Leadership teams have been drilled to believe that faster is better. Consider, decide, move. Quickly. The best time to solve anything was yesterday. That, in itself, assumes that the best answer is already available. However, speed is only an advantage if it’s applied at the right moment to the right effect. It’s easy to misjudge strategic tempo, and to find your action or reaction out of sync with how the change itself is developing.

This manifests in a range of ways:

• Companies launch something pre-emptively, but it is too early and the market is not ready and therefore not receptive
• They respond too late to a set of circumstances and find themselves confined within the parameters that others have already set
• They absorb the change internally and look to address it, but lose awareness of what is needed, by when and where in order to be effective
• They look to get ahead of the curve but find themselves stranded when the situation itself develops or changes course.

Different ways to respond

Judging the optimal time to address and tackle an issue is more important than doing it anyway and ticking it off as completed. Judging strategic tempo is all about knowing when to act, when to wait and what conditions need to be in place before you commit. We call this “condusivity” – the point at which you know the market is most ready for your response.

While being first to market might bring headlines and bragging rights, there can be merit in gauging response, bugs, adaptability and more. But, as Apple have proven time and again, if you do decide to enter an establishing market later, come with a bang not a copy. Use the time you have taken to absorb insights, add value and redefine the category in your favour.

Paced innovation is another example of responding to change. Meet the change. Assess the change. Navigate the change. Re-set your relationship with the market, investors and customers through your drip-fed response to the change.

Too fast is just as dangerous as too slow

Here’s a lovely set of thoughts on strategic tempo from JP Castlin:

“Most firms do not fail because they are too slow; they fail because they are moving at the wrong tempo relative to the pace and type of change around them. [But] in strategy, rushing can be just as dangerous as dragging; it may create churn, false urgency, exposure, and costly catch-up … the longer the gap between change, understanding, decision, and action, the greater the strategic risk.”

Warning signs

Moving too early will cost you educating the market and the risk of false start. Acting too late may mean the best position in an emerging market has already been claimed and you are boxed in or out of a leadership opportunity.

But it’s not just about timing. If your strategic tempo is off, it’s usually a sign that other aspects of your strategy need review and adjustment.

• If you find you’re launching too early, that’s a good sign that you need to better understand the context in which you operate
• If you find you’re late to a market change, your strategy is not attuned to the pace of the market
• If you are oscillating between waiting too long and not waiting long enough, you need to examine your decision tree.

4 questions that should drive your strategic tempo

1. Change: Why has this got our attention?
2. Understanding: Do we understand what it is, where it could lead and what that might mean?
3. Decision: Do we agree what we require to make decisions now and moving forward?
4. Action: Are we acting because we’ve decided, or because we feel pressure to act?

Define your Confident Future

Being confident about your future prepares you well for how to act. It means you are making the above decisions, already knowing:

• Where you will compete (so you’re not reacting to everything, everywhere)
• What you mean (so your moves are in keeping with how you define the business)
• How you will grow (so decisions align with wider plans, capacity, resources and opportunities)

Without that backbone, the default strategic tempo is almost certain to be blind urgency motivated by FOMO.

Right now, every leader is facing pressure, disruption and shift across their spheres of influence. Defining your Confident Future provides a clear perspective for how you can best act and respond, and at the right pace, so that you are ready.

If things have already changed and you are already under pressure to make big decisions, please contact us to discuss your strategic position.

Once your tempo is aligned with your intent, the next challenge is locking in the attitudes and behaviours your people need to keep pace via a Principled Culture.

The post Strategic tempo is a crucial leadership skill appeared first on The Audacity Group.

A north star purpose should be the glue uniting and aligning your culture and your strategy across times of organisational or market change. But for many CHROs, leadership’s driving focus on business outcomes comes at the expense of championing what inspires people.

There are four warning signs we always look for in evaluating if purpose is under-powered. Teams don’t connect the purpose to daily behaviours and performance. There is clear misalignment between what’s driving the strategy and what defines the culture. Values and vision feel generic and are seldom cited as part of decision-making. And/or teams within the organisation have their own sense of identity and embedded identity.

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Executive brief

Q: What is a north star purpose?

A north star purpose is an organisation’s guiding ideal — the enduring reason for being that directs strategy, culture, and behaviour. It serves as a compass for decision-making and cultural alignment.

Q: Why is a north star purpose important for CHROs and leadership teams?

It helps CHROs to strategically align culture, engagement and leadership behaviour. A clear purpose unifies teams, drives motivation and anchors change during transformation.

Q: How is a north star purpose different from a vision or mission?

Vision describes the future state of the organisation; mission explains what people do daily; north star purpose expresses the ultimate difference the company seeks to make in the world.

Q: What are the risks of not having a clear purpose?

Without purpose, organisations drift. They lose alignment, employee engagement declines and decision-making becomes reactive instead of principled.

Q: How can CHROs turn purpose into culture?

By embedding purpose into leadership expectations, cultural rituals and performance frameworks, CHROs create a “Principled Culture” — where purpose influences both the cultural experience and business outcomes.

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Aspirational, not astronomical

Keith Yamashita started it. At least, that’s where we first heard it. Your north star purpose is an ideal of your company or brand that burns bright in front of you and your staff, that leads you on, that fires you up and that you never let out of your sight …

It’s the brand and the culture you dream of being. It’s what your people long to be part of. And it’s who your customers always hoped you would be and that your competitors can’t be.

At Audacity, we talk about north star thinking like this: we define ambition or purpose as the greatest change you as a business or brand want to see in the world.

But we also place it in a context that ensures it is informed by other agendas. Your north star purpose, in our view, is tempered by your vision, which we define as the greatest change you want to see within your own company. And sometimes by mission, which is what your people come to work to achieve every day.

We also link north star purpose to a vital decision-making tool we developed called the benchmark question. Without a purpose, you risk drifting.

Why north star purpose works

In an article on Purpose, Not Platitudes, McKinsey state that when a company or brand has an activated purpose (i.e. one they act on) and that purpose aligns with what truly matters to people within the culture, people are far more engaged, far more likely to stay, and far more likely to advocate for their company. Organisations that achieve this cultural coherence reported close to 80% engagement among employees and an even higher intention to stay compared to a 20% engagement level for organisations that didn’t do purpose well.

Purpose may seem abstract to many leaders, but, across the enterprise, so many people can see that north star in some form. When we ask people in workshops about the company or the brand culture they dream of working for, they can tell us, sometimes in amazing detail, what it looks like, how it feels to be part of that , what it’s renowned for.

At times, it seems like they can almost reach out and touch it. What they often can’t see or touch is how they leave where they are and get to where they would most like to be.

If you’re a CHRO looking to strengthen or change your organisation’s strategic direction, framing what you are doing around a north star objective, and having these conversations around what is possible, can be extremely powerful. We call this building your Principled Culture.

North of where they are

It’s natural for people to look for tangible ways to improve things. If you’re engaging with people on purpose as a leader, listen very carefully to what you are being told. Many of the ideas will be insightful and important. They can often represent powerful improvement opportunities: fast and effective quick wins that will help shift the momentum.

But, at the same time, be careful how you treat this information. Chances are what you are hearing is, at some level, a variation on today. Taken literally, it’s probably an improvement on the reality people are part of – rather than an indication of where you truly need to be heading in order to be world-changing.

To disrupt your existing model and reset your competitiveness, you need to step-change how people feel about your culture, how they connect with it, what they understand the future could be.

Contribution to purpose should feature as an ongoing consideration in how leaders evaluate performance.

Three steps to turning purpose into practice

You want your people to make an emotional shift in direction: to commit to feeling a different way about the company and to approaching their work with a different mindset. Without that, leadership teams will often define success based on their own priorities: ROI, engagement, reputation … Those measures are all important but they’re not universal enough to directly achieve a deeper sense of alignment across functions.

The first step is to give people permission to dream. People will tell you what needs to change if you let them: but first decision-makers need to foster an environment where those conversations and challenges feel welcome.

Then, instead of asking “what do you think this company should be like?”, we ask “what would you like to feel that you don’t feel now?”. There are a number of ways to discover this. For example, you can use the Emotional Culture Deck to identify the emotional shifts needed in your culture.

The answers help build an emotional gap analysis of the company you are versus the company your clients and your staff would like you to be. Once you know that, you’re ready to develop a strategy for the emotional connections the brand and the culture must look to generate from the inside-out.

The third step is to set a north star purpose that recalibrates who in the world you think you are and what you think you’re here for. We do this in a range of ways, but usually through workshops or strategic sessions informed by interviews with people throughout the organisation.

Purpose should be purposeful

So, a purpose is powerful and potentially very good for your culture. But do you really need one? And are there options? Does purpose have to be all-in?

For a time there, purpose was every marketer’s golden word. It felt like there was  purpose in everything and everywhere you looked.

Inevitably, there was a backlash. Fund manager Terry Smith famously took aim at Unilever, saying that the organisation’s focus on sustainability and brand purpose had jeopardised performance. He singled out Hellemann’s mayonnaise as an example, stating that the purpose of the brand extended to creating better salads and sandwiches.

A middle ground formed. Mark Ritson, in an article titled Good purpose Bad purpose, makes the point that purpose itself is neither good nor bad. It is a strategic choice, not a dogmatic must-have, he argues, and execution is everything. Many get it wrong, because they put pursuit of purpose ahead of everything else, and fall flat on their face.

“Review your market.
Review your category and the role your brand plays within it.
And review your competitors, and the room that purpose would allow for distinctiveness and differentiation against them.
And then make the decision.”

In other words, treat purpose as a strategic opportunity and evaluate the need for it on that basis.

“Some brands in a multi-brand group should be purpose-driven and some, by definition of market, heritage, category and competition, should not.” If purpose is not applied this way, and is instead treated as a must-have, then the very point of having one – as a focus for strategic differentiation – devolves to just being the latest marketing panacea.

There are two potential north stars. They look the same …But they will take you to different places.

The different ways organisational purpose is applied

Our experience is that purpose is applied in a range of ways, and with varying degrees of success. Too often, it comes up in conversation (at brand or cultural strategy level) only to be left there, once that work is completed. To our minds, that’s an influential indicator lost for CHROs. Purpose should feature as an ongoing consideration in a shared leadership framework.

In an eloquent article in HBR, Ranjay Gulati reviews his in-depth research on how mission-driven organisations—both old and young, and spanning a variety of industries and geographies—succeed. His research advocates for using purpose as a north star to clarify priorities and inspire action in situations where trade-offs must be made. It also requires leaders to lean into such deliberations in consultation with stakeholders.

He breaks the application of purpose down into four groups:

1. Deep purpose organisations are those that are deeply committed to pursuing purpose through dips and rises in commercial and social outcomes.
2. Organisations with convenient purpose talk about purpose but act on it only in superficial ways.
3. Some treat purpose as a peripheral issue: taking part in corporate social responsibility efforts, but keeping them separate from their core business.
4. Finally, there are those who take a balanced view, looking for a win-win for both profit and purpose.

Why leadership needs an organisational north star

The secret to making purpose work well if you want to be a deep purpose organisation, Gulati suggests, is:

• Have a north star purpose, and state it clearly. Make it an active decision filter.
• Resist the urge to dodge tough decisions that your true north purpose may generate and instead live with the discomfort, ambiguity, and contradiction to make effective trade-offs.
• Look beyond short-term win-wins to accept good-enough-for-now solutions that will lead to broader long-term benefits.
• Communicate your decisions clearly and effectively to stakeholders.

