All Posts Tagged With: "brand"
Does Your Company Create Real Value?
According to a recent survey of 50,000 consumers in 14 countries including the US, 70% of the brands we interact with could disappear entirely and we wouldn’t notice it.
The survey also found that 20% of the brands we interact with have a positive impact on our lives.
Which list would your company make? (You can see two Top 10 brand lists at the end of this article.)
Umair Haque, director of the Havas Media Labs, explains the difference: “Did this brand make you fitter, wiser, smarter, closer? Did it improve your personal outcomes? Did it improve your community outcomes? Did it pollute the environment? We’re trying to get beyond ‘did this company make a slightly better product’ to the more resonant, meaningful question: Did this brand actually impact your life in a tangible, lasting, and positive way?”
I’ve written before about corporate social responsibility and how companies are embracing it to gain a competitive advantage (here and here), which is one part of the conclusions drawn by the Meaningful Brands survey and Haque. The other part is that companies are creating enduring brands by creating value for their customers, making them “fitter, wiser, smarter, closer,” to use Haque’s description.
This is where integrating the Baldrige model…
10Nov2011 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedCorporate Social Responsibility Is Unstoppable
“While consumer power for a better world is still nascent, it’s poised to skyrocket. Consumer pressure will greatly expand the breadth and depth of CSR, forcing companies to willfully change their practices,” writes Simon Mainwaring in his new book, We First, excerpted here in Fast Company. (Note: If you want proof that the corporate social responsibility (CSR) movement Mainwaring describes has gone mainstream, consider that his book is ranked #19 for all books on Amazon.)
According to Mainwaring:
- 83% of consumers are willing to change their consumption habits if it can help make tomorrow’s world a better place to live.
- 61% have sought a brand that supports a good cause even if it was not the cheapest brand.
- 64% would recommend a brand that supports a good cause, up from 52% last year.
- 56% believe the interests of society and the interests of businesses should have equal weight in business decisions.
- 67% would switch brands if a different brand of similar quality supported a good cause.
The data point to a warning for companies that choose to ignore CSR and to an opportunity for those that embrace it. More and more consumers are factoring corporate social responsibility into their buying decisions.
Mainwaring believes the consumer drive for CSR will…
9Jun2011 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedCulture Is People
In “Brand Is Culture, Culture Is Brand” (HBR, September 27, 2010), Bill Taylor makes a point: “You can’t be special, distinctive, and compelling in the marketplace unless you create something special, distinctive, and compelling in the workplace.”
In competitive markets, which are pretty much all markets, companies seek to create a brand that will elevate their names from the rest of the crowd. They design new logos and roll out new Web sites and develop new products and services and marketing materials that convey the image they wish to nurture. Sometimes that works, although it rarely works for long. A brand reflects a customer’s complete experience with a company, and that experience is rarely limited to buying a product off a shelf. Any interaction with the company taps into its culture, which is why Taylor believes that brand is culture and culture is brand.
He uses USAA to make his point. I’ve written about USAA before because it exemplifies the business culture that cares about its employees and its customers. In “Walk in Your Customer’s Body Armor,” I described the training USAA’s employees get and the innovative ideas it brings to its employees and its customers. “Do You Trust Your Customers?” looked at the competitive…
27Sep2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedKnow Thyself — and Act Accordingly
“We live in a conversation driven world,” writes Paul Worthington for Fast Company online. “Even if your brand is not an active user of social media, your customers and potential customers are.” He warns that “a brand that generates little or no conversation will be killed by one that does.”
According to Worthington, successful brands like Apple, Amazon, and Nike have three traits in common:
- Long term consistency of purpose. They know who they are and what they value and “everyone within that organization makes decisions that are consistent with this purpose.”
- Innovation as a core competence–and their innovations are true to the purpose of their organization and brand.
- Culture as decision making filter. Employees make their decisions based on what is right for the brand.
From a Baldrige perspective, these three traits are evidence of the alignment that high-performing organizations achieve. I’ve worked with five Baldrige Award winners and they all know who they are. They face challenges, consider opportunities, make decisions, and invest resources based on the mission, vision, values, and goals of their organizations. They know when something fits and when it doesn’t, and they act accordingly.
You find evidence of their purpose in their strategic plans and performance measurement systems, which are two…
4Aug2009 | Steve George | 0 comments | Continued
