At Hive we talk about branding a lot. We’re always thinking about what our brand means internally and externally, and some of our clients obsess about their brand too as they grow and gain new customers. Which pleases us. What do I mean by brand though, is it your company, reputation, logo, identity, service, values? Some or all of the above?
Values get talked about a lot. Products can add value to a customer’s life by aligning with their values, in the way that newspapers sell reality through different value lenses. I’m wary of over-emphasising this point. In my opinion, when thinking about your brand, it pays to stay close to your business fundamentals. If your business isn’t set up to take enquiries and deliver an efficient service then the best marketing campaign in the world is not going to work.
Your brand is bigger than whatever semantics come up on a brand workshop day. It’s more than your company character and conceptual targets. To begin with you need a good business. You need the cake underneath the icing. A brand style guide can describe the feel of your brand but your brand doesn’t stop there, it includes your team, your building and more.
No one ever tries to scale their brand. They try to scale their business. Why? Because that is tangible. If a business proves scalable, the brand does too. Operational success comes first. You can get a brilliant brand from a brilliant business. You can’t necessarily get a brilliant business from a brilliant brand. So you start with the business: get the service right, get the product right, get the communications right. Then you’ve got your identity right and you end up with a great brand.
There are exceptions. When Maurice and Charles Saatchi created M&C Saatchi they pitched for the British Airways account, which was up for review when the airline protested against the brothers’ removal from Saatchi & Saatchi. Moray MacLennan, the chief executive of M&C Saatchi Worldwide, said: “There were basically a handful of us working out of a single room. BA needed a worldwide network, the kind of agency that employs 20,000 people. So we took a lease for a day on an empty building, hired a group of models to pose as staff and held the pitch there — the best looking employees I’ve ever seen. The building was just round the corner from BBH who were also pitching for the account and they told BA what we were up to. So they asked for a second meeting and we had to rehire the building, redress it, employ the same models and prepare loads of fake CVs. They certainly knew what we were up to, but I think they liked the chutzpah. Anyway, we won the business.”
On second thoughts, maybe that wasn’t an exception. The team came across as gutsy, dynamic and confident. That was the brand, but it was what they really were too. What does your brand mean to your customers? It’s one of the most valuable things you have, but it’s vulnerable; someone in your midst, through incompetence or by design, could be destroying it. For instance, incivility is a common phenomenon in the workplace and could be affecting your staff (20% of witnesses of rudeness reduce their performance.)
Your brand can be harmed in many ways during growth. A fragmented customer journey, staff turnover, new treatment modalities, changes to the front and back end of the business, stress among staff, less time with each patient as patient volume increases. Cohesion can break down with disruption, growing pains, when everyone’s pushed to the limit. If you’re keeping up the marketing, controlling brand delivery becomes harder. There’s more room for error. There’s more likely to be a discrepancy between what you’re saying about your business and what customers are experiencing. This is dangerous territory. But every business has these painful growth stages followed by plateaus, it’s the natural way businesses grow and evolve. You’re priority should be making your brand safe. If that means focusing on operations, do it.
Our strength at Hive is unity. This is likely to be the single most important thing if a brand is going to succeed. Unity is when everything you do, feel, say and make is consistent. Your values manifest organically across the business through the work you do. We’ve worked a lot on our culture, internal and external communications and having the right people. But we’ve put much more effort into operations; real work in the real world.
If you feel challenged by competition or things aren’t working out as you had hoped, keep one eye on operations and bring yourself back to what you stand for. Check your team knows the common themes internally, and everyone is clear on who you are. What you share about your business externally needs to be clear and simple because people have limited attention. Remember, stay grounded — there’s no need to separate your brand from your business.