Embedding purpose in culture: identifying the right north for your purpose

Taken together, all these ideas point to an inherent trick-of-the-light in finding your north star purpose. There are two potential north stars. They look the same. They broadly head in the same direction. But they will take you to different places.

If your purpose aims true north, it is the yardstick for everything you do. You literally take your direction from it. Sticking with a true north star purpose includes tackling the trade-offs needed to get there and to change the world. It requires you to prioritise aligning everything else to your purpose.

We think true north lies at the end of this question: What changes will we look to contribute to in the world as proof that we are on-purpose?

If your purpose looks magnetic north, it sets a direction that your people and investors feel comfortable having but one that is much less demanding. You use purpose as an intention rather than a commitment. It does not drive your strategy.

We think magnetic north lies at the end of this question: How will we need to feel and work as a company, and how will our customers need to feel about us, in order for our investors to be making the money they deserve?

Both work to achieve change – but at different levels of intensity. The role of your cultural strategy is to help your company or brand find its best north in the light of all the factors that Ritson sets out. And then for the CHRO to take the culture from there.

Checklist: Three questions for leaders around purpose

1. What difference would it make to your decision-making if your true north purpose was a consideration factor? Satya Nadella of Microsoft once observed that purpose should be used to bring clarity, alignment and intensity.
2. Presumably, you’re already using measures like engagement, retention and productivity to monitor your people outcomes. What measures could you meaningfully introduce to monitor your purpose outcomes? Purpose is not just about what you believe. It’s about what you decide, and why – and how your people feel about those decisions.
3. Could purpose be the missing factor in motivating your culture to successfully lift performance to the next level? As Indra Nooyi, the former CEO of PepsiCo once said, “We do better … by doing better”.

How to find your north star purpose

As per earlier, identifying your true north purpose is pivotal to forming a Principled Culture. Alongside your vision, role in market and values, your purpose drives your culture’s shared belief system. It provides a motivating and shared focus. This is particularly important if you’re competing in rapidly evolving markets.

If your leadership team hasn’t defined its north star purpose, our Culture-fy strategic session is an accelerated option for people leaders and decision makers to enable the wider brand culture to purposefully thrive.

In less than a day, we can help you clarify and broadly articulate what a true north purpose should look like for you, and start a conversation about ways for CHROs and other leaders to embed that idea (and its implications) into the wider business as a key decision filter. Please contact us to find out more.

Acknowledgements

Photo by Allen Y on Unsplash

This article has been significantly updated since it was first published.

The post Why people leaders need to clearly set a north star purpose appeared first on The Audacity Group.

Our structured brand strategy process is all about helping leaders to diagnose challenges, redefine market position and align their people behind a shared direction. To do that, we translate market pressures and your ambitions as a leadership team into a business-aligned framework to drive performance, strengthen differentiation and ensure cultural focus.

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Executive brief

Q: When should leaders consider a brand strategy process?

Our brand strategy process helps organisations clarify challenges, transform how their brand creates value, and validate the new direction. It’s designed for companies looking to increase their brand performance metrics, pivoting, under pressure, or seeking a reset in how they compete and are perceived.

Q: What are the three phases of a brand strategy process?

The process includes:

1. Clarification – uncovering real issues and opportunities using insights from customers, stakeholders, competitors, and data.
2. Transformation – redefining what the brand stands for, including its positioning, name, identity, and story.
3. Validation – testing and refining the strategy internally to ensure alignment, credibility, and buy-in before rollout.

Q: How does a robust brand strategy process connect to business performance?

It links brand strategy directly to business outcomes by aligning brand meaning with strategic intent. The brand becomes a lever for margin growth, differentiation, employee engagement  and resolute reputation management.

Q: How do we use AI in the brand strategy process?

AI supports analysis by finding patterns across stakeholder interviews, industry data and customer insights. It helps identify themes, validate hypotheses and create informed personas, adding rigour to our human interpretation.

Q: What tools and frameworks are included?

Key tools include the Brand Report Card, a Brand DNA model (based on Kapferer’s Brand Prism or a custom framework), Opportunity Statement and the 6 Shares model for evaluating success.

Q: What outcomes should leaders expect from a brand strategy process?

A unified, confident brand that clarifies market position, strengthens competitive differentiation, and provides decision-makers with clear guiderails for how to best use their brand to align meaning and margin.

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Best Future is our brand strategy process for organisations looking to build a Confident Brand. It focuses on gaining a strong understanding of your organisation’s business issues and how to best resolve them through the lens of the brand. It’s a brand transformation strategy program for companies that are looking to achieve brand-driven growth, pivoting, under-performing, under competitive pressure or looking to re-set their place in a market and how they are perceived and understood through their brands.

Key business outcomes

Of course, a brand transformation strategy process must focus on defining the brand and what it can mean. But beyond that, a brand definition framework should also clarify a number of other business impacts:

• How each brand within the company’s portfolio aligns with the overall strategy, and the role it plays in fulfilling revenue and reputational aims
• How senior decision makers can leverage the redefined brand to reinforce market positioning and increase overall competitiveness
• How the brand can support (and justify) planned upticks in margin and/or volume
• How the brand can align with the overall culture (through the creation of a brand culture) to focus operational performance

Further reading: Why linking strategy, culture and stories matters

Too often, leaders respond to the brand strategy process at surface levels. The temptation is to pigeon-hole “brand” as a communication or marketing tool rather than assessing where and how the brand(s) are, or should be, contributing value to the business. So people concentrate on the outputs rather than the implications and application of those outputs to the achievement of the business’s broader objectives.

The secret to brand-led business strategy is for senior leaders contemplating a brand strategy process to ask these two questions:

• What do we want our brand(s) to achieve that it is not delivering?
• Why will doing this now work to our competitive advantage?

Asking these two questions helps generate what is too often missing: leadership agenda -brand alignment.

Case in point

Several years ago, we did work for an educational institution that was facing falling volumes. Initial discussions with the senior team focused on refreshing the look and feel to help the brand feel more relevant. We saw immediately that was not going to be enough.

Subsequently, we were able to work with that team to probe deeper. We challenged them to ‘justify’ their role in the market by defining their specific place and contribution to the sector. Repositioning them to that place separated them from other players. It also gave them a specific audience to pursue, a clear presence, and a basis for building a distinctive DNA.

But we didn’t stop there. We asked the senior team to probe the business strategy and, in doing so, to define what success looked like. We were then able to systematically link their new brand with key objectives.

For example, perceived lack of relevance about the institution itself was affecting course interest and therefore revenues. A key opportunity for the brand was to elevate the institution into the “active consideration” set. This in turn lifted enquiries and supported the sales team to increase conversions. Face-lifting the brand was part of making this – but much more important was connecting all the dots from what needed to happen for the business to succeed to how the new brand could be applied to directly assist course recruiters.

Here are three further questions you can ask as you start to set your brand’s strategic direction.

“Invest in this level of brand strategy process if you’re depending on your brand as your primary signal in the marketplace, and you need to systematically upgrade its effectiveness.”

Not an immediate solution

Timing can be a key tension for organisations looking at this level of change. Sometimes, the organisation is already being impacted by what’s happening and there is pressure to act quickly to resolve the pain. (As the truism goes: it’s always the wrong time for a crisis.) If that’s the case, while a transformation program may offer the fullest solution in such circumstances, perhaps you’re better off starting with something quicker, like a strategy session, to get things underway. That way, people can why a brand strategy process aligns with the circumstances you are facing. There’s more on that at the end of this piece.

Full disclosure: building a brand strategy through this level of transformational process is not a fast-track exercise, and, inevitably, it raises questions and crosses boundaries beyond marketing. But if you’re depending on your brand(s) as your primary signal in the marketplace, it’s an investment well worth considering. And it’s something we’d recommend if your brand is under-powered for your ambitions and you need to systematically upgrade its effectiveness.

Our brand strategy process won’t immediately fix your sales performance. It won’t directly change your operational capacity – although it will, and should, deeply influence the tenor of your culture. What it will do is provide the definition and identifying guide rails for how you need to be understood internally and externally if you are to succeed.

Want to see a business case for doing this? Read: How to decide if you need a brand strategy

Positioning and strategy

By the way, there are a full range of terms that marketers use around brand. Definitions vary, and as a result, this can lead to considerable confusion around what is meant. We try and keep the range of terms we use reasonable, but the distinctions between concepts are important:

• Brand strategy – what the brand itself embodies and why that matters for all concerned. This is how you create, develop and define “the most powerful understanding you have of yourselves and others have of you” (our definition)
• Vs Brand positioning – when we use this term, we are referring to where you position your brand in an evolving market to achieve greatest competitive advantage. (Others use it to denote what a brand means to customers.)
• Vs Marketing strategy – by this, we mean how the brand builds momentum in the market through the 4Ps.
• Vs Brand identity – when we use this term, we are specifically referred to the designed expression of the brand.

More on this: How to develop a brand positioning strategy; and Brand strategy vs creative strategy

While brand positioning defines the exact part of a market you must be in to be competitive, your brand strategy defines what you will stand for and what you will mean. Through our  brand strategy process, we address both these aspects because we consider them inseparable.

How we structure our brand strategy process

In our model, there are three phases to every brand strategy process:

• Clarification – where the issues facing the brand come to light and stakeholders gain a better understanding of the opportunities and what they are up against.
• Transformation – where the meaning and understanding of the brand is redefined to better align with and support the business strategy.
• Validation – where the new brand is socialised and discussed as part of adopting it as business as usual.

Getting clear on what’s required

Perhaps the hardest part of finding any answer is resolving what the actual problem is. It’s tempting to react to numbers, media coverage or customer feedback and respond accordingly. Symptoms like these often kick off what we work on, but they are seldom the real problem. In our work on culture, we look for an underlying agitation for why people feel and work the way they do. This is similar: the goal is to recognise not just what is happening, but where and why.

Forage for insights

Larger organisations will have brand tracking like Tracksuit that shows what is happening from a metrics point of view. Combined with the original motive for the project, this often points to areas that warrant further investigation. Conversations and workshops are opportunities to dig deeper into these aspects and explore other motives. Meetings with stakeholders point to what those outside the brand are experiencing and expecting. Industry sweeps and competitors’ annual reports and investor documents provide background on pressures, trends and opportunities.

Indeed, the key to a comprehensive brand discovery process is sourcing a full range of insights that pertain to the brand. The goal is to explore a broad range of pressures and expectations being brought to bear – from regulators to investment funds to lobbyists. In the course of those discussions, we encounter insights, history, perspectives, actions and more that, cumulatively, influence how the brand is, and could be, understood in the public domain. Combined with internal perspectives, these should render a clearer view of where the brand excels, where it fails and where it needs to step up its presence.

The broader you can make these points of reference, the better.

Defining the actual role of the brand

One of the things we look to get clear on very early is what are the expectations of decision makers around the brand. How do they perceive its role? And what are their expectations around how it adds value? That might seem like an obvious question for marketers but our experience is that many leaders don’t even think of brand as having a role or indeed adding value. They see it as a media cost, not a business contributor. For example, leaders often look genuinely surprised when we point out that there is no more effective way to add margin than through changing what people perceive they are buying.

Hardwiring the role of the brand to the bottom-line performance of the business and the implementation of the strategy shifts conversations beyond the communications arena. Your brand strategy personifies what your business strategy is building. Your communications and creative strategies will then express that and bring it to life.

Did you know? There are three different types of brand strategy

What makes our brand strategy process different?

We think of transformational brand strategy as a big-change program for the business. It starts with the business drivers and looks to resolve how the brand needs to actively contribute to what the business is looking for. Only then do we turn our attention to what the brand could personify in order for the business to succeed and what that might mean for marketing strategy, brand identity, content development and more.

