do the delivering day-to-day. Really successful companies have figured out how to bind strategy to operations so that they never drift apart. That’s what brand coaching is all about.
