Building the Business Case
Section 2 Building a Leading
4. they are an asset that must have resources devoted to their
development and maintenance.
In many ways, brands can be likened to a person's reputation. In his seminal text on corporate image/identity, Graeme Dowling did just that and coined the phrase ‘corporate reputation’5This concept of corporate brand as a company's reputation will become especially important when the employer brand process is discussed in later chapters.
Branding - What's in it for me?
With the ever increasing quagmire of advertising that proliferates across the airwaves, our television and computer screens, our papers and magazines - indeed any available patch of anything that doesn't already have an advertisement on it - it's hard for most people to make sense of all the messages we receive. Coupled with ever-increasing choice and the modern malaise of 'time poverty', people crave (and need) shortcuts to help get through the day. (If you think this is a nonsense, simply go to the supermarket and compare the range available today for a
'commodity' like milk with the single-type, two-brand selection that confronted you twenty years ago).
Brands provide these shortcuts. Once established in your mind, the sight of any familiar manifestation of a brand (a logo, a sound or song even a colour, like Cadbury's purple) will spark a string of associations that are programmed in to the consumer. You don't need to be told again about what these symbols mean - the brand provides the shorthand version. And it can deliver value at two levels.
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perceived level of quality. Universally, we all look for value in terms of a desired level of performance, the lowest price and good service associated with the purpose.6A brand that is perceived to deliver on these basics will at least be considered (assuming that the customer is aware of it).
If this were all that was desired as consumers - functional performance, a good price and good service - it is clear that brands can still help. But in so many cases, customers want more. They often want products and services that deliver social and emotional value.
Why would someone pay over three times as much for a shirt with a polo rider emblazoned on the breast pocket? Because that symbol (directly associated with the brand and its shortcut meanings of prestige, wealth and style) add value to the functional performance of the shirt. It says to everyone 'see, I am like this - I have style and can afford to wear clothes of this quality.' It has social value.
Why would someone pay almost twice as much for an Armani suit off the rack over a tailored equivalent? One could argue for the material, the cut of the suit, the quality of the stitching, but there are few tailors who couldn't match all three. In this case, unless the wearer is flashing the label on the inside pocket at everyone he meets (behaviour hardly likely for an Armani customer) it is not the social value sought because the vast majority of people could not identify an Armani suit from a tailored equivalent. The value lies in the way the suit makes the person feel - a sense of achievement, successful, powerful - the emotional value. And only the brand can deliver this.
The same is true of corporate brands. When meeting someone for the first time they may tell you their position before the name of their organisation. Others will simply say ‘I work for XYZ corporation’ as a way of associating themselves with the shortcut meanings associated with the brand of that company. This concept of functional and emotional benefits has clear implications for the employer brand. Try this simple exercise - When you next hand your business card to a
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person whom you are meeting for the first time, place your thumb over your company's logo and watch the expression on the face of the
person as they look at the card. Then take your thumb off to reveal your company's logo - Does this cause a different reaction from the person? Now consider if the corporate logo you revealed when you took your thumb away was Microsoft, McDonalds or Coca Cola.
Elements of the brand
While an organisation may know what it wants for its brand, how it wants the brand to be regarded by its customers and other
stakeholders, this aspiration may not (and seldom exactly does) match the reality. If the brand is represented by the image that exists in the customer's head then what is desired by the organisation (the ideal image that it tries to portray) is the identity it projects.
Again, we can relate this back to the individual. Each person has an identity (how they see themself and a belief of how they come across to others) but does this necessarily match the image that others have of them (what they really are like)?
Given this tension, how does one encapsulate all the information about a brand so that they know how to steer the image closer to their ideal identity?
Over many years of research and struggling with these issues, people have developed various frameworks for developing brands - hence the profusion of books about branding. Some is quite rightly considered hype, but, like the definition of brands, there is some consistency amongst the schemes that offers insight into the elements of branding that need to be considered and managed.
At the lowest level are the attributes of the brand, the adjectives that described the mental associations with it and the features of the products/services it covers. For instance, consumers may think of a specific service as 'fast', 'courteous' or 'professional'. Most people would use terms such as 'well engineered', 'prestige', 'exciting', 'fast' or
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'well-designed' to describe BMW. While these deliver functional value, they are easily copied by others and not particularly engaging to customers.
Customers tend to be more interested in the benefits (functional and emotional) as discussed previously. This is the next level at which brands deliver meaning. The attributes associated with a brand need translation to this level (i.e. if this is the feature, make it clear what is in it for the consumer). Often, this is done through advertising, but in great companies they are engendered in every form of communication and interaction with the customer. Prospective employees are much more savvy these days and companies cannot rely on simply creating slick advertisements to attract the brightest.
