B2B Brand Debate Topic — Brand Council
Compelling series regarding the role and importance of a Brand Council unfolding over at Gigabrandblog.com. Part two of the three part series covers the Who, What and How of a successful Brand Council. Interesting angle being taken to focus on the particular challenge facing brands in the technology sector. “Technology companies in particular struggle to enhance the value of their brands by aligning their activities to deliver a fulfilling customer experience beyond the functional and/or technological benefits they offer.“
Regardless of specific verticals or market, a critical component for any large company looking to enhance their image in order to boost business is a strong Brand Council. It’s something all of us here at B2BBrandDebate want to bring to the forefront of conversation. As we routinely address, brand development cannot thrive in a vacuum, but rather needs input and buy-in from the company from C-level to entry level.
Does your company utilize the power of a Brand Council when developing brand strategy and brand positioning? If so, please tell us a little about how it works for you.
B2B Brand Debate Topic — Category Definition
Category definition is an issue paramount to all successful businesses. As our friends over at Gigabrandblog.com point out, it’s a strategic decision that can stifle some brands. “Each technology brand shares the same business challenge: defining what category best describes their business, and how to position themselves within the competitive environment.”
The ever-evolving nature of technology forces executives in this field to think more in terms of audience confirmation as it relates to Gartner or Forrester category definition. So often technology companies get caught up in the technology and miss the mark as it relates to what category of business they really represent and how their customers categorize the corporation and view their positioning. In addition, approaching this strategy must be carefully planned and socialized to get buy-in and optimal results.
The series entitled Technically Speaking, What Business Are You Really In speaks about how proper category definition allows for development of an effective brand position. While the impetuous of the article is on the technology sector, there are certainly great nuggets for all of us in the branding world to discuss. Take a minute to read and share your thoughts, which could spark the next great debate.
Walk Softly And Carry A Big Brand: Part 2
By Benjamin Bidlack, orignally posted on Gigabrandblog
How a strong tech brand can help with inevitable mistakes.
Last time, we talked about Google and how its huge brand (valued at $32 Billion in 2009) helped it to move into new categories completely separate from search. But a strong brand also helps with when a company makes a mistake, and Google has certainly had their fair share of them.
Here are a few of Google’s notable technical and/or market failures, none of which has damaged its brand.
1. Google X (Mac OS Dock-inspired search bar)
Google X was a project released by Google in March 15, 2005 and was rescinded a day later. It consisted of the traditional Google search bar, but it was made to look like the Dock interface feature of Apple’s Mac OS X operating system. Google never released an official statement as to why the project was shut down.
2. Google Answers (online knowledge market)
Google Answers was an online knowledge market offered by Google that allowed users to post bounties for well researched answers to their queries. Asker-accepted answers cost $2 to $200. Google retained 25% of the researcher’s reward and a 50 cent fee per question. In addition to the researcher’s fees, a client who was satisfied with the answer could also leave a tip of up to $100. In late November 2006, Google reported that it planned to permanently shut down the service, and it was fully closed to new activity by late December 2006, although its archives remain available.
3. Orkut (social media tool)
Although not a failure per se, Google’s Orkut is not a roaring success either, at least in the US. It’s a social networking website designed to help users meet new friends and maintain existing relationships. The website is named after its creator, Google employee Orkut Büyükkökten.
Although Orkut is less popular in the United States than competitors Facebook and MySpace, it is one of the most visited websites in India and Brazil. In fact, as of December 2009, 51.09% of Orkut’s users are from Brazil, followed by India with 20.02% and United States with 17.28%.
4. Froogle
Originally announced in 2002 as Froogle, now called Google Product search (please notice the re-branding under the Google masterbrand), is a price comparison service launched by Google Inc. It is currently in beta test stage. It was invented by Craig Nevill-Manning. Its interface provides an HTML form field into which a user can type product queries to return lists of vendors selling a particular product, as well as pricing information. Product Search is only available for selected countries at this point.
Google Product Search is different from most other price comparison services in that it neither charges any fees for listings, nor accepts payment for products to show up first. Also, it makes no commission on sales. Any company can submit individual product information via Google Base or can bulk submit items for inclusion. Google sells advertising through AdWords to be displayed in Product Search results adjacent to the unpaid results.
