CHAPTER 5
Leading the Brand: Brand Strategy Orchestration and Implementation
Eric Leininger
The previous chapters in this book are devoted to the discipline and creativity required to strategically position a brand and a portfolio of brands for success in a rapidly changing and hyper-connected marketing ecosystem.
It is equally critical to apply the same level of discipline and creativity to the orchestration and implementation of the brand platform. As Phil Marineau, former CEO of Levi’s, taught his teams, “You will be more successful if you get the strategy 80 percent correct and the execution 100 percent correct than getting the strategy perfect and executing at only 80 percent.”1
This chapter will focus on why strong leadership of brand implementation is so important. We will look at pitfalls to avoid and consider a framework for driving brand implementation.
Leadership, Implementation, and Branding
A company cannot sustain a strong brand image, let alone be agile in the marketplace, unless marketing leaders focus on and anticipate potential implementation issues during the development of brand strategy. Senior leaders must communicate an implementation-friendly strategy that inspires cross-functional collaboration. Too many strategies are overly elegant and complex, which can deprive the initiative of focus. This in turn can lead to unwieldy and suboptimal execution. Simply put, if employees across the organization don’t understand the brand positioning, it will be impossible to bring it to life.
Many brand impressions are created by the actions of frontline employees, who often have the greatest impact on defining a brand. The absence of strong implementation practices can result in frontline actions that create consumer confusion, or worse yet, negatively impact brand equity. Even the greatest brands experience brand implementation and orchestration issues.
Starbucks is one such example. The company is regarded by many as one of the great brands of our time. In April 2018, however, a Starbucks employee called the police when two African-American men refused to leave the store (they were waiting to meet a friend). The police eventually arrested the two men, who were indeed just waiting for a friend. The incident received wide coverage in the media, and people pointed to it as an example of racism in the United States. A video of the scene was viewed on social media more than 10 million times.2 While Starbucks executives strived to create a brand built on inclusiveness and progressive values, the actions of one employee did enormous damage.
Although a great deal was written about how Starbucks managed this crisis, very little was written about how the brand was being governed, or not governed, when the store manager made the decisions that prompted the crisis. Despite the fact that the brand was firmly established as a “third place” to work (in addition to home and the workplace) or enjoy leisure time, decisions about whether noncustomers could use the seating and restrooms without making a purchase were left up to store managers. On one hand, this was a laudable commitment to delegation and trust in frontline management. On the other hand, it was an inherently risky business practice for the brand.
Of course, this begs the question of what organizational function, and what level of that function, should have been responsible for anticipating a potential implementation issue such as this. Clearly, many internal stakeholders had a role in this situation and might claim ownership of issues ranging from store operations to social responsibility to marketing, and potentially more. In the end, this was a brand implementation and orchestration issue well before it was a crisis. The lesson is that the chief branding officer in an organization (most likely the CMO) must be tightly aligned with operations on the brand promise and how that promise should play out in customer interactions.
United Airlines was dealt a similar blow when employees summoned police to remove a passenger from a plane. Video clips of the incident, where the man was literally dragged from his seat and was injured in the process, were shocking.3 Domino’s faced a similar crisis when bored store workers filmed a video showing them putting cheese up their nose and putting nasal mucus on a pizza.4 Of course, implementation isn’t always a problem. At times, employees dramatically enhance a brand with efforts that go above and beyond normal expectations.
Internal implementation is all too often overlooked in the branding process, as agencies and executives craft a strategy for positioning a product and then declare the branding challenges solved. The subject has certainly received scant academic attention. The Harvard Business Review Press search engine returned only 67 citations for brand strategy implementation, but 1,720 citations for brand strategy creation.
So why doesn’t implementation receive the attention it deserves? Formulating strategy can highlight original and often brilliant ideas that are inspiring and instructive. Implementation, done well, is often the result of an organization doing what it knows how to do in an aligned and sequenced orchestration. Implementation reflects “how we get things done around here,” and is more likely the result of observational learning and oral history, supported by established mechanisms to bridge functional silos. Institutional memory, in other words, is presumed to carry the day. It is therefore easy but incorrect for implementation to be seen as entirely idiosyncratic to an organization as opposed to a generalizable, transferable skill.
Pitfalls in Brand Strategy Implementation
Several common pitfalls can hinder brand strategy orchestration and implementation.
First, senior management’s commitment is a must. If senior executives are not fully on board, it will be hard or impossible to bring a brand strategy to life. Implementation will inevitably consume significant resources and will very likely require a struggle against ingrained practices and organizational inertia. Brand strategy implementation is by definition a cross-functional, enterprise-wide effort. Senior management support will be necessary to help align the organization to sustain a strategy across all customer touchpoints in an organization.
Second, the brand strategy must be implementation friendly. All too often, brand leaders create elaborate, complex frameworks that are difficult or impossible for frontline employees to understand. If a brand platform isn’t clear and direct, it won’t be implemented. Marketing language sometimes plays a bigger role than customer and employee language, which inevitably leads to problems.
