Today at the market place there are millions of brands competing for the share of the market. Thus, why is branding so key to an organisation? Let us start off with an understanding of what is a brand.  Simply put, a brand is a promise. At a personal level, a brand is what people say about you when you’re not in the room. So how can you ensure your corporate communications create the kind of a brand image that would make you proud to be a fly on the wall in your market?

It’s rare to find a company with a genuinely unique selling point, that is why to form a strong brand image and message, organizations or individuals need to think hard about anything that differentiates them. Often companies say their people make them different, but unless they have a truly unusual working culture, that’s unlikely. Better managed organisations always brand their organisation from the inside. Leaders begin by trying to discover what the organisation is good at, what it is proud of, and known for, and then build the brand promise around these existing strengths.

The existence of the strengths is derived from what the company stand for, typically focusing on the brand from the inside and outside. When your internal team doesn’t respond with appropriate enthusiasm for the brand promise, they work with heads of operations to flog the business into behaving the way they think it should. This breeds calamity to the organisation. Imagine leading an institution where an understanding of a brand promise is lacking, the workforce don’t behave, the brand doesn’t deliver while operating at the midst of many competing brand interests.

It should be noted, that brands are built around ‘the relentless pursuit of perfection’. As one would expect of a Safaricom company, there’s a strong emphasis on quality of services delivered, but this is taken to a whole new level through innovation, good governance practices, all round marketing concept and the corporate social responsibility among other virtues. It’s not simply about quality of fit and finish, but about seeking out and delivering on the little details that create as close to a perfect delivery experience as possible. For employees, this means the emphasis is on behaviours aligned to what the company’s good at delivering to its vision. All the above strategically packaged and presented to the company’s stakeholders enables brand positioning.

Brand positioning sets the direction of marketing activities and programs, what the brand should and should not do with its marketing. Brand positioning involves establishing key brand associations in the minds of customers and other important constituents to differentiate the brand and establish competitive superiority (Keller et al. 2002). Besides the obvious issue of selecting tangible product attribute levels (e.g., ‘M-PESA, Mshwari etc.), two particularly relevant areas to positioning are the role of brand intangibles and the role of corporate images and reputation of your organisation.

As you endeavor to fulfill your branding strategy, it’s essential to have your staff on board, ensure the brand has its own story. This approach is effective because storytelling is a fundamental part of human nature and it allows players to position their brands in human terms, rather than sterile marketing.

How do you ensure consistency and longevity? There is power in brand measurement, accountability and understanding. To manage brand equity (or anything) requires current, valid data. This includes diagnostic data about why the brand is where it is. Few brand owners do this well. Endeavour to understand systematically how your brand is perceived. Also consider accountability issue in relation to marketing metrics such as market share, customer loyalty, relative price and relative perceived quality. Leaders and Managers should make it their daily tea to seeing these metrics regularly and report the main ones to shareholders for strategic decision making.

Organisations contribute to the destruction of their brands through communication. A variety of brand messages just leads to confusion in the consumer’s mind.  As a leader in marketing, adapt to play to the media’s strengths and use the channels to the advancement of your brand’s ideals such as building your brand, the quality of goods or services and innovation while maintaining your organizational core values.

If you’ve already gained understanding and engagement from your people as part of the brand formulation process, this will stand you in good stead. Marketing teams can and should drive consistency of brand design, language and brand presentation across all media channels and forms of communication. Be able to drive and support the same messages internally as you do externally and in return this could double the power and performance of your communications campaigns at any given time.

Consider brand management as a solution when it comes to getting corporate communications right while embracing the complex and messy media environment for what it potent to your brand filled with unpredictable highs and lows.

Brand: Product and communications planning must work together as part of a cohesive whole. They’re often the responsibility of separate teams that don’t talk to each other enough. A unifying strategy and joined-up planning are critical.     
 Research: Communications activity can so often look great but miss the target with the wrong tone, language, imagery or media. The cornerstone of relevant, effective communications is insight, derived from rigorous research. Yet often this is the first part of the budget to be cut – in my view, a massive mistake. After all, without insight where’s the competitive edge coming from?

Control: Maintaining brand discipline across markets, languages and outlets is tough. An efficient online resource or library is a pre-requisite, centrally controlled, interactive and really easy to use. And, as a general principle, keep brand rules and regulations stripped out and simple.

Flexibility: With a seemingly unending variety of media available, understanding the relevance of each channel to different consumers on different occasions is vital. It is also critical to plan content and creative to work powerfully in each channel.

Engagement: In an age of social media, dialogue and engagement, we often seem stuck in a one-way street. It’s time to shift into listening mode and embrace interaction and transparency as more than just an afterthought handled by the web team.

As I conclude, it should be noted that, there are many technical and commercial reasons why companies are valuing their brands. Unlike the days when brand managers were messengers in briefing PR firms. Today they are more likely to be rubbing shoulders with key decision makers in finance for the corporate business. Brand managers have to be aware of how, when and why to value brands. Branding is big business and managing it determines your future survival and profitability at the market play.

The writer is a Chartered Marketer and Communications professional and can be reached at timothy.owase@live.com

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