With all of these missteps, because they are Google, and all they represent, the Google brand can act as Teflon to protect them from the usual damage that strategic missteps can sometimes bring about.
Brand-building has defensive as well as offensive benefits. Toyota’s recent battles over potentially faulty acceleration and shifting features shows that even a strong brand can face devastating blows to its image, however true the allegations and/or perceptions prove to be.
So what’s the lesson in this? Even if you aren’t aiming to launch new products or take over new geographies, it pays to continue to invest in, and prove out, your unique promise to the world. That investment and hard work will be a cache of goodwill and positive associations, ready to help fend off any brand damage that might occur, whether it’s deserved or not.
Do you agree? What do YOU think?
CA’s INITIAL NAMING MISTAKE
by Alan Brew, originally posted on Namedroppings
CA, the company formerly known as Computer Associates, is displaying all the characteristics of Hamlet. It is a company that can’t make up its mind.
Founded in 1976 as Computer Associates International, Inc., the company legally changed its corporate name to CA, Inc., in February 2006 while in the midst of a $2.2 billion fraud investigation that had dogged it for four years.
Explaining the name change at the time, CEO John Swainson said:
“CA is a changed company, but not an entirely new company. We’ve taken the strengths of the past and combined them with new initiatives, strategies and ideas to ensure CA is the clear industry leader in meeting the evolving information technology needs of customers.”
This week, four years on, the company announced it had changed it’s name again – this time to CA Technologies. Explaining this change, new CEO Bill McCracken, said:
“The name CA Technologies both acknowledges our past yet points to our future as a leader in delivering the technologies that will revolutionize the way IT powers business agility.”
Spot the difference?
While the latest statement does make reference to the current industry buzz-term “business agility”, the two statements are identical in their sentiment and intent. There is nothing to help us understand the logic of the addition of ‘technologies’ in the CA name.
Marianne Budnik, chief marketing officer, did add: “The brand and name change to CA Technologies was designed with insights from nearly 700 customers, partners and market thought leaders.”
It begs the question – insights into what, specifically? I would hazard a guess: CA hasn’t worked as a name. It was a hasty, myopic decision made at a time the company needed to distance itself from a debilitating scandal. CA was the easy choice, but the wrong choice. It just wasn’t thought through.
The pros and cons of initials as corporate names aside (more on this later), CA works visually when connected to the original name, Computer Associates, as in the amended logo introduced in 2001, shown above. Dropping the Computer Associates name from the logo was probably regarded as a minor adjustment. And as the internal rationale most likely went: competitors such as IBM, HP and BMC do just fine with initials, so why can’t we?
Well, disconnected from Computer Associates, CA becomes problematic for a number of reasons.
Unlike IBM, HP and BMC, ‘CA’ has no hard letter sounds. Consequently, CA it is not heard as two distinct initials, C and A. It is heard as ‘seeyay’.
Seeyay? Come again. Oh, you mean C-A, the old Computer Associates.
CA is nothing but a weak proxy for Computer Associates, a whiter shade of pale. It is too phonetically lightweight and nondescript as a name and simply not robust enough to acquire meaning of its own.
The other, not insignificant, problem - Google CA and up come pages of reference to California. CA means California first and foremost.
A new CEO brings in a new perspective. Bill McCracken decides change is necessary, and this time it will be based on research. Hence, the 700 insights Ms. Budnik mentioned. But they were probably given in response to a very specific question concerning the CA name, and very likely centering on preferences between modifiers, such as CA Software, CA Solutions and CA Technologies, etc.
Only in such a range of soft options could CA Technologies emerge as a winner. ‘Technologies’ is a verbal Band Aid and adds nothing other than a glottal stop to a very inadequate name.
This latest name change amounts to little more than fiddling around the problem, and in doing so CA creates another problem for itself.
In her statement, Ms. Budnik also said the name was “developed to ensure that we tell a consistent story in the market that reflects the full breadth and depth of what we offer.”