Third, it is critical to address company culture. Formal guidelines and rules can be helpful, but without efforts to embed the brand in company culture, the brand experience won’t come to life for consumers. The formal implementation process must be supported by the informal organization.
Fully inculcating a brand strategy across an organization is not for the faint of heart. As Kellogg professor Ed Zajac observed, “While everyone is familiar with the saying ‘culture eats strategy for breakfast,’ that presumes that culture and strategy are at odds with each other. When the two are aligned, however, I say that ‘culture feeds strategy.’”
Ideally, your company culture and values support the brand, and employees feel that taking personal ownership of animating a strategy is everyone’s responsibility. Yet, it is more likely that you will encounter resistance and will need to have the relationships and support in place to influence many people over whom you have no direct control.
Fourth, companies are often populated with functional silos that don’t agree on the path forward. Even within marketing, silos can appear, as subspecialties fragment the marketing function. As one CMO recently said to me, “I have 45 people in my marketing department. If I lined them all up and asked them to write down what we are trying to accomplish with the brand, the core message will become diffused as it is viewed through the lens of each specialist. Keeping the specialists inside and outside the company focused on the big picture is a huge challenge.”
Fifth, the right measurement tools need to be in place. It is tempting to measure inside-out process metrics instead of outside-in brand health metrics. Successful brand strategy efforts are grounded in the organization’s external factors—customers, competitors, categories, and context. Implementation efforts begin with the end goal in mind and work back to what the organization must achieve, rather than beginning with internal roles and responsibilities charts that describe what the organization is accustomed to doing. The adoption of an enterprise-wide consumer journey methodology is an essential tool that needs to be done correctly in order to identify the most valuable metrics.
Sixth, and finally, any brand implementation plan must be dynamic and able to manage the inevitable trade-offs that arise. It is critically important to create initial wins to build momentum. You do not want your management team asking, “When will something wonderful happen?”
A Framework for Brand Strategy Orchestration and Implementation
To understand the challenge of brand orchestration and implementation, I conducted in-depth interviews with senior marketing leaders at 15 companies across a range of business models: consumer packaged goods, technology services, insurance, homes, and marketing services.
An underlying pattern of behavior guiding brand strategy implementation emerged from these interviews. The model has six elements, all of which are important if an organization is going to build and embrace strong brands: company strategy, brand platform, culture, tools, brand governance system, and momentum (See Figure 5.1).
Figure 5.1 Brand Strategy Implementation Model
The framework is designed to help organizations assess the quality of their orchestration and implementation practices. Ultimately, those practices support the ability to make smart decisions and deal with the trade-offs that are sometimes required to maintain a great brand. Sometimes a company needs to sacrifice short-term profitability in order to maintain brand quality, perhaps skipping a short-term promotion in order to maintain brand value. Luxury watch producer Richemont, for example, recently decided to buy back inventory from retailers in order to prevent discounting and gray-market sales that might damage the brand. Finance director Burkhart Grund explained the move this way: “We don’t believe that having our inventory in the gray market will help long-term brand equity, so that’s why we bought it back. That’s what the story is all about.”5
Company Strategy
Branding must be tightly linked to the overall company strategy. As a result, the first element is a statement of company strategy. How will the firm create value and drive results? How important are brands in this approach? If brands are not seen as a prime economic driver for the company, there is a risk that branding initiatives will lack support and fail to take hold. An organization focused on winning with a purely low-price strategy, for example, is not likely to invest heavily in brand building.
Brand Platform
The foundation of a brand is the branding platform—a clear definition of the desired brand associations. This includes brand positioning, brand character, and brand purpose.
It is impossible to lead a brand-building effort if you are not clear on what the brand should stand for. As Shelley Haus, senior vice president of brand marketing at Ulta Beauty, observed, “The lack of a great, clear brand strategy is the kryptonite to great brand strategy implementation.”
It is important to remember that a brand platform is bigger than a creative brief, which is usually held within the province of the line marketing organization. A brand platform needs to play across functions. It is the starting point for myriad touchpoints across the organization. It distills unifying points of alignment.
Marketing leaders cannot wait until the strategy is fully developed to design implementation and execution plans. The most important issues must be anticipated at the outset, and they need to be considered while the strategy is being developed. Leading marketers think in terms of an implementation-friendly brand strategy that inspires cross-functional collaboration.
One way to determine if a brand platform is implementation friendly is to consider three guidelines:
- It should be easily understood by everyone in the organization.
- Everyone in the organization should be able to see how their jobs relate to the brand.
- It should provide a rallying cry to motivate employees and help them identify initiatives that will add value to the brand.
Other chapters in this book discuss the different elements of the platform. The purpose of this chapter is to help you establish a brand platform and be certain that it is implementation friendly.
