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Many companies have employer brands (that part of the brand that you show to prospective talent) that are different from their consumer brands (that part of the brand that you show to customers and prospects).

In fact research that we conducted in partnership with The Society for New Communications Research found that almost 20% of companies have an employer brand that is different from their consumer brand. And almost 70% of those that said there was a difference between the brands, also said that their organization was not attempting to make them similar.

Worse than having a different brand is when organizations show prospective employees a different organizational brand during the recruiting process as compared to the brand they experience after they are hired – they account for 15% of all companies that participated in our research (1,000+).

Having an employer brand that is different from your consumer brand may in fact not be such a great idea, and here is why:

1. A consumer brand promise in embedded in a company’s culture and how they behave behind the firewall

With more and more employees interacting with customers and prospects, your internal culture will inevitably become part of your perceived brand promise.

As John Kennedy, the head of corporate marketing at IBM said during a recent CMO 2.0 Conversation: “It is this whole intersection between not only what marketers promise and how a product may or may not perform, but also what the company is like behind the brand.” Or as Phil Clement, the CMO at Aon said during another CMO 2.0 Conversation, when he described how Aon spent two years building the brand from the inside out before taking it out to the marketplace, convinced that their consumer brand is in fact an externalization of their internal values and beliefs: “And then (we) spent about two years building consensus around the company that those characteristics were true, and built credibility around them, so that when we started to talk the talk, the employees and teammates and colleagues would be walking the walk.”

And these are not the only CMO’s that believe that, so do the CMO’s at SAP, Kimpton, Con-Way, and Macys.

2. The numbers show that is a bad idea to keep them separate

The same research study mentioned higher found that companies that show a unified employer and consumer brand can expect the following benefits compared to those that maintain separate brands:

• 1.6X higher employee satisfaction
• 3.5X higher employee loyalty
• 2.7X the number of self-directed employees
• 1.7X the number of new employees who have a positive impression of the company
• 1.5X the number of employees who are proud to tell others that they work with their organization
• 1.5-3X being more attractive to recent college grads

Those numbers are even worse for those organizations that show a different organizational brand during the recruiting process than they really have once an employee joins the company.

It pays to have consistent brands!

(This is a link to column I wrote for iMedia)

The importance of being human

Humanizing brands is a popular topic, but people mean different things when they use this phrase, both in terms of what it means and why you should care.

So what does “humanizing brands” mean?
Brands get created in the customers’ minds based on interactions in the marketplace. These interactions could be a good or bad recommendation from a friend or colleague, an experience with the vendor’s customer service department, an encounter with one of the company’s ads, or an exchange with one of its salespeople.

Thus, “humanizing” a brand simply means to make those customer experiences over which you have control, and which lead to a customer’s expectation of value about your brand, more human. Note that the experiences over which you don’t have control — such as word of mouth, through which people help others by recommending products or warning them to stay away — are already human.

Continue reading the article at iMedia.

Some pundits will tell you that you should do away with brand messaging and positioning all together, since you cannot control it anyway. Not so fast! People need to know what bucket to put your offering in, and if they can’t, they won’t know how to assign value to what you have to offer. Tivo ended up in that pickle, with consumers not quite sure what category of products to compare the offering with. Was it more like a DVD player or was it more like a computer?

Knowing that a good positioning will impact your revenue and profits, and realizing that you still have a seat at the customer decision making table (it’s just a much more crowded table and your share of voice has significantly been reduced) you need to develop a point of view about your positioning and try to get it co-opted by your tribe. Like in most social interactions, your chances to get someone to adopt your point of view are going to increase if you involve them early on. The more say you give them in the process of co-creating your products and services, and the earlier you get them involved (preferably at the product concept stage) the more they will embrace a shared view of the brand and product positioning. An added benefit of co-creating products with your customers is that those who are involved in the design of new products will typically pay higher prices for those products .