How we apply AI

Not so long ago, our analysis of this part of the brand strategy process would have focused on the human out-takes. Increasingly though, we’re finding there’s a role for AI in brand strategy to add further perspectives to what we have learned. AI-assisted brand insight development can bring together data-driven, customer-driven, market-driven and stakeholder-driven brand perspectives. For example, AI is great for finding common patterns of thinking across transcribed meetings. It’s also good for deep-diving into what is already known about sectors and using that detail to fill out key learnings at a market and industry level. And of course, we can use it to develop personas and test hypotheses and conclusions based on what is already known.

Initial deliverables

Through interrogating the actual and emerging situation against current market positioning, perceptions and reputation, we look to gain a clear understanding of where the brand stands now, what agitants are in play, where gaps or shortfalls are emerging and what the material impacts are. We present these findings back in two forms: a Summary of Conversations, that captures what we have heard; and a Brand Report Card that sets out what we are seeing.

Verifying what you have heard

In large organisations, where you have engaged with a large number of stakeholders over an extended timeframe, it can be useful to double back and check key findings with a representative group. We did this with a large public entity several years ago, and it proved invaluable. Using a framework of 12 statements, we asked the group to rate our assessments.

Two things emerged. The first was that the group felt more progress had been made in one area than we had given credit for. We re-investigated on that basis. The second was some specific wording feedback that the group said leaders would struggle with. The changes may have been subtle, but as every presenter knows, using a triggering word when feeding back to executives can quickly derail your intentions.

In presenting back what we have found, the goal is use insights to confirm key impressions and reach agreement on what the brand strategy needs to resolve for the business. On that basis, we can align and prioritise business and brand objectives, identify key audiences and set a time horizon for the brand strategy itself.

Distillation establishes the opportunity

The second half of the Clarification phase involves distilling everything gleaned so far down to a small set of priorities. This is also when we look to envisage what success looks like. This intense period of review and analysis sets up a critical Brand Situation presentation where we lay out the strongest business challenge as we see it, an intended response and an indication of the shifts in the business and the culture required for the reworked brand to do its work effectively.

This analysis and presentation can go through several iterations as people challenge presumptions or introduce aspects or opportunities. It’s not unusual too for this presentation to have different formats: detailed, for the project team; tighter; for the senior leadership team; and briefest to fit within the crowded Board schedule.

 It can be useful at this point to agree on an Opportunity Statement. Here’s one way to frame that:

It’s time to define the intended brand

This Statement forms the brief for the next phase of the strategy: Transformation. Again, there are a number of things to resolve in this part of the brand strategy process:

There’s always more than one solution to any brand situation. Decision-makers will naturally want to know what we have considered and why we’ve made the choices you have. We deal with that overtly by openly considering the various directions open to the brand strategy. We consider the strengths and weaknesses of each option before making a final recommendation on how to proceed.

Knowing what the brand must achieve then directly drives how the brand is defined. We refer to this as developing the brand DNA. Strategists do this to differing levels of detail and using various mechanisms. We look to define the brand in as much detail as needed to grasp what it means without looking to over-complicate that definition with too many artifacts. Behind the scenes, that often involves “testing” how strong the brand will be by trying various types of definition, and then refining that back to a palatable list of characteristics that provide real guidance.

Different forms of brand DNA

We use two versions, depending on how much detail is required: a model based on Kapferer’s Brand Prism, which essentially puts the brand definition on a page; and a more nuanced Brand Definition Framework which sets out what you will promise and what you will deliver as a brand going forward. This Brand Definition Framework guides not just expression but also brand culture and of course marketing communications, ensuring consistent interpretation and adoption of the brand and its spirit across teams and throughout the business.

If a new name is needed, this is the time to consider that. Knowing what the brand must achieve and how it intends to change current perceptions (if any) is a strong basis for a naming brief. The process itself is involved – not least of all because names are so subjective. But we find that establishing territories on the basis of the brand definition gives decision makers a set of criteria for judging whether a name is right. (Even after you’ve found a name, there’s still a ways to go. Availability and protectability can strongly influence what makes the final cut.)

A powerful creative brief inspires visually

At this point, there is usually enough understanding to write a creative brief for the visual identity. This document marks the beginning of brand activation planning: how the brand itself will come to life visually and verbally. It’s easily overlooked or undercooked, but this part of the brand strategy process is very important. The key to getting this right is providing the design team with the right level of detail to do their work. Bynder’s 12 elements provide a useful structure:

(Proposed) brand name

Background

Strategy summary

Key audiences

Drivers and objectives for the visual brand

High-level competitor overview

Key messages and shifts

Personality guidelines

Relevant assets and deliverables

Key channels where the brand will be seen

Decision process (and key stakeholders)

Budget

Project timeline

Visual identity development is not part of what we do directly, but it’s a critical outcome of the brand strategy process. Design literally makes your new brand visible. It’s a comprehensive process in its own right and one that requires time, patience and attention to detail to get right. Pick your design partner very carefully, making sure they have the experience, resources and flair to do justice to all the hard work completed so far.

Adding story and structure

While the brand identity development is underway, the next phase of the Transformation phase for us involves sharing the newly defined brand in story form. This could be a piece of prose, a presentation or in the form of a video script. The goal is to give first expression to the brand in language that people can easily and quickly absorb. In particular, this form of the brand story looks to share what the brand is looking to achieve and the future it envisages. This should become the long story form of your story – the over-arching narrative that lays out your strategic intentions.

The final element of the Transformation phase is to agree on the brand architecture – in other words, how the brand is structured (and therefore seen). This is particularly important if the brand is one of a number of brands marketed by a company.

In broad terms, there are four options: masterbrand (where everything is under one brand name); house of brands (where the brands all appear independent of each other); branded house (where the brands all have a clear relationship with each other under a common brand name); and endorsed (where the brand has its own identity but is supported by a master brand).

Some brand portfolios use a combination of these structures. Terms vary slightly, but here’s a useful guide on how to choose the best model for your business (courtesy of Pariveda).

A series of grouped presentations

We present this work to stakeholders for approval and sign-off in a range of ways. Our recommendation would always be more, short presentations rather than a magnum opus. Naming should probably be a set of presentations in its own right. So should the development of the visual identity and wider visual language. Brand DNA, story and architecture recommendations come together well as a presentation and help people see how the new brand will work.

Validating what’s been decided

Many strategists might consider that the end of the brand strategy process. For us though, there is still one more important phase to go: the brand validation phase. This mirrors the validation that took place at the end of the brand discovery phase. Except now, the new proposed brand is under review.

This phase is not about watering down decisions or relitigating what has been decided. It is an opportunity to present the brand to those within the business and beyond to test reaction, gather feedback, absorb reservations and correct any oversights. Assembling a sample group and then engaging with them in detailed discussions about what has been decided not only gathers allies, it also ensures that key influencers in the business feel involved and included.

Setting clear boundaries for this review process, and limiting the timeframe for feedback, will help keep things on track. We invite people to be candid and constructive, not to wordsmith yet (unless there is a specific reason to do so) and to consider what they are being shown in the light of the challenges facing the business rather than what they themselves would or would not buy.

Guiding assessment through the 6 shares

Different organisations will discuss what constitutes success, and the role of the brand in getting there, but one straight-forward way to assess expectations is through our ‘6 shares’ model. Here, we set out in clear terms what the brand must deliver and the contribution it will make to overall success:

1. Market share – the presence you intend to have in your market through your brand
2. Heart share – how you want people to feel about you, and connect with you, through your brand
3. Head share – what you want your brand to mean to your people, your customers and even your competitors
4. Eye share – how you intend to show up in market with this brand (and the commitment you’re prepared to make to gain that attention)
5. Profit share – the shift you want to see in margins for the brand
6. Earth share – what you are doing to deliver a brand that is sustainable, responsible and circular in its design (i.e. non-waste producing)

Structured conversations like this provide powerful criteria for decision makers to assess what has been developed, and to evaluate the capability of the proposed brand to express and accelerate these ideas. Most importantly, thinking about the brand this way ensures the strategy is judged in terms of its ability to ‘move the dial’ on a range of fronts.

(For those who like symmetry, there’s no reason why the 6 shares could not be used also at the outset to set expectations for what the brand strategy must deliver.)

Checklist: 11 elements to include in your brand strategy framework

Always bring momentum to the final presentation

There’s another important reason to undertake this validation. At the final presentation to the Board and/or senior leadership group, someone will inevitably ask if you have tested this approach, at least internally, and whether you are confident that it will work.

Validation is a chance to show that you have important internal buy-in, that you have made adjustments based on this final check, that you have expectations for what the brand strategy can achieve and that you have a launch network in place to champion the brand internally and in the market when it is launched.

The brand strategy process is an investment in your competitiveness. It should define and enhance what you offer, how you can outsmart others in your field and how you can achieve the margins you’re looking for.

Outcomes of the brand strategy process

As we have said elsewhere, a successful brand strategy should light a path from where things are now for a brand within your business to where opportunity seems strongest. A brand strategy helps you identify the specific choices to win in your marketplace. It should define and enhance what you offer, but your brand strategy should also set out how you can  outsmart others in your field and how you can achieve the margins you’re looking for.

Knowing this, you are ready to start working through your brand rollout strategy with confidence.

The brand strategy process is an investment in your competitiveness. The hard questions that it provokes can make some uncomfortable – but taking the time to really probe what makes you a distinctive presence in your market will pay off well for those prepared to bring open minds to the process.

Ready to explore your Best Future?

We call our brand strategy process Best Future because it is about not settling for just a better future. The goal has to be to identify and express not just what success looks like, but why. It should also look at how your brand or brands can best work to achieve that.

A Confident Brand is more than one that the marketing team believes in. It’s a non-fungible  asset that has the ongoing confidence of decision makers. It makes sense, it aligns with their priorities and it achieves a visible difference to business performance. If you are not consciously strategising for your brand to contribute in that way, then it is probably being under-utilised.

Further reading: What makes for a successful brand strategy?

At some stage, those who engage in a brand strategy process reach the point where they recognise that their brand is either not paying its way. Or it should be doing more for the brand budgeted for it. Perhaps a new brand is needed if the business is to progress. If you’ve got to that point either independently or in discussion with your colleagues, we’d love to talk through how we can help.

Further reading: If you’re not sure whether you need to change or update your brand strategy, here’s our guide on how to audit and improve brand strategy.

Or start smaller

As we mentioned earlier, if you truly don’t have the time to embark on a detailed brand strategy process, there are alternatives. We can talk about running a Brand Blueprint workshop with your team to boost what your brand means for the business. That will deliver you a working definition in weeks. Or we can run a strategic session like Know your Place. Use this to identify the options for you to own your own category within your market. That will give you options to discuss further in the room, on the day. Please contact us to find out more.

Acknowledgements

Photo by Isaac Davis on Unsplash

The post Inside Our Brand Strategy Process | Building a Confident Brand appeared first on The Audacity Group.

Ask the internet for the difference between brand culture vs company culture and the consensus seems to be that organisational or company culture looks inward, while brand culture focuses on how customers and other stakeholders experience the brand. Frankly, there’s a bit more to it than that.

Company culture brings structure

Company culture tends to focus on the logical, structural and procedural mainstays of how a business works. It provides the framework for how and why people would want to come together and be part of the entity.

