Retail Observer

RETAILOBSERVER.COM DECEMBER 2022 42 Steven Morris On Brand I f you can solve your brand challenge, you can probably solve everything else in your business – but if you haven't solved this challenge, just about everything else will suffer: your culture, your marketing, your sales, and your ability to attract and retain more of the right, loyal customers and employees. Here's what happens if you haven't solved the brand challenge: You chase customers, compromise your values, sell your products or services for less than premium or profitable rates just to stay afloat, and you work hard on innovating what you deliver, only to see it fall short in the market. Most challenging of all, though, is that you work very hard to keep the organization humming, only to have a confused audience and a disengaged staff who don't seem to be on the same page with you. Your brand is the culmination of what your organization believes, how your culture behaves, how you express yourself visually and verbally, how you innovate products and services, how you market, and how and what you communicate to the world. If your business were a human being, the brand would be its beliefs, attitudes, actions, behaviors, character and the cumulative effect of these attributes applied consistently over time that creates your reputation. An evolved brand is one where the organization integrates its brand- building to create a measurable and actionable through-line between the leaders, the culture, the products or services and the customers. Kevin Sharer, former CEO of Amgen, called this fusion of business strategies, beliefs and organizational actions the "social architecture" of a business. " Sharer says, "If you don't have a social architecture that's solid, well-accepted and can be operationalized against the most important decisions you make, that's leadership's fault." My client partners have shared a few things you might find surprising about the results they've realized. • "The brand evolution operationalized what we believe." Those beliefs always sat at the core of our business, but the clarification helped us activate them. As a result, we had more clarity about the business we're really in, and how our brand is fused with our culture. This brand-culture unity made a world of difference to our team and our customer service. • "It was easier to evolve our brand as a company that has been around for many years." The maturity we now have provided traction that allows us to accelerate and innovate more easily. • "The brand evolution brought our team together." Because we all understood more deeply what we collectively believe and how we can live these beliefs, we realized greater team engagement and customer retention. After six months, we saw increased retention in our culture, and our retooled marketing saw greater sales. • "The brand evolution unearthed research that helped us better understand how our services (or products) are impacting the lives of our customers." The brand-evolution process clearly went well beyond our previous attempts to "rebrand" and our prior strategic planning exercises. It fused our business strategy, marketing strategy and our culture with how we express and communicate with our customers. • "The brand evolution created deeper employee engagement and increased our retention." While we expected to see an improvement in our ability to attract new customers, we didn't anticipate the benefits for recruiting new employees and deepening our team's engagement in their work. In the end, these benefits shouldn't be all that surprising. An expert-driven brand evolution should create clarity and trust with your customers, employees and the public. It should unite a team that is driven to create impact. It should attract customers who are aligned with your values and who appreciate that you share your beliefs with them. Finally, it should capture the unique beliefs that the organization stands on and operates from, which will distance you from the competition. This is what all beautifully evolved brands offer. Most important: A well-evolved brand creates integrity within your organization, as it brings together the disparate parts of your company by aligning your beliefs, behaviors and strategic business impact. If you want to get back to what your company does when it does its best, you might want to look within your organization's social architecture to create greater performance. HAVE YOU SOLVED YOUR BRAND CHALLENGE? Steven Morris is a brand, culture and leadership advisor, author and speaker. Over his 25+ years in business he's worked with 3,000+ business leaders at 250+ global and regional companies. Discover: https://matterco.co RO

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