Marketing executives have come to understand, sometimes the hard way, that brand perception is only as good as the last interaction the customer had with it. When I spoke with Mark Colombo, senior vice president of digital access marketing at FedEx he described the challenge as follows: “In the 50’s and 60’s, brands used to be built on a set of attributes. Now brands are built by customers, one experience at a time, and those experiences are, obviously, more and more online experiences.” So you cannot just convey a brand’s promise or a product’s positioning through advertising and packaging anymore, you also need to deliver against that promise across all your other customer touch-points, and at any time. That becomes especially challenging when you have complex product distribution channels, high numbers of people involved in your service delivery, or a high level of interaction between your customers and your customer service and support center. It gets further complicated by user generated touch-points that people will encounter in the form of online reviews, blogs, and online communities. All those touch-points can make or break your brand, product, or service promise and position. Like many other things in marketing, this is not something new; it’s just something that we used to get away with because our customers, prospects and detractors could not behave Hyper-Socially and hold us accountable for our actions.

The way you control a brand promise through multiple touch-points is not through elaborate process manuals that we have grown accustomed to in business. The way to do it is by embracing Hyper-Sociality and all the messiness that comes with it and allow all the people involved in the process to behave like humans. Some companies like Zappos and JetBlue achieve that through a shared values-based culture that creates a common sense of belonging among their employees. Others like Western Union achieve it by becoming customer-centric to a fault. Still others, like IBM, are doing it by encouraging all their employees to set up communities with whomever they want, wherever they want, and about anything they want.

The key to success is to embrace all four tenets of Hyper-Sociality: think tribes, knowledge networks, customer-centricity, and be willing to accept some of the messiness that comes with Hyper-Sociality.

What do you think? I would appreciate your feedback.

There is a lot of research on Brand Communities, defined by Muniz and O’Guinn as “a specialized, non-geographically bound community, based on a structured set of social relationships among admirers of a brand.” (Muniz and O’Guinn 2001).

But do brand communities really exist?

Brand communities imply that the brand is at the center of the community. So in the Harley community it would mean that the Harley bike is at the center, in the Jeep community the Jeep Wrangler or the Cherokee, in the Mini Cooper community the Mini, and in the Fiskateer community, the Fiskars tools.

Is this really what is happening? I don’t think so.

For communities to work, the members need to be at the center of the community, and so the motivations have to be different from the pure hedonistic pleasure of owning a brand/product. The Fiskateers may be the people who come up with most of the new Fiskars products ideas. And they may be their staunchest defenders when the brand comes under attack. But the reason they form a tight-knit community, one that some members say changed their lives, is because they share a passion for scrap-booking. The reason that Harley owners get together is because they share a riding lifestyle passion. Jeep owners, probably because they have a shared aspiration for being adventurous by “off-roading” their cars. Mini owners? Not sure, but according to ethnographic research even people who no longer own a Mini Cooper stay with the community, so it cannot be that the car is at the center of the community.

So why Jeep and not Ford, why Fiskars, why Mini, why Harley ? Because in all those cases the companies have provided environments in which those member communities can operate and thrive. Jeep marketers are providing training camps, and are organizing the barbecues around which members can share their passion. Fiskars provided an online environment for their members to thrive and connected those with offline events as well. But in all cases they are enablers of a shared passion that exists within a tribe or community.

The result of that is what I described in a recent blog post – people use the Jeep, the mini, the Fiskars scissors, or the Harley as symbols to associate with others who share that passion. In some cases they take that a step further and create rituals around those brands, which make the brands more sticky. But at the end of the day, these are not brand communities, they are passionate rider communities, scrapbooker community, adventure seeker communities.

What do you think? Do you buy that, or do you think I am missing something?

Say you are a really honest used car dealer, a truly compassionate personal injury lawyer, or a lobbyist fighting for a real noble cause…how do you create an image for yourself that is believable and disconnected from the bad connotations that characterize your industry?

Can you overcome the perceptions?

And how do people make buying decisions when they need a product or service from an industry that is tainted like that? Sure, they can ask for recommendations…but in a lot of cases you do not need that product or service too often, and many of your friends may have never needed it either.

It’s a tough one…and one that many small businesses are facing.

Thoughts? Good case studies? Let me know…

Bob Garfield’s Chaos Scenario 2.0 is a great read in the online section of AdAge today.