Working with the construct

If you think about it, there is nothing natural about the way organisations are structured. Every day, people with different backgrounds, interests, personalities and levels of experience and involvement come together to resolve and deliver on a set of targets that they often had little say in setting. It’s a set-up fraught with tension because it brings together expectations, egos, agendas and more in a confined space.

And so the company culture acts to put boundaries (and incentives) around what will be permitted. It’s characterised by alignment and foundational expectations around how people relate to one another and how they contribute to fulfilment of the company’s goals. Company culture also sets out norms for where formal and informal decision-making takes place, how teams position themselves in relation to others, and what they are expected to do to ensure things operate safely, within regulations and as expected.

Bad things happen without boundaries

All of this is vitally important. Without these rules, expectations and ways of working, business would be unstructured, anarchic and narcissistic. Turpitude may be lucrative, at least in the short term, but it is also self-deceptive, menacing, damaging and ultimately destructive. Gustavo Razzetti draws attention to what happened at places like WeWork, Uber, Theranos and more when the controls loosened and bad inclinations became mindsets and then norms.

That’s why, within our Principled Culture model, the company culture is defined by rational things like: controls and rules; remuneration; structure; leadership (style), decision-making and safety. It includes all the things that the culture uses to establish, monitor and develop an operating framework.

Brand culture channels emotions

By contrast, brand culture focuses on discretion and competitiveness. Its role is to bring the brand, or each brand for those organisations with a portfolio of brands, alive and to deliver on what customers, potential employees and investors expect of the brand.

We’ve defined what a brand culture is here. The immediate and noticeable difference is that a brand culture operates from a distinctive and competitive belief set. It sets itself against rivals and looks to out-perform them through the strategy it works with and the ability of teams, individuals and supply chains to deliver on-brand products, services and experiences. Through doing this well, a brand culture consolidates the position and perception of the brand in the market, enabling it to deliver on expectations.

Because of this, brand culture plays to the emotive intelligence and strengths of people working within an organisation. It is the agile, human, empowered and relatable side of a modern day entity. In our model, brand culture encompasses beliefs, behaviours, signals, workplace environments and how easily people feel they can innovate and respond to what happens in a marketplace. In a powerful brand culture, people respond based on the brand rather than ‘by the book’.

Brands come to life through people

A brand culture recognises that today’s consumers buy brands habitually and expect the people who they associate with that brand to behave in ways that conform with their perceptions of what that brand will be. The brands embody particular ideas, and buyers expect the people they deal with to align with that. For buyers, that consistency is a trust factor. Brands keep their promises through their people, and therefore through their brand culture.

Company cultures value conformity

Most company cultures value the same things, for all the reasons given above. They think about what they want people to do, rather than what they want them to feel. In the eyes of many decision makers, company values should set out the minimal attitudinal and quality standards for participation. So they trot out “values” that sound exactly the same as everyone else, including all their competitors. According to research cited by Gustavo Razzetti, 90% of large organisations reference ethical behaviour or use the word “integrity,” 88% mention commitment to customers, and 76% cite teamwork and trust.

Brand cultures lock in differences

In contrast to the company culture, a powerful brand culture is looking to lock-in the differences in attitude and belief that make it distinctive from its competitors. To do that, it does three things: it shares a purpose and vision with the brand strategy to ensure the highest goals are consistent; it articulates values and behaviours that are special to the brand and that endorse, emotionally, what the culture needs to think and feel to perform; and it shapes a brand enemy that acts as a focus point for what the brand most wants to counter.

To do this, it brings an edgy attitude and upbeat language to the cultural code that encourages people to go beyond what they might have been told to do elsewhere. A brand culture should be fearless and confident – encouraging positive tribalism and giving people real opportunities to speak up for the brand. Acknowledgement, belonging and support sit alongside candour, brand passion and open access to leaders and brand owners to make the best things happen for the brand.

Further reading: How to develop, lock in and apply powerful brand values

Together, differently

Company culture and brand culture represent an holistic way of bringing people together. Instead of brand culture vs company culture, each complements and counter-balances the other. Which also explains why they can show up quite differently.

For a company culture, the signs of success are unity and harmony within the culture. For a brand culture, however, success is all about interpreting the strategy, and configuring teams in the right ways emotionally to project the brand into the market in ways that win over audiences.

If there is only one brand across the organisation, brand culture vs company culture ideally operates like left vs right brain – fusing discipline and energy into a co-ordinated, responsive whole. But if there are several brands, then each may have its own distinct culture – influenced and infused by how each culture defines itself, the markets it works in and the success markers the brand pursues.

Interested to find out more about how a Principled Culture could work to lift your brand’s overall performance? Need help aligning your brand strategy or how you should reconcile your brand culture vs company culture? Contact us to talk through the differences with our strategist.

Acknowledgements
Photo by Margarida CSilva on Unsplash

The post Brand culture vs company culture: What’s the difference? appeared first on The Audacity Group.

A brand is as strong as its storytelling, and the business that it supports. Storytelling is how leaders effectively humanise strategy. By understanding brand storytelling as a whole – what it is, how it aligns with the business objectives and where you currently are in that storyline – leaders and marketers can get out in front of short-term communication objectives and better understand and control the whole story they need to tell.

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Executive brief

Q: What is the relationship between brand storytelling and business strategy?
Storytelling is how leadership shares goals, turning strategy into a narrative that people can  believe in and act on.

Q: Why should CEOs and CMOs prioritise brand storytelling?
It brings strategy to life through emotion and meaning. When leadership defines and champions the story, every message reinforces strategic direction and builds trust.

Q: How does brand storytelling support brand strategy?
It ensures strategy is lived and shared, not just documented.

Q: What makes an effective brand story?
Alignment with business strategy, authenticity to the brand and interest for the audience.

Q: What types of brand stories work best?
We give 12 examples in this article, based around four themes: From the beginning; Something attained or transformed; An ongoing quest; and High emotions.

Q: How can leadership start improving brand storytelling?
Align brand narrative with strategic intent, use storytelling to maintain coherence across teams and touchpoints, and use it to guide decision-making and innovation. In managing how your brand executes on your storytelling strategy, we suggest you set four goals: distinctive presence; internal coherence; co-ordinated narratives; and flexibility to respond.

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The significant emphasis on data and “proof” these days should not distract decision-makers from the competitive advantages of strong storytelling. Data is largely an internal didactic. It informs, proves and quantifies decisions. But it doesn’t involve and incline stakeholders, markets and customers. It doesn’t shift the dial emotionally. Campaigns too are often ‘response bait’. They focus on short-term “performance” at the expense of building longer-term understanding and cultural salience.

Leaders that understand the power of brand storytelling can structure and express their goals and intentions in ways that take people with them. Released over time, strong, long stories “play out” in markets. They unfold, supported by products, services and innovations that make experiences stickier, richer and more distinctive. So while data proves performance, it’s storytelling that builds meaning, involvement and momentum.

Howard Schultz once said, “If you can’t tell your story, you can’t lead.” We’d take that further. “If you can’t champion, share and develop a distinctive story, you won’t have a brand worth leading over time.”

What is brand storytelling?

We define brand storytelling as the use of narrative techniques to bring a brand to life in the minds of customers. A brand strategy informs where a brand needs to go to deliver on its potential for the business. But the shifts in perception that dramatically change value equations come with changing what people understand about the brand. And that’s the role of storytelling.

Story provides sentiment. And sentiment changes inclination. The team at Emotive Brand capture this beautifully, as follows: “to lead, to differentiate, and to truly drive transformation, companies need to ask: What emotional state are we creating for our audience? … Emotion isn’t just a vibe. It’s a strategy. When teams align around the right emotional energy, they create the conditions for performance, clarity, and momentum.”

In their post, they coin an idea that we find powerful and pertinent for every leader: emotional acceleration. The ability to transform business by quickening the reaction of humans. When you move people towards what’s possible, you shift more than mindsets. You shift interest and buy-in.

Rich storytelling draw on 10 core elements to elevate the brand from just a product or service to the embodiment of an idea – expressed through a story. The goal is to bring the brand alive in the minds of the culture, investors, buyers, the media and more, so that it takes on value beyond its raw materials and functions. The best leaders know how to build emotional equity in their brand – and to generate and capture value by doing so.

“If you can’t tell a story, you can’t lead” – Howard Schultz

Understanding strategic storytelling

Every story needs a goal. In our model, we structure brand stories at five levels – ranging from the longest form to the shortest, each with its own role within the storytelling agenda. The effect is cumulative.

But to truly work, the strategic end goal must be clear. Only by knowing whether you want to put daylight between your brand and that of competitors, or whether you want to shift the affinity people have for what you offer, for example, can leaders measure and judge the contribution of storytelling to their business performance.

A key question for every CMO grappling with how to make storytelling meaningful to their peers is this: What could a story achieve that nothing else will deliver? Framed in this way, leaders come to understand brand storytelling as a unique strategic contributor rather than as just a creative plaything.

Strategic narrative and brand story

Unless the organisation and the brand are the same, strong business storytelling should align two lines of narrative that tend to remain silo-ed: the strategic narrative, which sets out, in narrative form, the intentions of the business and where your strategy is going; and the actual stories of your brand and how you intend to present those through campaigns and various media.

The secret to understanding brand storytelling is realising that stories provide the best ways to engage people. They are journeys that spike curiosity and partiality. When we hear a story, listeners instinctively “pick a side”. They want to know how things got to be the way they are, and where they’re heading. They’re looking for challenges and resolution. You need a story that works for them and also that is competitive in its own right.

This is how objectives become a narrative worth sharing.

Data alone doesn’t give you that arc. Content may well tell a story, but it tends to be more momentary. Brand storytelling animates the story of your brand’s history, character, struggles, triumphs and future. In doing that, it makes your brand relatable. And while many brand stories have common ‘chapters’, the stories themselves can vary greatly.

Four things a story must always be

It must be a story that aligns with your strategy.

As we’ve said, it has to be true to your brand.

It needs to amplify people’s reactions.

And it must be a story that adds to how others see you and value you because it confirms what they already believe.

Case in point: storytelling rebuilt the business for Lego

LEGO’s decision to become a storytelling company that sold toys, rather than the other way around, transformed their business model and completely changed how they generated and measured success.

Rebuilding their business model around a globally relevant, globally available “system of play” enabled them to inject new momentum, direction and energy into how they did business. LEGO bricks became the means for people of all ages and a diversity of interests to express themselves as never before. Instead of just being customers buying sets of bricks, buyers could become creators. They could build their own stories – or share in other stories with others.

The change in strategy became a change in story. And that new story not only redefined what the brand stood for, it literally changed the business case for growth and the relationship with customers. In choosing to re-understand what their brand could mean, LEGO rewrote not just the story they told, but what counted for success.

A whole new world of licensing opened up to them that attracted new audiences, lifted LEGO’s appeal, changed their fortunes and locked decision-making to purpose. As the company moved further and further into gaming and film, executives could ask: Does this advance the LEGO story of creativity, curiosity, and imagination? That narrative discipline became a crucial decision-making framework.

The big out-take for leaders here is how a clear narrative refocused the business strategy, re-engaged the culture and customers, added new meaning to the product and redefined success.

Finding the components for your brand story

One of the things we do in Long Arc, our brand storytelling workshop, is to look for the stories that people already know about you. These are part of your brand equity. If you are an established brand, the storytelling elements or pieces of story that you are using are contributing to how people see and relate to your brand.

Depending on your strategy, some must stay and others will be less important. Some may be distracting or unrelated to where the future of your brand lies. Audit and select.

