Building a brand needs a multi-layered approach

Not giving your leadership team a clear idea of the brand you want to establish and the behaviour needed to achieve that can undermine your efforts and create confusion in your team.

It is striking how few leaders clearly articulate the critical brand attributes they want their organisation to manifest. If an organisation’s brand is poor, fix it quickly. Within six months to a year, the brand you inherit becomes yours. 

Early in the transition period, every new CXO – senior executive – should have conversations with staff on promoting the brand, set the context for the brand with critical stakeholders, and drive behaviour and actions that make the brand a reality.

 

Define the brand

A first step to triangulating a new brand is to interview existing stakeholders and customers and take an inventory of terms they would use to describe your organisation. Negative and positive descriptions offer opportunities to transform future interactions and reset the brand. 

A second approach is to consider your goals for the organisation, although it may sound like one overarching goal. As the brand defines how you are perceived in the delivery of this goal, you need to ask yourself this: What terms are you likely to use when describing the delivery of this overarching goal? 

A third approach is to brainstorm with your team on how to define critical brand attributes. This approach, most importantly, involves your team in the brand-definition process, enabling it to take ownership of the results. Engaging the team to frame brand attributes also expands the set of descriptors for the brand. 

By adding these descriptors, you can frame the new desired brand. 

 

Set the context

A key responsibility of the new executive is to analyse and potentially reset the context of the brand. This may require breaking prior patterns of the organisation’s interactions with critical stakeholders and internal customers. 

 

Drive behaviour

The brand is defined not by what you say but by what your organisation’s key stakeholders observe. As you reset the context and receptivity of a new brand with key stakeholders, you need to ensure your team undertakes the behaviour and communication needed to show off the new brand. They will also need to manage behaviour so the brand is not undermined.

Once your team has taken ownership of promoting the new brand, you may need to tackle redefining visuals, shifting rewards and incentives, and role modelling to achieve your branding goals. 

Leaders have to be role models for the desired behaviour. 

If the goal is to be responsive to customers, leaders need to demonstrate this trait. If the team is to be perceived as insightful, leaders need to show that they value insights from their staff and perhaps even generate valuable insights for their clients.

 

Incentives and rewards

Incentives and rewards are essential to reinforce the desired behaviour that represents the brand you want to create. Implementing incentives and rewards will require measurements to validate the incentives. 

Complementing incentives and rewards with tangible measures of behaviour and desired outcomes enables you to track the progress towards the consistent delivery of your organisation’s brand promise.

The take away: Your team becomes an expression of your brand. So explicitly express and co-create the brand you desire with your team. 

Delivering the target brand through triangulating from multiple perspectives on key desired brand attributes, ensuring key stakeholders are receptive to a brand reset, aligning rewards and incentives, and being a role model can systematically help change perceptions of your organisation.

 

This article is an extract from the Executive Transitions series by Dr Ajit Kambil, Deloitte Global research director for the CFO programme and the creator of Deloitte’s Executive Transition Labs. For more articles in the Executive Transition series, please visit www.dupress.com.