Your brand needs to earn its keep in recessionary times. Our Brand Alignment process identifies your priorities and makes sure you continue to be true to your brand – ready for the brighter future.
It’s not easy - as a manager, you need to drive cost out of the business while growing income streams. You also want to develop your operations so that they are in shape to take advantage when the recovery comes. You need to have your cake and eat it.
Customers are looking for greater value, more offers and more bang for their buck. They also demand the service that they have come to expect in the good times. If you reduce service levels to save costs, your customers will seek alternatives, especially if they see other behaviour changes from your brand, revealing you to be only a fair weather friend.
They want to have their cake and eat it.
Meanwhile, your staff will be worrying about their jobs and do not want to see the management leaving their principles behind. They will watch the actions of the company rather than listen to the words even more than they did in the good times – and they want to see consistency.
They may be helping to make the cake but they want to eat their share too.
Is there an answer to these apparently paradoxical views? Something that considers the needs of all parties but still keeps your brand true to its core? Something that meets the business imperatives of cost savings and lean operations?
We think the answer, or at least part of the answer, lies in our Brand Alignment process. It won’t make the difficult times go away, but it can help you maintain your brand, an asset that represents so much resource and demands a return on investment.
The Brand Alignment process
1. Know your customers in their new environment
For successful alignment you need to keep a clear insight into the customers and influencer who surround the brand, especially in tough times when they will have different needs and attitudes. Hiding from these brutal truths is not the answer - use them to help you plot your course through the storm. Get out into the jungle and watch your customers in their natural habitat. It is more important than ever to find the truth behind their real behaviours.
If this sounds expensive, we have found that a little money can go a long way if you are clear about what you are trying to achieve. And the costs of getting it wrong are far greater.
2. Review your brand promise and processes
Your brand is a servant of the business strategy, so needs to earn it keep – whether focusing on new customers, retaining current clients, demanding reappraisal from lapsed users or encouraging satisfied customers to buy more from you.
Most importantly, are you delivering your brand through processes and business behaviours that you have aligned effectively? As you reduce costs, are you taking them out of the right processes, causing minimum negative impact on the customer experience?
3. Be seen to be doing the right things
Brand Alignment identifies your brand critical processes, costs them and develops new and more effective ways of delivering your brand promise with fewer, leaner processes that enable your people to deliver the brand more efficiently. Managers, staff and customers all see a consistency with the brand that they know and love.
This ability to manage the essential cost saving needs of the business, while minimising the operational impact on the brand, is possible because we are in an era of branding where what you do (and are seen to do) matters. Brand actions, driven by deep insight, clear vision and aligned behaviours and processes are vital to building your brands. So what you do is as much a communication medium to your customers as any advertising campaign – and an essential reinforcement when budgets are under pressure and you need to create effective word of mouth. In fact by focusing on the things that are truly brand critical you might be surprised at the things you can stop doing.
We have designed Brand Alignment specifically to increase your brand’s ability to deliver its promises.
Understanding and identifying key brand processes - and improving them - is vital for all brands in the difficult times. You can preserve and grow your brand and save costs elsewhere in your business. If you know where you can best cut costs, you might be able to make further cuts that are calculated and visible, without damaging your brand and your business for the future.
The Broken Promise
Of the many issues, phrases, claims and counter claims amongst all the political parties, one phrase has been used on a regular basis; the broken promise.
Political parties have talked about others breaking promises and of course their determination not to break the promises that they make. View article >
Out of tune
So; they have got their positioning spot on, I buy into their values and personality whole heartedly, I love their visual imagery and they stand out on the high street. What fantastic retail branding! Totally aligned, I salute thee brand and my custom is your reward. View article >