Equally, you may have “moments” (past, current and projected) that you want to include or re-introduce into your narrative. These could be key things that have happened with the brand. They could be successes, changes of direction, new products, new markets, controversies, triumphs or collaborations. Again audit and select based on significance and interest. If you decide to keep some of these moments, then you will need to shape your brand storytelling around them.

Thirdly, look for the stories that haven’t been told, or told well, that shed new light on your brand.

By treating all these elements as contributors, you can establish how pieces of story and moments work with each other, and the cumulative impression they should be making to improve how people understand you as your brand storytelling unfolds. Here are 8 types of brand stories that you need to keep an eye on.

What does it take to tell a compelling story?

Make sure your story has the substance and the time to scale. Seth Godin explains that, “Great stories succeed because they are able to capture the imagination of large or important audiences.”

They do that, he says, by feeling true to the brand and by appealing to our senses. A strong story makes a promise but also leaves enough gaps for people to draw their own conclusions. Interestingly, stories start small and depend on contagion to gain momentum. And they can do that because they build on what people believe or are inclined to believe.

“The most effective stories match the world view of a tiny audience—and then that tiny audience spreads the story.” That’s how they get to capture large-scale imagination.

Just some of the stories you could tell

The story you choose to tell pivots on what is most compelling for audiences and most credible and competitive for your brand.

From the beginning

Your brand story might focus on chronology – on the emotive and literal journey you have taken to get to where you are.

It might focus on your founder, or your founding product.

Or your story could be based on commitments – how you came to believe what you believe now and where that will lead you.

These stories are powerful when you want your brand story to progress from one point to another.

Something attained or transformed

It could be a story of inspiration, or hard work, or discipline or innovation.

Or you may wish to tell a story based on reaching a goal that others thought impossible.

So it could be about a belief or a hunch or a mistake that led to a realisation.

Yours could be the story of a pioneer, or a laggard turned good.

Tell stories like these to reinforce the desirability and supremacy of your brand.

An ongoing quest

It could be about the formation of a community.

Perhaps it’s a story of protest, justice, persistence or triumph.

It could be a story where potential has yet to be realised.

Stories like these present your brand as a challenger and in pursuit of a noble goal.

High emotions

It could involve a battle with a brand enemy.

Or how you came to join forces with an unexpected ally.

It could be a story of love or refusal to compromise, of no money or too much money, leading to disaster and perhaps redemption.

These kinds of stories focus on people and relationships.

Further reading: Why linking strategy, culture and stories matters

Understanding brand storytelling strategically

Strong storytellers maintain “line of sight” strategically across their narratives. Their story pushes forward the brand strategy (which is in turn linked to the business strategy) and employees understand how their external storytelling aligns with purpose and their cultural DNA. None of this is happenstance. On the contrary, all of these elements are consciously aligned and leveraged, with teams under clear direction to maintain authenticity while keeping interest high.

In managing how your brand executes on your storytelling strategy, we suggest you set four goals:

• Distinctive presence: your storytelling should actively increase affinity and understanding of your brand. Measure this through brand tracking and long-term performance of your brands.
• Internal coherence: your people should have ownership of the story you are telling and its connection to what defines them as a culture. Measure this through engagement and how teams reference the story and purpose in decision making.
• Co-ordinated narratives: your stories coalesce around a core idea. Your storytelling presence feels bigger than it is. Measure this through awareness (including accuracy of awareness) as well as perceived market presence against actual spend.
• Flexibility to respond: astute storytelling means you retain control of where your brands can go through their stories. If possible, set out a set of circumstances where you would consider redirecting your story. Make sure all those involved with a brand are aware of this playbook. If you do need to pivot, monitor your Net Promoter Score as one way of checking if your story has held you steady.

How storytelling can go wrong

Stories need time, space and resources to run. A common mistake is that teams within an organisation want to change a story they are telling because they are bored and want to try something new before the story they have should have ended. There is plenty of evidence to show that, far from refreshing the brand in the minds of buyers, this leads to confusion and lower brand recognition. Equally, running too many stories causes fragmentation and dilutes impact, recognition and interest.

Stories are most powerful when they are shared – and that particularly applies to who has mandate over the story. Storytelling shouldn’t be functionally controlled. It should be a strategic asset that is executed on by experts, but it needs to be well understood and overseen by all leaders to achieve its potential. And that alignment needs to carry through to encouraging a storytelling culture. If teams don’t know the story or can’t retell the story, it simply won’t have the conscious presence it needs to be influential.

Storytelling needs to be accountable – because leaders need to be able to judge whether it’s working to the business’s advantage. Having a story is counter-productive if it’s the wrong story, or it’s not managed well or it doesn’t deliver to expectations.

Strong storytellers maintain “line of sight” strategically across their narratives.

Understanding how your brand storytelling aligns with your products and services

If your brand is closely tied to a range or ranges of products and services, and you have a release programme for how new iterations of these will reach market, you can also align these market releases with your projected story.

Gaming companies and the big film companies are masters at this. So are LEGO. Their products sit within what we call a ‘storyworld’ – an imagined universe that allows them to shuttle back and forth between the current, the history of how the story got to this point, and where the story s going next.

Product releases are slotted into the long story arc, enabling every new product or product improvement to be a reveal in its own right but also to sit within a context that is defined and cumulative.

Plotting the launch of your products and services against the trajectory of your overall story prevents what you sell being separated from what you tell. Instead, each acts as a proof point for the other.

Co-ordinating this can feel complex (especially for portfolios of brands) but it needn’t be. The key is to establish the long story arc first. Then look for opportunities across your organisation to inform and add value to where your brand storytelling is going.

Brand storytelling is a strategic leadership tool

The reason we talk about brand storytelling rather than just storytelling per se is that brand storytelling transcends the art of the tale. It is defined by and through what the brand values rather than just being a good story. Brand storytelling advances what the business wants to achieve through the brand. It is a story and a way of storytelling that only that brand, with that DNA, could tell.

In fact, the power of brand storytelling lies in how it helps key stakeholders re-value what your brand means to them.

But strong storytelling starts and ends with confident and involved decision-makers. The next chapter of your brand’s success depends on the story you tell as a leadership team, and how consistently you deliver on it as a culture.

We offer a range of ways for leader storytellers to explore where your brand story stands, and how to make it work harder for your strategy. Our Strategy in Motion session is an accelerated way for leaders to explore and identify the alignments between strategy, culture and story. Examine the connections between what your brand strategy requires, what motivates your people and the stories you are telling internally and externally to find where you have gaps to fill and better bridges to build.

Or, if you already have a range of stories in place, bring together authors and leaders from across the business and invest in our advanced brand storytelling workshop Long Arc to tighten how your storytelling works together, at every level, to advance your strategy. Please contact us to find out more.

Further reading: Why brand storytelling matters.

Acknowledgements
Photo by KOBU Agency on Unsplash

The post Introduction for leaders: Understanding brand storytelling appeared first on The Audacity Group.

Every strategy lives or dies on its ability to be delivered effectively by motivated people. What defines a brand culture are the principles and ideas needed for the people working within that brand to make their brand strategy work.

Culture is the enabler of strategy

That may strike some as counterintuitive. Culture is often described as a force in its own right: something that happens when people come together and sort out how they want to co-ordinate and co-operate. In effect, culture is the sum effect of human nature. The implication is that it is, and should be, beyond control. Something you need to work with. Or at best, do your best to influence in the right direction.

Perhaps – but, frankly, if that’s not the culture you need to perform strongly as a business, then your culture is not a positive contributor. And if your people have got to a point where they are inhibiting delivery, that’s not something that is going to sort itself out. Attitude is not something you can restructure. Policies and systems provide layers of structure and rules, but they don’t provide the emotional direction needed to get people not just on the same page, but on the right page.

Brand strategy makes sense as a cultural guidance system because it should be driving where the brand is heading. And as we often say, you can’t separate strategy and people. A strategy is literally nothing without people to being it to life, and an audience looking for just that sort of brand. The culture must work with and for the strategy. And vice versa. That’s what defines a brand culture.

A principled approach

The role of a brand culture is to give the people a principled way of working together to deliver the brand strategy – cleverly, profitably and cohesively. A Principled Culture, as we call it, is about identifying and fortifying everything you need as a culture to become competitive as a brand.

Stepping up to that starts with choosing a brand culture archetype as the foundational definition, and then introducing the workplace, experiences, people, rewards and stories needed to make that compelling. The archetype matters because culture needs basis and guidance in order to be principled. The right strategy matched with the wrong sort of culture will not work. It’s unreasonable to assume that people who like to work in particular ways can interpret and deliver on a strategy that literally is at odds with their sense of identity.

That archetype may be close to the culture you have currently. Or there may be a sizeable gap. But simply pairing a strategic approach with a brand culture option is not enough. To develop a Principled Culture, it’s important to identify and resolve a range of influencing factors that will align strategic and cultural intentions, accentuate the people factor and make your brand feel distinctive, human, emotional and approachable.

The pursuit of cultural advantage

A brand strategy framework revolves around a single organising idea. Our view is that a brand culture should pivot on a single driving emotion – the most powerful sentiment that the culture should commit to in order to bring the brand to life. That emotion should be positive (obviously) but it should also complement the brand’s single organising idea and set the tone for all the cultural influencing factors.

Cultural shift also needs an agitation. An emotionally-based reason for change that is more pressing and more compelling than leaving things as they are. Finding that catalyst to develop a more competitive brand culture is not always easy. People won’t tell you they are unhappy to change – especially if it is not in their perceived interests to do so.

What an agitation does is to articulate what the brand intends to challenge from the inside-out. It enables the brand, for example, to establish a brand enemy and to define your mandate as a brand and a culture in order to take up your chosen market role. These ideas, combined with the brand’s purpose, vision, values and behaviours set out clear expectations for what people will do, why and how. They unite those who believe in them. And they also light a path to the exit for those who are not going to thrive, or contribute meaningfully, in this environment.

A true brand culture builds like a movement

For us, a brand culture involves more than just setting these goals and guidelines. It requires taking people on a journey to become the best exponents of the brand they can be. In that regard, it has all the characteristics and energy of a social movement. Such movements typically develop across four stages:

• People become aware of why change is necessary. Leaders assert themselves;
• The shared sense of commitment gathers pace and people join together in support;
• Ideas institutionalise and become established;
• The energy starts to decline – and a new agitation, or re-interpretation of the original agitation, is needed to reinvigorate the culture.

This dynamic of course closely mirrors a market development bell curve. It also reinforces our belief that organisational cultures are inclined to lose innovation and courage over time, in much the same way as brands will decline in perceived value over time, unless that value is consistently endorsed and communicated.

Tapping involvement in pursuit of performance

This points to another important characteristic of what defines a brand culture: it takes its cues from both how the brand is performing and how the culture is performing, connecting and sync’ing them rather than treating them as separate functions. In a brand culture, involvement and performance are equally important and directly related metrics, and are monitored that way. Energised people deliver energised brands.

Intent and order also matter. Intent, because everyone wants to know where they’re going. And order, because structure brings surety. ()

A Principled Culture encourages actions that so often get stifled in strait-jacketed cultures that insist on consensus, alignment and “fit”. Instead, a Principled Culture looks to leverage tribalism and debate as contributors to an open way of moving brands forward.

In a brand culture, the goal is for people to feel involved, recognised and heard as they work alongside others to propel the brand, and its strategy, forward.

Progressing participation

A successful brand culture does not exist in a vacuum. Some elements of traditional organisational culture must remain. (In fact, they provide a vitally important counter-balance to the brand-specific focus of the brand culture, particularly in organisations hosting multiple brands.)