A redundant word in a name makes for inconsistency, not consistency. ‘Technologies’ is a such word. Lucent Technologies was always referred to just as Lucent, for example. No doubt CA Technologies will appear on things the company can control, such as corporate signage, stationery and collateral. But in all other cases it will be CA. The company’s ticker symbol is still CA, it’s URL is still ca.com, and the company still defaults to CA in references to itself on its website. It will still be CA in headlines, analyst calls and in conversation. Where is the consistency?
Rather than finessing with the corporate name a simpler option would have been a tagline to anchor the name in some specificity for marketing purposes. EMC’s “Where information lives”, or GE’s “Imagination at work” are two of the better examples.
The better and braver option for Computer Associates would have been to change the name of the company in 2006 when it had reason and opportunity to, the accounting scandal apart. While Computer Associates’ success was built on mainframe software a different future beckons, one in which companies manage their technology in what the industry calls the “cloud.” The name should have claimed that future unequivocally.
JUST ADMIT IT BP, YOU’RE AN OIL COMPANY
by Alan Brew, originally posted on Namedroppings
“Yes, we are an oil company. But right now we are also providing natural gas, solar, hydrogen, geothermal. Because we live on this planet, too.”
No, this is not part of a mea culpa from BP. It’s a couple of lines from a Chevron ad, and one which BP would do well to consider emulating given the situation they are in.
With smart and refreshing directness, Chevron’s “Human Energy” TV ad from McGarry Bowen makes the case for oil and an oil company better than it has ever been made.
Actor Campbell Scott narrates the 150 second spot that unapologetically states Chevron’s case and its position in the global energy debate as an oil company searching for solutions.
“…today, tomorrow and the foreseeable future, our lives demand oil. But what’s also true is that we can provide it more intelligently, more efficiently, more respectfully”.
It is in marked contrast to BP’s “Beyond Petroleum” campaign. Chevron seeks to explain and educate; BP tries to obfuscate.
The problem with the “Beyond Petroleum” campaign for me is that it has always smacked of rebranding spin. Why? Because BP is, undeniably, an oil company. And a very big one at that. Like Chevron, BP is one of the world’s six oil majors, along with ExxonMobil, Royal Dutch Shell, ConocoPhillips and Total of France.
Any attempt to deny that fact, or at least mask it, was bound to tempt fate in an industry in which major shit happens, as with the 2005 explosion at a BP refinery in Texas, and the Alaska oil pipeline leak a year later. Now, with oil gushing into the Gulf of Mexico unabated and officials giving no indication that the flow can be contained soon, BP is unfortunately up to its oily neck in an imminent environmental disaster. Any lingering credibility attached to its pretense of being an energy company that has gone beyond petroleum has been deep-sixed along with the Deepwater Horizon oil rig.
Hold the oil
The “Beyond Petroleum” campaign was born opportunistically out of BP’s merger with Amoco in 1998.
Back then, BP was British Petroleum. After a brief but respectable period as BP Amoco, the company was recast in 2000 as plain BP. Replete with its elegant, Landor-designed sunburst logo, the intent was to send the message that the company was looking past oil and gas toward a benign, eco-friendly future of solar and renewable energy.
John Browne, the CEO at the time, wanted to position BP as a broader energy company, not just an oil company, ahead of the looming issues of climate change, energy security and supply scarcity. Just as all oil companies are now attempting to do, he saw it as a way to “gain a seat at the table, a chance to influence future rules.”
The slogan “Beyond Petroleum” was a clever if specious way of utilizing the initials ‘BP’ to emphasize they no longer stood for British Petroleum. “Better people, better products, big picture, beyond petroleum” went the alliterative mantra.
But idea was pushed way beyond the bounds of its limits. BP’s ill-advised attempt to position itself beyond the petroleum sector on the basis of its laudable but marginal investments in renewables is rather like China claiming to be “Beyond Communism” because it now owns capitalist Hong Kong. It is a huge stretch of a small, albeit desirable, truth.
How can an oil company be ”Beyond Petroleum” without actively distancing itself from its core product? It’s a very hard sell when your logo is emblazoned on 10,000 gas stations in the US alone and the vast majority of your profits come from the black stuff.
BP has really tried to clean up its act over the last few years. How the company extricates itself from its current predicament will be proof enough of whether we are seeing a new BP.
