Your brand’s touchstone question and the bridge to implementation
Think of your corporate brand as a bridge. When built correctly, it links your strategic purpose – your promise to provide something of value to customers – to all of the things you do, internally and externally, to deliver on the promise. It opens up a direct road from strategy to implementation.
Let’s take a closer look at how the bridge works and especially at one amazingly simple way to give everyone in your organization access to it.
The bridge to implementation
When it comes to delivering on the strategic customer promise, an organization must ask itself two things:
- Do we have the ability to deliver: do we own the products, services and delivery resources to fulfill the promise? Since this consideration is at the heart of brand strategy formation from the start, the answer had better be yes. If not, back to the strategy drawing board.
- Do we have the will to deliver: do our people know how to deliver and are they motivated to do so? Is fulfilling a customer promise even something non-customer-facing people think about as they go about their everyday work? The answer is too often no, or at best, occasionally (but usually no).
When the will to deliver fails, that means there is a problem somewhere inside the organization that’s blocking implementation. There are a couple of places to look.
One is weak internal understanding of what the brand promise is. People understand their own particular job functions, but not the overall purpose of the organization. Internal branding can help fill the gap by ensuring that people know what the brand promise is, and have internalized it so that it becomes second nature. You can build internal branding into onboarding processes, ongoing training and all manner of internal communications.
Another roadblock to promise-delivery is failure to apply the brand promise to day-to-day tasks. People get so involved in the minutia of their operational tasks that they never even consider whether their actions support or impede the big-picture purpose. This can be addressed though, for want of a better term, brand operationalization. This is where the corporate brand is employed as a sort of strategic guide-rail to align actions and processes at a fine-grained, practical level with the brand promise.
The touchstone question
There’s an easy and straightforward way to attack both poor understanding and lagging operationalization at once: the touchstone question. It’s a question people ask themselves and it goes like this: “Does [what I’m doing, planning, proposing] help to fulfill [brand promise to customers]?”
One simple yes-or-no question. No ambiguity, no complex analysis, no top-down micromanagement – just a quick check that helps people stop doing what violates the brand promise and think about how to tweak their actions in the direction of better customer-directed fulfillment.
The touchstone question puts the brand promise, and the customer, front and center. When everyone gets into the habit of asking themselves (and others) the question repeatedly and at every turn, they will be doing the good work of brand operationalization. Or as brand fans like to put it, they will be living the brand.
MBA types might put it another way: employees will be implementing strategy – and as a bonus, they will be doing so on their own initiative. The corporate brand, and how it is activated internally, is the bridge from strategy (the promise to customers) to implementation (delivering the promise). The touchstone question? That’s, um… whatever makes the bridge easy for all to use. The on-ramp? The carpool lane? Reflective lane markers? Self-driving cars?
Hey, no metaphor is perfect.