But the goal, to borrow a phrase from Jeremy Heimans and Henry Timms, is to move everyone who works for a brand, “up the participation scale”. In a successful brand culture, people feel invested, included and emotionally engaged with where the brand is heading, and the principles that guide how it does so, rather than just passively monitoring the data and waiting for instructions from the leadership team.

Brand success strategically becomes cultural success for all involved. Because each energises the other.

Interested to find out more about how a Principled Culture could work to lift your brand’s overall performance? We’re happy to answer questions. Need help aligning your brand strategy and what defines your brand culture? Contact us to talk through our approach with a strategist.

Acknowledgements
Photo by Joel Peel on Unsplash

The post What defines a brand culture? appeared first on The Audacity Group.

A recurrent question we receive is this: “I’m not a marketer. What is brand strategy, and why should I be interested?” It stems from two things: a narrow definition of what brand is and how it applies to business; and a lack of understanding as to why brand strategy matters. Our view is that a successful brand strategy lights a path from where things are now for a business to where opportunity seems strongest. It does this through the organisation’s brands.

What is a brand strategy?

A brand strategy helps you identify the specific choices to win in your marketplace. What you decide and what you rule out determines where your brand sits in the market, what you offer, how you outsmart others in your field and how you achieve the margins you’re looking for.

So – what exactly do brands do? And why is brand strategy important?

If you’re a business that owns a brand and trades through that brand, your brand represents you. It gives customers something to look for. It brings a name, visual identity, presence and personality to everything that you do as a business. A successful brand engages people and forges a relationship with them.

Here’s how the folks at Bynder sum up brand strategy: “A brand strategy revolves around all the intangible elements that over time drive brand awareness, brand equity, and brand sentiment.” Those are, in effect, all the things that drive recall and long-term value.

Think about any successful brand – and you should be able to draw some immediate associations. Coke, Apple, John West, Ford Uniglo … No matter what the sector, these companies project personality through their brands that bring them alive. That’s no coincidence. That’s a hard-working brand strategy doing what it’s designed to do.

A successful brand strategy personifies your business objectives via a brand with tangible and memorable characteristics that customers value. Get this right and people feel like they know you. You actually mean something to them beyond what you’re selling. You’re not just another drink, soap, car, aluminium component, laptop or flight. You are a specific choice.

Getting to that point takes conscious effort.

The role of a brand strategy is to resolve what you want customers to look for, why that’s more noticeable and interesting than what others offer, how you can make it feel valuable. It’s not an action plan for marketing nor the rationale for creative work. Instead …

A guide for the brand’s longer future

A brand strategy is the business case for what seems to be the brand’s best future: an extrapolation of what success could be for that brand, based on what’s known. Because of that, a robust brand strategy is rational and yet intentional, declarative and yet adjustable, speculative and yet measured. As a strategic framework, it should paint a picture of what’s possible beyond present realities.

In almost every case, even if the case for change is urgent (more on that below), you’re building something that the business itself will grow into. Like a hermit crab. Once you’ve outgrown your current shell, you need to find a new one to grow into – perhaps over the next 3 – 5 years. That’s what you’re developing with a brand strategy. An understanding of that shell. Because if you develop anything smaller than that, you are only going to need a new shell, sooner.

But to get that right, a brand strategy should make the case for what’s ahead using a wider range of consideration factors than often get tabled – particularly if you want it to be meaningful to non-marketers.

If you’re responsible for developing a brand strategy, commissioning or assessing one for an established brand, what follows is not a table of contents. Rather, it’s a framework for what a brand strategy can (perhaps, should) include.

Further reading: Why linking your brand strategy, culture and stories matters

What should a brand strategy cover? Here’s a quick guide

1. Discusses the role and contribution of brand(s) in the business
2. Provides a prompt for why you need a brand strategy now
3. Identifies your key audiences and what your brand currently means to them
4. Describes the present reality for the brand (and why it is not flourishing)
5. Looks at how the market and culture is changing
6. Identifies a range of opportunities for where the brand could go – and recommends one
7. Gives the brand a distinctive role in the marketplace
8. Describes what success could look like
9. Defines what the brand needs to embody
10. Provides a watch list of key factors/complexities that could affect brand performance

Right, let’s take a closer look.

1. What do you actually want the brand to do for the business?

It’s important to identify and agree the actual role of a brand in the business. Why do have one – or more? Do you use them in combination to achieve a multiple presence in a market? Do you have brands in order to achieve a premium in terms of price or distribution?

What difference are you looking for your brand or brands to make for the business?

Brand is everybody’s business. Defining the business contribution of your brands builds agreement on their impacts and value at senior level and makes them a shared responsibility. Every brand strategy should start with this understanding. It makes brand strategy important to those who might otherwise have dismissed it.

When the reason for having brands goes unanswered, the linkage to the business and the role of the brand(s) in meeting business objectives goes undefined and unacknowledged. Brand is seen as a marketing cost rather than as a business asset.

Framing why you have brands and what you want them to achieve in the context of the business strategy sets the stage for informed investment based on a defined role.

2. Why do you need to develop a brand strategy now?

Creating and approving a brand strategy is no small task. It should be a substantial consideration. Here’s how to decide if you need a brand strategy. There should always be a major cue – with correspondingly large stakes to play for. If you’re an established company, a brand strategy usually stems from an action that you are looking to take, or a reaction to big changes in circumstances or the behaviours of competitors.

The fundamental driver we look for is “we can’t stay here” – meaning how you are currently perceived, positioned and/or priced is not aligned with your business objectives and will not work for you given what is happening around you. If your current standing as a brand is sound, stay as you are and make changes tactically.

If not, your strategy needs to clearly identify and articulate the problem you are looking to solve, why it needs to be acted on and why doing so will work to your advantage.

Without this, there is no basis for decision makers to objectively assess the strategy you will propose.

3. Who’s buying your brand? And who do you want to buy your brand?

A brand is no-one, literally, without an audience. Understanding the various layers of audience for your brand – from those who buy what you offer to those you need to talk to in order for your brand to mean something (media, regulators, investors) – is critical to crafting a brand for people.

It’s not the role of a brand strategy to understand all the details of the customer experience but you do need to know who buys and who decides, what they buy and what they don’t, their expectations and the perceptions of the brand that they are most drawn to, or not. If you want to shift or change your audience, you need to identify that clearly, and your motives for doing so.

You also need to test that your new audience is viable – large enough, profitable enough, engaged enough, accessible enough.

Data matters (and we’ll get to that) but your brand strategy needs to clearly reflect the human drivers. The people you appeal to. The ones you want to appeal to, to resolve the problem you identified. The audiences you are looking to leave behind as you change. And who you’re looking to invite to consider (a new version of) the brand.

4. What’s the current reality?

Every successful brand strategy needs an agreed starting point: the situation that the brand finds itself in at that point in time – good, bad and indifferent. This is not a place for sugarcoating. It should frankly portray what’s happening for the brand and what has prompted the need for change. The focus should be on what was expected of the brand and what has happened (instead).

Cue: the data. The assessment of the brand’s present reality should fuse facts, data, feedback, key opinions, analysis, results against metrics and financial impacts to provide a rounded view of the current reality.

Just as important as the information itself is the diversity and objectivity of the sources. We nearly always list these because they provide proof of groundwork. Important too to note not just what you have gleaned but what you have not been able to source. That’s important because it reveals where you may have blind spots or need to do further work.

Some brands try and do this assessment of the brand’s current reality in-house. The challenge here is that people involved and responsible will naturally want to downplay or explain away shortcomings because they believe it reflects on them.

The advantage of using an experienced third party to pull together this assessment is that they can probe failures and vulnerabilities to extract candid insights.

5. What’s really going on in the market and the culture?

Stepping back from the trading realities, it’s important to look at the broader trends affecting the sector. A market overview is an opportunity to examine not only what competitors are doing but also the impacts that everything from technology to attitudes to geopolitics are having on market dynamics. A cultural review is a chance to look at how attitudes and norms are changing for people culturally.

In particular, a brand strategy should be looking at emerging trends within sectors and within the broader culture to determine what the brand needs to consider, incorporate or avoid.

Right now, for example, sector conversations are dominated by AI, trading dynamics and availability.

The brand strategy should identify how known developments are likely to affect the trajectory of the brand in its current state. Influential and far-reaching changes could prompt a range of reactions – from redefining what the brand could stand for to potentially quitting a market altogether if the commercials no longer stack.

6. What are the strategic opportunities for the business?

Shortlisting a range of potential responses is a great way to ‘make the case’ for different ways to move forward, before deciding on a recommended opportunity. It enables those assessing the strategy to see what was discarded and why, and also how the recommended direction was arrived at.

Because strategy is as much about what you say “No” to as it is what you seek to progress with, opportunities are a transparent way to show pros and cons, to take what might have historically viable options off the table and to include and suggest ways forward that might otherwise come as a surprise.

7. What role could the brand play in the market?

Just as a brand can be many things to a business, it can also play a range of quite different roles in a sector. For example, your brand could be the leader or the challenger, the educator or the democratiser, the volume play or the luxury brand. A successful brand strategy defines such a role for the brand, knowing that role is the one where the brand can best gain advantage over competitors.

The role the brand plays should align directly with the brand’s chosen opportunity. For example, a brand that sees opportunity in expanding the overall size and value of a market could decide to play the role of a democratiser: a brand that goes out of its way to make the whole market more accessible than it has been.

8. What’s the potential payback for getting this right?

A successful brand strategy is a disciplined speculation. It defines what the brand sees as its best future based on the information currently available. To motivate decision-makers to commit, it’s critical to show what the business stands to gain in concrete terms. In other words, how does the brand strategy advance the wider business strategy?

There should be a direct contribution, and the goals used should align with those business goals and make sense to decision-makers.

We would also recommend that you include a list of current assumptions where possible. This provides context for the brand strategy direction and for the metrics set out as defining success.

9. What’s the DNA of the brand?

These are the elements that people often associate most closely with “brand strategy”. They bring the brand to life by defining what the brand intends to aim for, stand for and value in order to fulfil the market opportunity, play the role it intends and achieve the success that it envisages.

There are seven defining elements: purpose; vision; single organising idea; promise; values; personality and behaviours; and value proposition.

These elements help bring the brand to life through statements, intentions and characteristics that people identify with and that give the brand an attitude that it intends to make its own. Just as importantly, these identifying factors guide what people within the brand culture are asked to believe and deliver, and they influence the stories that the brand tells to socialise its presence.

A successful brand strategy forges a brand that people relate to, that they agree with and that they want to support. Naming, design and structure all take their cues from how the brand is defined through its DNA, adding further layers of relatability for shoppers to look for, value and respond to.

But brand definition requires discipline. Sometimes, the definitions of what a brand stands for just can be too complicated, too layered, with so many ideas and motifs that they feel more like a word salad than a clear description for the brand going forward.

But done well, a brand DNA provides insights and guidance that bring the brand to life as an asset and give brand leaders and managers something wonderful to work with and extrapolate from.

10. What are the things to keep watching?

No brand stands still – and even the best brand strategy won’t either. The key is to know what needs to stay constant and what to keep an eye on. If you’re strategising for an established brand that needs to change, establish a bedrock of things that can’t change, because doing so would make the brand unrecognisable. These are the brand codes.

Outside of that core, adaptive strategy is all about experimenting – advancing ideas to see if they work, capitalising on them when they do and letting them fail fast when they don’t.