One thing it can do is finally move beyond “Beyond Petroleum” and talk about the business it is in with conviction, not what business it isn’t in.
“One Thing.” The best strategic advice a brand could ever get.
by Ray Baird, originally posted on GigaBrandBlog
“What’s the biggest challenge to creating a successful B2B brand?” I am often asked this question, and without a doubt it’s the decision of what not to be— let me explain.
So often, companies want to try and be everything to their customers. Does this sound familiar? Many times when we are working with a client to find their sustainable point of differentiation they will say that it’s many things and not just one; “We’re innovative but have great service at a value price.” Does this sound familiar? There in-lies the challenge. Yes, companies may have differentiation at many different levels, but customers and consumers think differently than businesses do.
Your customer’s brain is wired to retain information that is new and different or important to decisions that they are making—everything else gets lost in the sea of sameness. And most importantly, buyers immediately categorize brands based upon their first impression, which means you better be prepared to understand what you can own in the marketplace and what’s most relevant. And that’s where most companies struggle.
So often, corporations don’t spend enough time to really understand what makes them different in the minds of their buyers. They resort to value propositions that are confusing, uninteresting, and lacking in singularity for maximum intention—“One Thing”. Trying to build a brand on everything will leave you with nothing.
So if you are in the process of developing a brand position, here are two critical things to consider:
1. Get the strategy right.
If the strategy and value proposition has not been created or agreed upon, how can you create a successful brand? Finding the “One Thing” is really a strategic exercise more than anything else. It cannot just be delegated to the marketing department. It needs to be developed with the brain trust of your organization. Only then can the brand team go to work on developing a long lasting, successful brand and delivery strategy.
2. Be the Brand voice of reason. Take the test.
As you begin the brand development process consider using these three elements to make sure you are building a lasting brand strategy.
a. Is it relevant? If what you are saying does not resonate with your buyer, go back to the drawing board. Ask yourself the question, “Will they care?”. Remember , if your customer is not ecstatic over the promise or doesn’t get it, you will be building a promise on a false foundation. And remember, focus on “One Thing”.
b. Is it believable? If you can’t come up with strong reasons to believe, you need to start over. In most cases your employees can tell you immediately if your value proposition will fly. The last thing you want to do is announce a new positioning that people cannot believe. Do yourself a favor, always test your future brand promise with both employees and customers. If it’s not resonating with them and if it’s not credible, you’re in for a rough ride. And remember, focus on “One Thing”.
c. Is it defendable? You need to step back and look at your ecosystem and determine if your new position is defendable. So often, companies build brand promises that are short lived because they did not do the proper homework to understand the competitive environment and market dynamics. The last thing you want is to introduce a brand position that someone can knock down or will become irrelevant in short order. And remember, focus on “One Thing.”
If you start with a clear strategy that’s agreed upon by your executive team and use this criteria to develop brand, you’ll be in great shape to create a long lasting successful brand. And remember, focus on “One thing”. If you try to be known for many things, you‘ll be remembered for nothing. But that’s just my opinion, what’s yours?
Walk Softly and Carry a Big Brand
By Benjamin Bidlack, orignally posted on Gigabrandblog
How building your brand helps you enter (or bulldoze your way into) new products, categories and geographies.
Why invest your brand? Especially a B2B brand? Because it pays off. Handsomely. Let’s look at Google, a brand worth $32 Billion in 2009 according to BusinessWeek. (Yes, that just the brand, not the hard assets. More on brand valuation in an upcoming Brand Valuation blog piece.) Google started off in 1998 as a search engine, competing with a slew of other search providers: Yahoo, Magellan, InfoSeek, AltaVista and a slew of other now irrelevant search brands. Yahoo is the only remaining search competitor worth mentioning, with 14% share of search as of 2/20/2010. That’s 14% compared to Google’s 78%. As a result, I believe, Yahoo decided to turn its brand and business ship toward “personalizing the internet experience” and away from pure search (watch for an upcoming blog on that soon).
Google’s stated mission from the outset was “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful” and it has certainly succeeded. In pursuing that objective, the company held two beliefs they bet their life on: 1) “The user is in charge.” And 2.) “If users come, so will revenue.”
