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business

Stories in The Village: EVERYONE must understand the brand

Our stories as marketers continues to be a theme of late, whether it’s understanding how YOUR history and biases impact your stories and now from Seth, how your EXECUTION is central to the story/brand experience. Below is an excerpt which asserts lack of a story can impact consistency of the brand:

But what if you haven’t figured out a story yet?

Then the work is random. Then the story is confused or bland or indifferent and it doesn’t spread.

On the other hand, if you decide what the story is, you can do work that matches the story. Your decisions will match the story. The story will become true because you’re living it.

Does Starbucks tell a different story from McDonald’s? Of course they do. But look how the work they do matches those stories… from the benefits they offer employees to the decisions they make about packaging or locations.

The pithy piece from Seth opines about what comes first, the story or the work. Not sure that this is the best way to manage the story or the execution, since they are more or less ONE thing – the Brand. These are two interactive and evolving components which can’t be untethered. Customers, employees and transactional interactions move the story and change the story over time, evidence the $1 coffee from Starbucks or the 3 hour re-training event which was intended to boost the barista-ness of the the customer experience.

This example from Starbucks is a great use case for how to align execution to the story and the market. So if the story is linked to execution/the work, then speaking to the market is only part of the story to be told.

As brand managers/creators, marketers need to continuously deliver messaging not just for the market, but for the larger organization in partnership with human resources and the leadership. What are the types of activities and processes required to consistently deliver on a brand story/uphold the integrity of a brand? The realities is it varies. This will vary from industry to industry and market segment to market segment, but 3 key areas for consideration regardless of industry:

  • Establish a Unified Tribal Understanding
  • Open Channels for Feedback
  • Consistently Reward and Publicize Contribution

Tribal Understanding

You can’t tell the same story, unless you KNOW what the story is, so what have YOU done as a marketer to make this happen?

This is the concept of making sure the whole organization understands what a product is supposed to do and what the value drivers are for the consumer. In technology for example, the larger organization needs to understand the solutions being delivered, the relative importance of the solution for the consumer and overall strategic direction of the company.

With this baseline folks can understand and how this relates to what customers/the market need for a given technology provider. Without common tribal understanding, you get inconsistent execution which can greatly change the market version of the story/the stories your customers tell.

Tip: The easiest way to figure out if you need to develop a plan for this is fairly simple, walk around the business. Walk around and ask say 10 folks across the organization from a functional perspective and seniority perspective and see if they tell the same story about your product or your brand. If you get 6 different answers, you probably need to do something.

Channels for Feedback

As consumers habits change and market requirements evolve, it is important that every organizational story teller cannot only understand the brand story, but also that they can contribute to the evolution of the story. Whether it’s collections, professional services or customer service, all of these stakeholders interact with the market daily and should have easy access to provide input from the business. This can be as simple as email or a suggestion box on the intranet and is imperative to keep a pulse on the market and to understand how your product is perceived on the front lines.

Tip: See if you have a clear path from communication to the marketing team, product management and leadership of YOUR organization, if not perhaps you should roll out a formal plan, remind folks of how to contribute and develop a formal plan to manage input for improvement.

Reward and Publicize Contribution

This seems a little obvious, but telling the story for the market, requires awareness for the larger organization of how a single person can leverage their tribal knowledge and exceed the promises of the brand. While the type of recognition will vary by company size and budget, marketers need to equally tell the story internally and leveraging an open channel for feedback and ensuring the full understanding of the story makes it simple. Don’t underestimate a Starbucks gift card and an “all employee” email.

Tip: Recognition isn’t about burying an accomplishment on the intranet for a specific functional group – it needs to be shared. Don’t fall for the corporate newsletter trap here – you can mention it in the newsletter, but take the time to highlight individual successes outside of the normal communications channels for the whole organization.

While this clearly is not the alpha and omega of brand based story creation and modication, it’s a good place to start. Do YOU have any ideas on how to improve the stories told in the village? Leave a comment and let us know.

April 2, 2008 by
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Kill the cheerleader – improve communications

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Despite multiple people informing me to the contrary – I consider myself a man of the people, with that comes some union stewardship activities within the organization. Not a true beat people up with baseball bats union role, more of a “hey, I’m noticing “X” in the organization and blah, blah….”. Essentially I’m always willing to hint “maybe we should look at X” to management kinda guy. I know, how un-[tag]proletariat[/tag] of me – but I do think [tag]middle management[/tag] has the best position to drive change and improvement.

th-4.jpg

Nevertheless – so what is the cheerleader? It’s both a persona and a group mentality, at some point, I’ll write on the persona as part of Stuck in the Middle, but it’s the Corporate Cheer Culture which represents an erosion of corporate-wide execution and what I want to rant about today which may help middle managers be more effective and improve corporate communications.

The cheerleader mentality can easily be recognized: it’s when just doing your job – the job for which you are paid for – becomes a corporate-wide messaging platform from which senior executives send ad-hoc, real-time blackberry-driven snippets to the organization to prove who is the most transparent and dedicated member of the leadership team. Let’s put it in context of [tag]Bring it On[/tag]:

Isis: Where we come from, ‘cheer’ is not a word you hear very often…
Lava: They should call us ‘inspiration leaders’ instead.
Jenelope: Ooo, that’s deep… I like that

Often it starts with the line executive who feels the need to send a “who’s awake” message and prove that they are not really sleeping in their bed, with the initial non-global email that declares project completion at 2 am on a Saturday, which get escalated to the whole organization due to him/her having global distribution list sending rights.   The two word “GREAT JOB!!!!” [tag]email[/tag]s lack originality….