Interrupt marketing is dead! Traditional media and traditional advertisers are locked into a death spiral…word of mouth and social networking are in…agencies are out…

Good stuff.

[Tags: advertisement new media]

Last week I moderated a webinar panel on the role of communities in B2B marketing with Rob Leavitt from ITSMA and also with Mike Smith from BMC Software (recording can be found here – requires registration). It was a great conversation with good lessons learned from BMC Software.

As part of my opening comments I harped on one of my favorite topics again – that the field of marketing is undergoing tectonic shifts and that the old rules no longer apply. The old techniques of interrupt marketing that involved interrupting people to show them product or company messages or as Alan Moore, one of the co-authors of Communities Dominate Brands, calls it – the just in case marketing techniques – do not work anymore!

You can no longer broadcast messages to individuals and hope that they will get it and retell your story. Funding traditional communication programs like that is like pouring water into a sinking ship. Not only are people fed up with it, you are also competing with an exponentially growing number of companies who are trying to reach the same people. Plus you now compete across multiple media – many of them always-on and where prime time is between 9-5.

As a marketer you really need to solve the ambient findability problem – be there when people need you and where they need you. Madison Avenue calls it “engagement” – although most agencies are very confused about what engagement means. No it does not mean engagement with the ad…

One way of solving this riddle is to engage with communities who are already communicating amongst themselves about topics that you want to talk about. If your message resonates with them then it will automatically get amplified within the community before being “retold” outside the community. In some cases they may not like your message, but still like what you do and simply replace your message with something else before retelling the story. And then there will always be the case where they really don’t like what your doing, will reject your message and talk back and in the process expose flaws with your company or product in public.

This is of course the end of control. This will happen whether you like it or not. You have to give up your brand to your communities to succeed. And if you do it right you will once again reach your customers and do it with budgets that are dramatically lower than what you are spending today.

[Tags: communities community management marketing community marketing]

When you think about the affinity that you have for different brands, you quickly realize that they fall into different categories – you may not have the as much brand affinity and loyalty to your soap vendor as you do to your favorite shirt manufacturer, or your car manufacturer.

Could there be such a thing as a universal brand loyalty hierarchy – akin to Maslow’s needs hierarchy? And if so, would it help marketers in determining what marketing program might work better to promote and position their products?

Let’s try this out and see where it leads…

At the highest level of the brand loyalty hierarchy are products that help define who you are and what you stand for. They are the products that define your personal brands – let’s call them Image Defining Brands. Brands that fall in this category in the consumer space include your clothes- you might want to wear only Nautica shirts because you are a sailor, or a sailor wanna be. Another product that probably falls in this category is the car you drive – with some people driving all wheel drive vehicles to indicate their love for the rugged outdoors and adventure travel, and others swearing by the Toyota Prius to indicate their dedication to a cleaner planet. In the corporate world, products that fall into this category are products that can affect a person’s image or career. Early adopters of Lotus Notes collaboration software or Linux servers come to mind. Being early in buying VoIP solutions would probably fall into this category as well. The key is that those brands define who I am or who I want others to think I am.

Next ring down are products that do not necessarily define your image, but they make you feel good – let’s call them Feel Good Brands. You may not really have much brand loyalty to a soap vendor who’s product you use, but you buy the same soap over and over again because it smells good and makes you feel good when you step out of the shower. Another example in this category could be Fair Trade Coffee – it really does not make a difference to your image whether you drink Fair Trade Coffee or not – after all it is not written on your cup. But it makes you feel good that the laborers that brought you this coffee were treated fairly. In the business world, products that fall in this category are products in well established and mature product categories. If you are in charge of deciding which CRM system to bring into your company, it is no longer a career defining decision, or even an image defining decision – it is very much a “feel good” decision. You will choose a solution that will make you feel good about your decision.

One ring further down are the products for which you have little brand affinity. They don’t define you, nor do they make you feel much different than if you were using another brand – let’s call them Commodity Brands. Low end pens and pencils come to mind. You may buy a pen from Bic because you know that they have a reputation to last long and not leak on planes, but in reality you might be just as satisfied and feel just as good with a Papermate pen. The same is true for the gas you put in your car, you may have a slight preference for Mobil because it has a reputation of being a cleaner gas, but you really would not feel much different after filling up your tank with with cheap LuKoil gas. In the business world, brands that fall into this category would be office supplies, or snack/vending machine service providers. The key buying decisions for these brands are reputation and trust.