Both of those beliefs served to be right. Google quickly monetized their leadership in the space by starting AdWords, their flagship advertising product and main source of revenue ($23.7 Billion in 2009). And then used the power of their brand and reach to enter (or bulldoze into) new categories.
- Online productivity software, including email and documents (where Yahoo was the clear leader at the time, and still is: 3.8% share vs. 0.8%)
- Desktop apps (GoogleWave)
- The Chrome browser
- Picasa photo editing and organization
- GoogleTalk instant messaging
- SketchUp 3D modeling
- The incredible and comprehensive GoogleEarth
- And most recently, mobile phones and operating systems: Google Phone and Android.
I would suggest that these entries would have only a tenth of their current buzz and value if they were coming from an unknown brand, even if that unknown company were better qualified in the category.
So how can Google’s story help you with your business? The first thing it says is to set an inspiring and badly needed vision/mission for your business, however large or small it may be. Make sure people really want what you’re offering them. Then, become better at delivering it than your competitors, because they will try to copy you.
Then, build your brand:
Create a compelling promise that asserts your leadership
Design it beautifully verbally and visually
Work diligently to deliver on your promise. Emphasis on the word “work”. Brands don’t become great because of beautiful design or catchy phrasing. They become great because companies DELIVER great product and service experiences that live up to their brand promise: their cause, you might say.
If you let people down on your promise, you’ll be worse off.
Once you’ve delivered great experiences, you will have earned the right to branch into other categories and geographies. You’ll be afforded product and/or service trial (and even forgiveness if you stumble) where before, you wouldn’t even be considered.
Does this happen overnight? No. Does great branding replace great business strategy and value delivery? No. But it does take great companies to new heights. And gives them a huge club to walk around with.
What do YOU think?
Brand Hijacking
by Ray Baird, originally posted on GigaBrandBlog.com
Why are many brands unintentionally hijacked by their own people and strategies?
There have been many papers and books written on the importance of brand alignment, employee engagement, brand adoption, call it what you may. So, why do so many companies still suffer from poor employee morale, low retention, misalignment, performance fatigue and the inability to make good on their brand promise?
To answer the question, all you need to do is look at the typical business eco-system— its structure, interactions, systems and most importantly its accountability and philosophy. For the most part, business in America is built in a departmental fashion, and the larger the company becomes, the more susceptible it is to falling into a “Silo” mentality. Obviously, the “Silo” effect works against the principle of being aligned, collaborative and fully informed. When the right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing, they are left to their own interpretation and often both work against the brand’s best intentions.
Structure is the next problem. The biggest problem here is who is really in charge of pulling the entire picture together and reporting on its effectiveness. HR deals with internal issues, marketing controls brand, operations tries to deliver the goods and sales. So the problem is not only that “Silos” are not conducive to collaboration, but that structures typically are not built to orchestrate a bigger picture mentality and understanding of the customer experience, the internal experience and how it’s being perceived and delivered.
In addition, companies often fail to develop well thought out interactive/collaborative processes to foster “informative decision making” internally and externally. Yes, most companies have some loosely defined collaborative meeting structure but most don’t monitor the internal brand working relationship to the external delivery. Again, people and departments are left to make decisions without confirmation of alignment to the overall strategies.
One of the biggest disconnects we often experience is the division and disconnect of Marketing and HR. So often these departments work on their own strategies without coming together to fully agree and embrace how the communication content is generated and distributed. We find that successful companies and brands that co-develop strategies and shared systems experience greater unity and brand performance.
So, if you’re looking to increase the morale of your organization, improve retention, or better deliver on your customer experience and brand, here’s a few things to think about:
1. Have a holistic view. Don’t develop brand strategies as it relates to your brand experience strictly in a departmental fashion. Bring department leaders together to truly understand the internal/external workings of the brand. Develop a brand council comprised of your department leaders, to guide, instruct and monitor the internal and external brand experience.
2. Say NO to “Silos”. If this is an issue, break it down now, it will only get worse. Especially make sure Marketing and HR are collaborating in strategy and the development of monitoring metrics (and don’t leave out operations).