Missy: You ripped off those cheers!
Torrance Shipman: Excuse me, Missy, our cheers are 100% original. Count the trophies!
Missy: Well, your trophies are bullshit, and you’re a sadass liar.
Torrance Shipman: All right, that’s it! Get out of the car, I’m gonna kick your ass!

Communication of project accomplishments should typically remain internal to the group participants or team and leverage a more formal vehicle for corporate-wide communications to be done by the CEO or a similar GM level role.   Not all projects are worthy of corporate-wide communication, and some departments, by their nature have more “projects,” which if the communications plan and policies aren’t well managed, could ultimately suggest a preferred team over another.  For example, IT has all kinds of projects, but Collections…not so much.

Unbalanced, ad-hoc and unstructured communications to an entire organization does not solve for the “you don’t communicate enough” complaint which is never satiated by more communication – really!

Effective communication should start with middle management and be group-oriented. While not an article on general communication on a Hill and Knowlton blog, it is still an important framework to use for the “great job team” stuff, paraphrased:

  • How do you manage culture change/improvement?
  • Where are the middle managers in the communication process?
  • How can you increase your credibility as communicators and the credibility of your communication channels?
  • How can we better use measurement to bolster our communication?

If a “great job” communications plan for the whole company doesn’t address the items above, then it basically degrades to promoting and public recognition for a team which is essentially doing what they are paid for.

If, however, middle management institutes a post-completion, “lessons learned” step into the project plan that promotes coaching and further growth, the company will be better off – every project has coaching opportunities, and global “great job” emails minimize the opportunity to strengthen individual teams and eliminate the effectiveness of more strategic corporate-wide communications which leverage formal or established channels.

Think about it – if the VP of Human Resources sends a 1 line great job email and the line Executive rights a missive on great execution, a little hard to coach most people. Everyone has an ego and an artifact in their inbox to PROVE they did well, regardless of the opportunity for improvement.

Corporate cheerleaders need to determine when and how they will communicate encouragement and appreciation to the entire team.   Again another Bring it On thought:

Sparky: I am a choreographer. That’s what I do. You are cheerleaders. Cheerleaders are dancers who have gone retarded.

Perhaps group email love-fests for the whole organization are just bad choreography from a limited leader who wants folks to know what they are doing and how important THEY were in organizing/leading the effort.  There are more sparky’s than one would think on most [tag]leadership[/tag] teams.

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September 30, 2007 by
(1)

Stuck in the Middle: Fence Mender

I appreciate [tag]Robert Frost[/tag]’s questioning of why fences make good neighbors in [tag]Mending Wall[/tag]. It seems like a construct at opposition to getting along and a free existence. It is however, not so in more effective business, groups and organizations.

Many leaders and individual contributors are very focused on building, mending and extending their fences. This too seems oddly inconsistent with a friendly little workplace, but alas it is how it is. Perhaps fence mending is a corporate culture issue as much as a personnel concern.

So what type of fences exist in corporations? Organization, process and the ad-hoc fence – all of these magically remove accountability of ownership when someone throws something over the fence. The fence mender can be a leader or a individual contributor, as a mid-level leader this is an persona which if effectively dealt which can dramatically improve the execution and [tag]cross-functional[/tag] execution.

The fence mender is consistently proving the value of fences for lack of ownership, since they are consistently defining the fence with forwarded emails and copious “cc-ing” of folks, hoping that someone will pick it up.

Real easy to improve interactions in this mode – just ignore it or follow up with the mender and clarify alternative next steps for that person to work. The other way to change this organizational behavior is to find revenue risk or to optimize the process (less boxes and arrows). This behavior existing in both Product and Process roles, which I’m not sure I agree with some of the conclusion/assertions, I do like the construct, since in Howard’s description most Fencer Menders are in product jobs, from what I have seen, but the most damage (revenue or risk can be done process-centric roles.

Since a fence mender can be a worker bee too, it’s just an opportunity for growth. If you manage the fence mender, it represents an opportunity for embracing accountability and personal ownership of an issue which has found it’s way to you.

As a rule, if a customer, team member or manager (actually these are all customers if you think about it) reaches out to you it is implied that they are looking for the Menders assistance – and assistance to closure. So in fact a fence mender is anyone in the organization who is willing to flip things “over the fence” and use the fence or the public throwing over the fence as an excuse for why something didn’t go well.

In the Vassal organization ( A Vassal leader is not one we have examined yet – but think BIG organization), there are even fences in the same organization and even within smaller groups/team. Typically these organizations are horribly overstaffed and each person has a very small zone of ownership, skill requirement and little to no accountability.

In principle, a Fence Mender organization is overly [tag]process-centric[/tag] (way too many [tag]swim lanes[/tag] and boxes), lacking creativity (I do what is in my box) and generally the domain of the mediocre (just get it out of my box). To that end:

‘Why do they make good neighbors? Isn’t it
Where there are cows?
But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.

– R. Frost

It appears the only person who is given offence is the “customer” in need of something. So why is it that fences make good neighbors?

September 14, 2007 by
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