To be successful, most brand strategies require an adaptive spirit. Too often, a brand strategy makes an appearance for the initial presentation and maybe acts a set-up for a campaign or design, and then is relegated to the background. But just as it’s important to identify and monitor how the brand performs, it makes sound business sense to analyse what’s happening in the immediate and wider market to change the brand’s environment. Listing a set of triggers at the end of a brand strategy provides a watch-list to keep the brand strategy relevant.

Further reading: The 11 elements to include in your brand strategy framework

Not everyone has to see all of this

It’s obvious from this scoping that there’s a lot of work needed to pull off a successful brand strategy. But not everyone needs to see all these workings. It’s about thoroughness, not complexity.

It’s ironical that we should be talking about how to increase the scope of a brand strategy, because major criticisms of brand strategy documents are that they are too long-winded, too vague, too indulgent, too complex and too hard to navigate.

No brand strategy is successful if decision makers don’t buy into it. And most of them will not give any strategy the attention it needs if they feel they have to wade through treacle to get to the salient points.

Which is why we recommend you structure presentations and playbacks in a range of ways for different stakeholders. Configure your presentation as you would for any audience. Draw from what you’ve worked through to tell them everything that matters for them in their role on a need-to-know basis. Then use question time to walk through how you arrived at specific conclusions.

Next steps after you have successfully agreed your brand strategy

To get started, you should set your brand’s strategic direction with these three decisions. This will give you a simple guideline for developing your brand strategy framework.

Once you have agreement on who you are as a brand, where you’re going and what you stand for at a business level, you’ll need to do three things.

Develop a name for your brand (if you’re not happy with the name you have).

Give your named brand a structure to sit within.

And outline the long story of your brand.

Finally, you’ll need to convert your brand strategy thinking into a creative brief for a design team. The role of that brief is to express the brand in a way that inspires people to capture the true spirit of the brand creatively.

Understanding why you need a brand strategy and what it should cover in order to be successful is the first step in making your business more resilient through its brands.

If you have any questions or if we can help you with preparing your brand strategy direction, please contact us.

Acknowledgements
Photo by Vidar Nordli-Mathisen on Unsplash

The post What makes for a successful brand strategy? appeared first on The Audacity Group.

At some point, a brand culture that is serious about what it intends must put those intentions in writing. That’s about a lot more than documentation. Articulating what you come to work for collectively amounts to a stated commitment. So many companies squander this opportunity. They market what is happening internally rather than explaining it. Or they expand on what it means for the company rather than how it benefits the individual. Sometimes, they paint a process and not a picture in communicating a purposeful culture.

The power of articulation

Articulation should be the culmination of a journey that has taken people through a range of steps and emotions: from why change is needed and the opportunity that change could generate to the information that explains how decisions were reached and the incentives to push through reluctance.

The final stage of our Culture to Thrive is Articulation – weaving the background, actions and proof of cultural change into a holistic and involving narrative, operating at a number of levels, that people can carry with them. Articulation brings talkability and relatability to executive decisions. It presents the strategy in the context of intentions and principles, and encourages conversation and involvement.

Enabling culture to unfold

Every day, people across cultures are asked to take actions or pay attention to so many things. They’re quickly overwhelmed because the things they are asked to do or think about are often not prioritised, nor are they linked to what has happened before.

The best brand cultures unfold – they reveal what they are doing and what it will mean in ways that connect what people knew with what they are currently being told and what they expect to hear about in the future. This is about managing the flow of information so that people know what they need to know, in a format that they can handle, given everything else in their day.

Reviving internal storytelling

Storytelling is becoming a lost skill culturally. The art of the internal narrative has been replaced by the simplicity and autocracy of the top-down declaration. Each message of each declaration is carefully thought about and wordsmith-ed to within an inch of its life – but the connections between the bigger ideas, and the opportunities to involve people, are often missed. A brand culture, if it is to be successful, is not nurtured by its policies – but rather by the principles and stories that drive it at a human level.

A call to community

Articulation has two objectives. The first is internal.

We love this explanation of storytelling from Christopher Maier, “Every time I tell a story, I am putting out a call to community. A story presumes a community of listeners who will recognize some experience that they have lived or can imagine living in the narrative. It is a call and response …” because it frames the articulation and the response to that declaration together. You receive what you get a response to.

Articulation is not broadcast in this context. It’s verification of decisions made. It’s the check-in with the culture that the business is good to go on this, and that for those who are not on board perhaps it’s time to leave. But as Shawn Callahan observes in this post, don’t call this a “story” because in many cultures, people will interpret that as fiction. Instead Callahan suggests declare the relevance of your intentions. And follow that up quickly with the plausibility of such a view.

First up: Stories as journeys

Connecting narratives, so that what people have heard previously directly aligns with what they are hearing now, provides context and continuity. It enables people to see a release, development, idea, even a scandal, in a setting beyond the immediate reaction. Examples of details to include in scene-setting are:

• Playback – a brief history of what has happened to get us to this point
• The biggest goal – what the brand and culture have consistently strove to achieve
• Time frame – what else was happening for the brand and the culture during this time
• Disruptions – unusual developments that influenced past thinking and/or guided current decision making
• Specifics – particular examples to show what was at stake
• Driving emotions – how people within the culture have felt and how/when that may have changed
• Actions taken – what has happened previously, and how that aligns with what leaders said they would do
• Triumphs and tragedies – what has happened to give the culture confidence and anything that has happened that the culture has learned from
• Future direction – where this is taking us, and how it will progress goals

Of course, you don’t have to include all of these. But you should try to thread the elements you do include into a storyline that articulates your intentions clearly and generously.

Ways to do this:

• Keynote address at annual conference or brand launch event
• Initial “big picture” launch communications
• Video
• Brand book/manifesto

Second up: Actions as storylines

When it comes to revealing what’s next within a culture, each major action should also have its own story, and each story should have its own momentum. In the words of Gaping Void, it needs a framework not dissimilar to hurricane warnings:

• Something could be happening (Remember, we said …)
• Pay attention, this matters
• Be prepared. This is serious
• OK, it’s on. Act now

The goal is to take people on a journey of involvement that starts with getting the story on their radar and then, through repetition and introducing more substantiation, increasing their awareness and their agency.

It’s more than a memo or an individual email. It’s a sequenced story that people recognise and track because they know it is in their best interests to do so. And when the sequence is used consistently and judiciously, it becomes something people are familiar with and know how to react to.

Ways to do this:

• Email campaigns
• Team briefings
• Internal social media (e.g. Slack)
• Intranet

Follow up: Proof through stories

Having inspired people about what is possible, and given them specific actions to take, it’s critically important to share progress and learnings. Involving people in what happened afterwards is a valuable opportunity, often missed. Instead, the culture hears back how something went by accident: gossip; or a confidential aside.

This, of course, is in direct contrast to the open manner in which the idea was first launched, and naturally leads people to question the effectiveness of what was done and/or how much they should personally invest in what they are asked to do next.

Ways to do this:

Proof stories within a culture should take three forms. Each has different aims.

• Formal reporting – intended for leaders – puts what happened in the context of wider performance.
• Inspiring case studies – provide both an update and key learnings for the teams involved. They enable the work of individuals and groups to act as exemplars for the wider culture. They point to challenges faced and solved. They prove relevance and value.
• Headline anecdotes are, as Shawn Callahan describes them, the little stories that people share and relate to because they are snackable, social, momentary and fun. Stats, quotes, examples, graphics. Their attraction lies in the fact they are immediate, positive and quotable.

Don’t stop there. Go public.

The second objective for effective articulation is to send a powerful and committed public signal. For your culture, that acts as an external endorsement of what they are hearing at work. It raises the cultural flag in the world.

Articulating your intentions around where and how you want to see change in the world puts your culture on notice that your purpose is an open agenda not a closed one. It brings your customers onboard. This aligns what you’re saying internally with your public position. It gives you talking points. Arguably, it should drive your editorial approach to content.

Speaking to why brand cultures should publicly articulate their purpose, for example, Hilton Barbour observes, “Brand purpose becomes a pivotal touchstone for customers and employees giving them a reason to say “this is why I choose this brand” and “this is why I choose to work here”. Purpose is why consumers will find a way to bring your brand into their lives. It’s certainly a deeper motivator than the functional, or even emotional, benefits we tend to cajole them with … Ultimately, today’s proliferation of me-too brands and fickle customers affords no marketing and brand leader the luxury of being without purpose.”

Articulating clearly as a culture

Articulation is an opportunity for your brand culture to communicate clearly and intently. Doing so not only helps people understand the principles that guide you, it also enables you to weave powerful storytelling into your relationships internally. People feel encouraged to use a range of storytelling formats to keep those around them involved and updated. By being articulate, and using language within your storytelling, that your people know and have ownership of, you can change the communication climate for the better.

How we can help you articulate effectively

Culture to Thrive is our strategically focused approach to big picture brand culture change for leaders wanting to align their people, strategy and core principles. You can read more about the range of brand culture services we offer here.

Culture To Thrive helps you find and define what you are striving for as a business. It helps you shape the culture you specifically need as a brand and to share your successes and challenges. Together, we’ll build out why you should be one type of culture rather than another. We’ll also work through what you intend to accomplish and how every person can contribute to that.

Please contact us if you’re ready to get people talking openly and clearly about and within your culture.

Acknowledgements
Photo by Lennart Nacke on Unsplash
Graphics designed by Fuller Studio.

Further reading
Agitation: Step 1 in building a purposeful culture
Inspiration: Step 2 in activating purposeful culture
Exploration: Step 3 in building purposeful culture
Motivation: Step 4 in activating a purposeful culture

The post Articulation: Step 5 in communicating a purposeful culture appeared first on The Audacity Group.

Today, as people work together in a range of configurations, the implications for culture are complicating. We’ve been thinking about this in terms of how these evolving arrangements affect brand culture. Increasingly, we believe organisations with devolved and distributed workforces are going to need to function less as a singular brand culture and more as a brand delivery community.

COVID may have been a catalyst for breaking up the office, but the combination of different ways of working, different timeframes within which people work (full and part-time), complex supply chains and the need for specialist skills to deal with specific issues and opportunities has been decentralising brand delivery into markets for some time. That in turn has the potential to affect brand culture performance.

Working together, working apart

People don’t work the way they did. And many of them don’t want to revert. Access to talent is now less problematic than configuration of talent. Managers are grappling to establish and oversee blended workforces at organisations of all sizes. And the “freelance” market itself is segmenting into a plethora of arrangements. From fractionals to independent contractors to gig workers.

How do you bring people together as a culture when so many factors now contribute to them working apart? Rather than just insist on uniformity and physical presence, is there a way to measure alignment in increasingly distributed organisational cultures?

One thing’s for sure. Traditional organisational structures, with their assumptions of everybody in set places and set employment structures, don’t align with the dynamics we are seeing play out above. Some organisations will choose to enforce visible and present cultures. That’s the way they wish to manage and deliver their brands. But we’re interested in what an organisational structure might look like for brand cultures that want to foster flexibility. Particularly when they need to place people, who may or may not work for them directly, within a cultural structure that feels relevant.

Scoping a new approach to culture

What shape might a cultural structure like that take?

One way to consider this may be to take a prompt from carbon emissions frameworks. Here, carbon outputs are measured against three scopes: scope 1 (direct), scope 2 (indirect, but connected), scope 3 (beyond that). After all, that model is about collective evaluation and effort to quantify and achieve shared goals. Companies use the carbon emissions framework to analyse their impact on climate change. Imagine applying the same idea to evaluate the “cultural inputs” that people have with and within a culture and what the impacts are for each group.

Scope 1: Directly aligned. This is the core “in-house” culture where people (full-time, part-time, onsite and WFH) identify themselves as working directly for the brand.

