Content area
Full Text
Abstract
This paper presents, then explains, a model to grow and sustain brands strategically. It adopts a more balanced perspective than existing models, since it builds on the asset of knowledgeable and committed staff whose values ideally align with the brand's values. The model encourages a multifunctional brand team progressing through the phases of strategy to tactics to implementation.
INTRODUCTION
Brand building has traditionally concentrated on finding untapped customer opportunities and then devising externally focused strategies - insufficient attention has been paid to staff as brand builders.1 Furthermore, many organisations have primarily regarded corporate branding as a way of engendering greater customer trust through leveraging any goodwill inherent in favourable corporate associations. Yet a weakness of these externally focused orientations is the way staff are overlooked in the brand-building process. The values of a brand can be partially built through communication, as the classical approach to branding shows, but staff, or more precisely the organisation's culture, are also critical contributors to a brand's functional and emotional values. Staff have unique knowledge and skills which enable them to deliver the brand's functional claims, and when their personal values align with those of the brand, they are committed emotionally to delivering the brand.2
Organisations are awakening to the importance of staff as brand builders. Competing brands are becoming more similar as technological advances make it easier to understand and emulate a brand's functional advantage. The motivating brand differentiators are becoming more emotionally based, and it is through unique organisational cultures that the emotional bonds are being made.3
One often hears exhortations that brand marketing is a strategic activity and that the ultimate brand manager is the CEO. However, often reality does not bear this out.4 Brand marketing should be a strategic process that is visionary and integrates cross-functional activities in the value-adding process. Alas, focusing on short-term goals, striving for profit improvement rather than generating greater shareholder value and having corporate structures which do not facilitate cross-functional coordination are but a few reasons as to why brand marketing does not attract the senior management attention it needs.
Brand equity improvements can be achieved by adopting a more balanced perspective, addressing both customer opportunities and any organisational culture strengths, in addition to a management approach which...