Of course, product vendors can create products in certain product categories that allows them to move up (or down) the hierarchy. Luxury pens are perceived by some buyers as image defining products. And while Fair Trade Coffee in your own cup may not help define your image, being a Starbucks vs. a Dunkin’ Donuts kind of coffee buyer may do just that.

More on this later…what are your thoughts?

[Tags: brand image brand affinity brand loyalty]

Reveries.com released a survey and white paper on increasing loyalty by creating deep-soul connections, Harley style (pdf here).

Dori Molitor, the author of the report starts off by talking about the incredible levels of brand loyalty that Harley-Davidson bikers have – attributing it to a deep-soul connection between Harley-Davidson and those who love their motorcycle, and claiming that this is the highest level relationship a brand can have with its consumers.

Companies like Apple, BMW, or Nike can easily be used as other examples of companies that have achieved deep-soul connections with their customers, but can other companies in less “sexy” industries develop deep-soul connections with their customers? The white paper takes us through the stories of less obvious candidates that have achieved that same level of customer connection – including General Mills, Serta, the mattress company and Trader Joe’s.

One of the things to remember, says Dori Molitor, is: “A deep-soul connection is not the exclusive purview of ostensibly “sexy” brands like Harley and Nike, nor does it require spending enormous sums of money. It is about transcending those kinds of considerations and connecting with consumers based on a higher purpose than a sterile, financial transaction.” And a higher purpose does not mean a “good cause” or a charity – something many marketers will try to use and fail miserably. Finding a higher purpose is all “about the connections that brands can provide to other people (their relationships) or the ways in which they help consumers lead happier, more purposeful lives.”

Well said! At the end of the day branding is all about how people feel about themselves…

[Tags: loyalty customer loyalty deep soul connection harley]

Advertising Age just came out with their top 200 brands report – in which they measure brands by their ad spending on “measured’ media. As can be expected when you measure brands by their ad spending, the top 25 list is littered with losers – including Verizon, in the top spot, Ford (#3), AT&T, Dell, etc.

Verizon spent almost $1B in “measured” media in the first half of 2006, while Ford, Chevrolet, and Dodge combined spent over $1.2B on “measured” media in the first six months. Ford spent 3X as much as General Motors Corp. on “measured” media. And when looking at the top 200 brand spending by media, they allocated a whopping 6.7% of their “measured” media spending on the Internet – with the rest spent on TV, Radio, Newspapers and Magazines.

What the heck are they thinking? And what are they “measuring”? Do you think that if Ford were to stop spending on traditional advertising for six month or even a year and instead invest $1 B in a clean energy research they would lose a ton of marketshare? And what if they were to spend their marketing dollars more wisely – like use the information that they already have about their existing customers to market more effectively to their existing base. If you have a Ford, how many times did you hear directly from the company since you purchased your car? Or what would happen if Verizon were to spent 1/2 as much as they did in the first six months – and by doing so still spend as much as their nearest competitors – and instead spend the other $1/2 B on customer service and customer retention programs?

Economist Steven Levitt – from Freakonomics fame – found that money spent by candidates in political races hardly mattered at all. In fact he found that a candidate could cut his spending in half and lose only 1% of the vote. The same research found that a losing candidate could double his spending and expect to shift the vote in his favor by only that same 1%.

Verizon – are you listening?

There is no question that advertising plays a role in marketing – but those numbers prove that a majority of ad dollars are being wasted and miss-prioritized!

First you need a product that will WOW your customers. And while Geoffrey Moore will tell you and Apple prove to you that you should not care about customer service while your product is in the Tornado, when you have mature products like Verizon and Ford, customer service and retention are key to your success. In fact, they can lead to a ton of free advertising – generated by your very own consumers and delivered with much higher precision than TV advertising!

[Tags: advertising branding brands customer service]