Scope 2: Indirectly aligned. These are the contractors and freelancers who work alongside and with those in scope 1 to deliver the work. They work within the culture but may or may not feel part of it.

Scope 3: Beyond that. Supply chain and distribution companies that connect the brand with the wider market. They may work completely outside the culture and within their own culture, yet interact with scope 1 to bring the brand to life.

The power of such an approach is that instead of treating different workforces as separate elements, a community framework would consider how they deliver together and the relationships within groups and between groups to generate commonality. The focus is on communal commitment and outputs rather than physical presence.

What would the metrics be?

In an article on linking culture to performance, Denise Yohn points to three categories of culture measures devised by the Josh Bersin Company that could help measure the collective effectiveness of such a community:

• Leading measures – to identify how people feel about themselves, their team and other groups at all three scopes;
• Descriptive measures – to describe what the culture should look like as a community and how it should function as a united body; and
• Outcome measures – to define expectations and benchmarks for ongoing cultural transformation and adjustment

These measures, Yohn says, should be combined with business objective and target setting advice so that the collective culture is working towards shared and articulated goals.

Our suggestion for evaluating how people engage with the culture at these three degrees (scopes) of separation is that it could prompt a whole range of questions around overall cultural contribution. Here are just four:

1. Are the people closest to our culture (scope 1) actually committed to strengthening our culture?
2. Do the people who come in to work with us (scope 2) believe in and enhance what we share as a culture?
3. Are our partners and suppliers (scope 3) aligned with us culturally and what are we doing to support that?
4. What happens to our purpose and values as work shifts out into the wider scopes? (Are people committed to the same things when they are partners and suppliers as they are when they are in the building?)

Integration rather than just rules

A key challenge of course will be convincing people in different scopes of commitment to each other to make a unified and effective commitment to the brand.

Supply chains do that anyway to an extent, and we see that in things like Supplier Codes of Conduct, but forging a brand delivery community requires more than contractual expectations.

It requires levels of integration that are probably closer to those seen when companies are well merged. Rob Sanchez, CEO of Anteriad, offers some great tips:

1. Treat the inter-relationships like a partnership.
2. Gather best practice from wherever it sits in the community and apply it so that everyone learns.
3. Build a collective vision, with specific benefits for each party, so that everyone knows what to expect.
4. Provide a roadmap and invite input, so that everyone feels heard.
5. Find the common points across the cultures, and build out from those.
6. Look for fault lines between groups and resolve them proactively and quickly.

Time for a rethink?

Once the assumptions of physical presence were challenged, it re-set how people thought about where, why and how they work – for themselves, with others, and for collective success. Inevitably, that has generated questions around what and who a culture is these days and how companies should look to align the many moving parts and the orbits within which they work.

Many companies will want to take things back to the way they were – and they may or may not succeed. But our view is that the “distributed culture” is here to stay and that the smartest brands will look to reconcile individualism, team effort and collective allegiance to best effect by building cultures that transcend presence and even ownership.

Thinking and working as a merging community will challenge many facets of traditional organisational structure, but as value chains become more complex and integrate more specialist skills to achieve competitiveness, a rethink of how a culture is defined and how it defines itself and holds itself accountable is overdue. The Scope 1 – 3 model provides one way of thinking about this.

You can read more about the ways we work to align and change brand culture here.

Acknowledgement

Photo by Nick Fewings on Unsplash

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Despite appearances, brands are complex. They exist to be quickly and easily recognised, and yet the work required to make them perform effectively is considerable and diverse. So how do you know if your brand is up to scratch? Here are the elements we recommend you include on your Brand Report Card.

The purpose of a Brand Report Card is to assess whether your brand is indeed one you can have confidence in, or whether there is more work to do to make that happen. Essentially, it’s an executive summary of the key attributes of your brand and how effectively they contribute to your brand working to its capability.

The six parts of brand success

To understand why a Brand Report Card is useful, let’s start by defining what it takes to achieve brand success:

A confident brand

That is delivering value to the business

Because it is well supported

Robustly strategised

Beautifully expressed

Skilfully managed

And effectively delivered.

A brand that lacks one or more of these success factors will probably struggle to perform to expectations. But too often, these factors are conflated to judge the brand as a whole, without looking more closely at which factors are working well and where the brand may be lagging.

Without a confident brand, marketers have very little to build with. Brand forms the basis for how a business makes its presence felt in its marketplace. If you don’t have that, then the business is dependent on more fickle factors to meet its ambitions.

The 15 success elements included here are in the order we choose to assess them. You may of course choose a different order or exclude any elements that you deem less important or hard to assess.

Your Brand Report Card

1. Definition

The brand is well defined, in terms of purpose, vision, mission and values. Every brand needs a powerful sense of self in order to fulfil its goals. It’s important that the core brand DNA is ambitious, specific and provides clear focus for what your brand is looking to achieve. Your definition is exactly that: your reason for being. It sets out why you have chosen to enter a market and why you intend to generate a significant presence as a brand

2. Respect

The brand is valued within the business for what it delivers. It may seem strange to have this element so high on the Brand Report Card. But it’s up here because every brand needs a clear mandate to operate, and for that to happen, the brand must be valued throughout the business for its contributions. Without respect, brands are often relegated to cost status, and their presence and the investment required to keep them current is continually questioned.

3. Audience

The brand understands its market(s). It’s critical that brand leaders are laser focused on the audience for the brand. Knowing who they are and understanding what motivates them is crucial to ensuring your brand feels valuable and relevant. In so many sectors, too many brands are competing for the same (broad) audience with bland products that feel interchangeable. The challenge for every brand leader is to find an audience for their brand that is sizeable, valuable, motivated and under-served.

4. Relevance

Brands live or die on their offer. Knowing the audience, a brand must excel at developing and delivering products and services that surprise, engage and involve. For consumer brands, that’s often about reflecting, or foreshadowing, the wider culture and developing offers that are lifestyle-compatible.

5. Distinction

The brand itself is distinctive. That’s harder than it looks in marketplaces where category brands increasingly seem, feel and sound the same. It’s tempting to succumb to uniformity in the name of recognition and sector alignment. But a robust brand achieves what Josh Lowman refers to as “categorical difference”. It does enough to be an EV, for example, without behaving and marketing itself like every other EV in the market. That’s particularly important – and difficult – in sectors where the core elements that make up the offer are set or limited. Increasingly, personality defines who is noticed and who remains overlooked.

6. Availability

Distribution is a critical brand signal. A brand that doesn’t deliver is a brand doomed to failure. It’s critically important for brands to read the room in terms of channels and demand, and deliver what’s expected, when and where. Of course that’s about logistics and inventory control, but it’s also about being seen (and found) in the right places. Smaller consumer brands competing in larger markets, for example, are quickly judged on who has chosen to distribute them.

7. Value

The brand upholds a pricing strategy based on how the audience perceive the brand’s worth. We believe a key objective for most brands, especially in crowded and commoditising markets, is to deliver a higher level of margin than the market is pre-disposed to give you. Brands add value, and therefore profit, because they elevate what people believe they are paying for. Without a brand, your product’s pricing, and perception of value, is governed by what the market happens to believe it is worth at that time.

8. Position

To achieve that perception of value, a brand needs to be clearly and accurately positioned for the marketplace and against competitors. It must occupy a space – or role – relative to other participants. That position should align directly with how the brand defines itself. The goal is, where possible, to put “clear air” between where your brand is positioned in the sector and where others are seen. But, and this is important, that position must be viable, credible and, preferably, expandable.

9. Direction

The brand knows where it is heading – and its direction aligns with the wider business intentions of the organisation. The strategy focuses on the brand as a revenue and strategy contributor, not just a marketing communicator.

10. Narrative

There is a compelling story to tell, and that brand story is structured across a range of timeframes – from the brand’s long arc story (the story it is looking to tell over time) all the way through to the more immediate and daily content snaps that the brand releases socially to keep people interested. The narrative itself also needs to be capable of being told in interesting ways to different audiences.

11. Experience

The brand delivers in ways that people remember and talk about. It does this by shaping and delivering brand-specific experiences across channels that people recognise and engage with. It’s tempting to think that experience is only something that consumer-facing brands need to think about. But the experience of interacting with a brand is very much something that business-to-business brands need to think about. If the experience of working with you is not memorable and valuable, there is less inclination to work with you again.

12. Recognition

The brand is seen. And that’s because there are strong and present brand codes in place that define crucial identifiers for the brand in public: a powerful name; strong identity system; ownable language. Everything about the way you present yourself as a brand is consistent and telegraphs who you are instantly and effectively to your audiences. Martin Lindstrom once compared this to shards of Coke – if a Coke bottle breaks, you can pick up any piece and recognise the brand. Your brand should aspire to that level of recall.

13. Structure

The brand portfolio and hierarchy make sense. Customers won’t necessarily see this, but understanding your brand architecture and applying the rules of that structure consistently and confidently helps people see a brand, and the products within that product, in a context that makes sense. Brand architecture is all about mental breadcrumbs. It links or separates brands and brand lines in order to deliver clarity.

14. Campaign-ability

The brand has what it takes to come alive in communications. Although there is much more to your brand than what it looks like and what it says, those are the most visible elements to your audience on a day to day basis. Campaigns are how major elements of your story unfold publicly, and you will need a brand with the confidence and substance to be interesting, no matter which channels you use.

15. Delivery

This relates back to #2 on our list. The brand is delivering what’s expected for the business and is thus proving its value. Different brands will incorporate different factors here, depending on the maturity and nature of the brand. Physically placed brands, for example, will want to include metrics like traffic and sales volumes, whereas digitally-driven brands may want to monitor searchability and conversions.

How to organise your Brand Report Card

We suggest ranking your brand in two ways. First, assess each of these elements internally to determine how leaders, marketers and indeed the wider culture measure the brand they work with. Then, do the same thing externally – either through workshops, or by looking at what your brand research and results are telling you.

We use a points basis. So, for example:

1 – Doesn’t exist

2 – Present, but weak

3 – Passable but unremarkable

4 – Strong, but could still improve

5 – As strong as it can be

Incorporating the two perspectives means your Brand Report Card is marked out of 150 (15 x 5 x 2). This “State of the Brand” not only provides you with an analysis of where your brand is strong and where it still needs to improve, it also lets you see the differences between internal and external assessments and where there are perception gaps that need to be closed.

(If you’re wondering how to externally assess 2. Respect and 15. Delivery, these can be based on how external parties perceive this.)

Applying the findings

While some include growth, brand equity and reputation as success factors in their own right in their brand performance model, we don’t. Instead we identify all three as rewards generated for brands with a strong Report Card.

While many brands will start by completing their Brand Report Card and then working out the implications for growth, brand equity and reputation, it is of course perfectly feasible to work the other way. If you have identified problems with growth, brand equity or reputation, you can use the Brand Report Card to specify if, how or where the brand itself is contributing – or not contributing – to those.

Indeed, a Brand Report Card can be used at different times to assess different things.

For example, we often use this Card at the beginning of a rebranding process to determine why the brand needs to change. But it can also form the basis for annual reviews. Or for workshops  to determine where specific help is needed.

The brand may be under-powered in terms of its Definition. In which case, you may want to work on purpose, vision and values. Or it may need a stronger story. You may want to investigate that aspect further through our Long Arc brand storytelling workshop.

If you’re interested in seeing how strong your brand is, but would rather not score your own Card, we can undertake a Brand Report Card on your behalf and report back findings and recommended next actions.

Acknowledgements

Photo by Erik Mclean on Unsplash

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