3. Continual innovative communication. I know it sounds obvious but people need to hear strategy over and over to get it. You must reinforce the importance of the organization to nurture and foster brilliant internal communication and to have external proof that the brand is performing to its intended standards.
If you follow these simple rules, you’ll reduce the chances of your brand being hijacked by its own people. But that’s my opinion, what’s yours?
Google: When brand values collide with business opportunity
by Ray Baird, originally posted on www.GigaBrandBlog.com
The ongoing news about Google potentially pulling out of the China market has stirred up some very interesting points of view as it relates to sticking to your brand values versus protecting your bottom line. If you read Google’s core principles you can see why so many people are keeping a close eye on their moves as it relates to pulling out of China. It’s not just about money, it’s about principle. It’s about their brand.
When you get a chance, check out the philosophy section of Google’s website www.google.com/corporate/tenthings.html, specifically the core principles that guide their actions. Basically they have 10 statements that clearly articulate their thoughts as it relates to conducting behavior and business. I’ve always liked the concept of “clarity” and “consistency” as it relates to a company’s action, but the challenge becomes staying true to what you believe in during tough or challenging circumstances and not bending or shaping the principle to work in your favor.
In the case of Google, they clearly state, “You can make money without doing evil”. Therein lies the dilemma. In January Google outed that the December attacks that hit 34 corporate firms originated in China. Bottom line, it’s all about censorship and privacy, and Google has publically threatened to withdraw its search engine business from the Peoples Republic for these practices. But will they?
Just last Friday at the TED conference, Google co-founder Sergey Brin stated, “I want to find a way to work within the Chinese system to bring information to the people”. Really, even if the government has no intention of stopping censorship or blocking certain sites? Needless to say, there is a fine line between staying true to your brand principles and protecting your brand reputation. Careful what you ask for? Employees, customers and prospects are very savvy and will not put up with posers in this day and age. Google must be very careful to walk the walk if they want to remain one of the most courageous and admired brands of the decade. But that’s’ just my opinion. What’s yours?
Time Warner’s naming twavails
by Alan Brew, originally published on www.namedroppings.com
When it comes to name changes, the Time Warner organization has had its share of unfortunate events.
The merger with AOL produced the misbegotten AOL Time Warner for a brief period before Time Warner executives regained their composure senses and dropped AOL from the corporate name. In this case the name was the least of Time Warner’s problems, however unlovely and humiliating it may have been. Its offspring, Time Warner Telecom, made much heavier weather of its naming challenge.
Time Warner Telecom was created in 1993 by Time Warner Cable, a division of Time Warner, and was spun it off as its own company in 1997. A licensing agreement with Time Warner allowed the carrier to use the Time Warner name until July 2006. As the deadline approached the company sought a 12 month extension of the license and undertook a rebranding program with a San Francisco firm. It came up with the interesting name of Avid Networks. It was too interesting for Avid Technology, a maker of sound-and video-editing systems. It sued to block Time Warner Telecom from using the name.
After an initial round of legal sabre-rattling in which the carrier told Avid it “could consent of fight” Time Warner Telecom backed off to rethink and extended its licensing agreement, for a second time, to June 30, 2008.
Whatever happened behind the scenes in the meantime, the company finally changed its name to the safe and anti-climactic TW Telecom on July 1, 2008. “TW Telecom is familiar; it is stable; it is consistent; it is clear, concise and focused — it is who we are,” said Larissa Herda, company CEO, president and chairwoman. Or as the company said on it’s website to reinforce the non-change – “Twied and twue. Same twadition of service. And we are not changing a thing. Twust us”.
Part of the proclaimed logic of the Time Warner Telecom name change was to avoid confusion with Time Warner Cable, which has also been spun-off by Time Warner. Both offer Internet and data services to small and medium businesses. And in some places, the two compete in the business data transport market. Now we hear that Time Warner Cable is also considering a new name although it is under no apparent licensing pressure to do so. It has reportedly launched “Project Mercury”, in an initiative to rename itself sometime during 2010.
No doubt the Project Mercury team will do its due diligence to avoid an Avid situation when recommending a new name to the CEO.
TW Cable anyone?