Brands can also deliver meaning about the values that it identifies with. (Note that this is different from the concept of value that was discussed above - always a problem with the English language!) These are not attributes or benefits but the core principles that it operates by. These are the values that the brand embodies and espouses - they could be different from those of the company that developed and maintains the brand. Hence, the irreverent, anti-establishment youth brands that value confrontation and 'attitude' have been developed by law-abiding, often multinational corporations. Increasingly, however, customers are seeking consistency between the values espoused by the brand and the organisation that uses them.
Needless to say, in the case of the corporate brand, the values of the organisation and that of the brand should be one and the same. Indeed, any lack of consistency itself speaks to the values of the organisation. Scott Davis summed the brand elements up best with his concept of a Brand Pyramid.3 (see figure 18)
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Figure 18: The Brand Pyramid
Source: Brand Asset Management 2002
The first two levels of the pyramid embody the elements of product competition, not those of brand competition. The top level of the pyramid illustrates the concept that powerful brands attract and hold customers with their particular promises of value that reflect the values of their target customers. This leads to the creation and reinforcement of brand loyalty.
Who was that masked man?
Once consumers know so much about a brand - how to describe it, the benefits it offers, its values - it is hard not to start thinking of them in the same way as we think about people we know. People have a tendency to personify a number of things in their lives - such as their pets and cars.
In concert with the functional aspects of the brand is the brand persona or personality. When trying to uncover what people think of brands, it is not uncommon for market researchers to ask ‘If this brand was a person, what sort of person would it be?’ Usually, the subjects have no
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problems describing such a person (unless they are unfamiliar with the brand). This personification tendency is used to advantage by marketers who understand that individuals are drawn to personalities that they find attractive (and often who they see themselves like, at least ideally). They will try to craft, through communication and product/service delivery, a personality that matches that of their target audience. A quick way to achieve this is to 'borrow' the personality of someone who the target audience already knows and identifies with. Hence celebrity endorsement, or celebrities becoming the 'face of' the brand, is used to achieve immediate personification. A good example of this is the use of tennis sensation, Australia's Pat Rafter by Bonds to promote their range of men's underwear.
While this can and does work for consumer product brands, it becomes more difficult for service brands and corporate brands. This is because the clues that people use to decipher or reinforce the brand personality are gathered from each and every interaction with the organisation. This means that the culture, policies and values of the organisation - and its effect on the behaviour of the people who interact with customers and other stakeholders who support these people - all has an impact on their perceptions of the brand.
Position, Position, Position
Like the real estate mantra of 'location, location, location', branding has its own mantra - 'position, position, position'. Corporate brands are developed to differentiate themselves positively from rivals - to
position their product as attractive and superior in the minds of the target consumer.
All the 'stuff' associated with branding that has already been discussed comes into its own in this exercise, because the attributes, benefits, values and persona all combine to help provide a unique position in the mind of the target customer in a way that a simple product/service cannot.
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A critical concept here is 'target.' To be different, companies will appeal to some and not others. While most people wear shoes, not everyone identifies with irreverence for the establishment and 'attitude.' A shoe manufacturer can make their shoes more appealing to the youth market not only in the styling of the shoes, but in the brand that surrounds their product. But, by design, this will not appeal to an elderly
consumer who seeks dependability and identifies with the mainstream. Skeechers are not Grosbys (even if they were made in the same
factory).
Taking care of business
It is clear that there is a lot to the concept of branding. To make it work, its application in organisations has to be consciously and
continuously managed. The aspirations of the brand (identity) has to be managed in the context of what the brand currently delivers and what place it occupies in the mind of customers.
To achieve this, the brand has to continually reinforce what it is and what its stands for. This means managing all the ways that people get information about the brand from all touchpoints - from the billboard advertisement, to the product/service itself, to the way that the
telephone is answered. All manifestations of the brand have to be considered and actively managed to provide a consistent, reinforcing view of the brand. By necessity (and probably most importantly), this includes all interactions that a customer has with the organisation. Research has shown that these interactions, more than any other cue, are what shapes the customer's view of a brand.
This is easy to say, but the role of brand management is harder to achieve, especially as those given this task rarely have operational authority to make it happen. The problem is magnified in service
organisations (which now constitutes the majority of companies), where the tension between the existing culture (the way we do things around here) and the culture necessary to deliver on the brand promise (the way we should do things around here) are at odds.
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Armed with the fundamentals of branding presented in this chapter, managers should now begin to see how branding can help with the challenges of employee recruitment, engagement and retention. The remainder of this book is devoted to providing a practical application of employer branding and how it can make a difference to the long term sustainability of an organisation.