Culture
If the culture, both formally and informally, does not value and support brand building, it won’t happen. Branding should be brought to life in everyone’s area of responsibility.
This means that brand leaders need to have the relationships and support in place to influence many people over whom they do not have any direct control. This is particularly true in organizations with multiple independent but interdependent power nodes, such as global companies and franchisee and dealership organizations. The only solution to this challenge is to commit the time to listen, engage, and solicit support from cross-functional and frontline employees that drive important brand impressions.
A company’s culture also needs to be able to value the different skills required for brand-building implementation. The core implementation skills are generalizable, but knowledge of a specific industry domain and of a particular organizational culture is also critical. Jim Skinner, former CEO of McDonald’s, observed, “Anyone can write a strategy. The real work is bringing that strategy to life in the context of the McDonald’s business system and operating culture.”
Company culture is certainly affected by senior leadership, so it is essential that the senior team model certain behaviors; they need to demonstrate a deep understanding of customers and the role of the brand in customers’ lives. A. G. Lafley, former CEO at Procter & Gamble, set this tone. He personally engaged with customers during in-home interviews and famously identified the three moments of truth for all P&G brands:
- At the point of purchase: Why would the consumer choose our product?
- At the moment of use: Does the product do what the consumer expects it to do?
- At the moment of social media: Would the consumer say good things or bad things?
Although Lafley’s three moments of truth were created in the world of consumer packaged goods, any company should be able to identify a similar short list of moments of truth in its industry. Lafley used his consumer and market visits to teach, train, and empower team members—not just tell them what to do.
Senior leadership guidance alone won’t bring a brand to life: training, processes, and incentives have to help employees throughout the organization understand the brand strategy and how they impact it. Employees also need the tools and ability to deliver outstanding service and bring the brand to life every day.
Brand Governance System
Brand implementation becomes more difficult as organizations grow. In particular, global organizations face special challenges, as their customer touchpoints occur all over the world. In addition, our hyper-connected world means that timing is compressed; brand leaders can’t spend days or weeks debating the proper way to respond to a customer issue. In many cases, every second counts.
All of this makes brand governance critically important. How are decisions about the brand addressed? Who creates key policies? Who makes brand decisions?
The commonly heard advice is that “global sets strategy and local executes strategy.” Use extreme caution with this guidance; employees who implement will be more committed and more effective if they are part of the strategy formulation. Those who set strategy need to be committed to building implementation-friendly strategies.
The best practice is to convene a brand council with a clear leader who absorbs all of the issues and perspectives. The brand council is usually not a voting group or a completely consensus-driven group; it is a forum to gain input and generate alignment. As Larry Light and Joan Kiddon argue in their book New Brand Leadership, creating “freedom within the framework” is a compelling approach to ensure that brand leadership principles are in place and that local creativity will enrich the brand locally. The creativity is focused by the framework, thereby building the brand.
A brand council will generally meet quarterly or semiannually to review and share best practices, and identify situations where freedom has been extended beyond the framework and needs to be checked on a continuing basis.
Tools
Brand leaders can use a range of tools to guide brand growth. Certainly, it is critical to have a clear strategy. At a minimum, two tools are needed to guide and measure implementation. The exact content of these tools will depend on the nature of the business, but generic outlines can be adapted by any business.
First, a brand leader needs to create clear brand guidelines. People won’t follow guidelines if they don’t know what they are or can’t locate them. This means that a brand leader’s first task is to create an easy-to-use platform that employees can access. Often, this will be a web site that includes the strategy and best practices, and templates to execute the strategy.
Second, a brand and business-balanced scorecard is essential to evaluate overall progress and to ensure that brand metrics are considered in the context of overall financial metrics. Almost all businesses run on their financial key performance indicators (KPIs). It is important to have brand- and customer- oriented KPIs, too.
Most businesses have either too many or too few brand-oriented KPIs. These metrics proliferate when there is not a clear view of the relationship of those metrics to the short-term and long-term health of the business.
There are three types of KPIs. Criteria measures include things such as Net Promoter Score (NPS) and customer satisfaction metrics. These are useful for continuous improvement monitoring, but they tell us what and how high—not why. Execution KPIs, such as service levels and response times, are also useful, but often these measures get buried in the middle level of the organization. Capability KPIs, such as employee and process development, are the most overlooked metrics.
I am often asked how to identify the right short list of consumer and customer KPIs. This should include, but not be restricted to, a quantitative exercise that identifies leading indicators and contra-indicators of business performance. However, that analysis might not yield measures that reflect new goals or new external conditions.
We need to focus KPIs on the actions that will ensure success with our customers. The consumer journey is an analytic tool to help us identify the most critical success factors. However, proponents of the consumer journey often exaggerate the case by establishing an absolute requirement to understand and maximize every consumer touchpoint. The fact is that not every interaction point has equal value, nor do we always have funds to make every moment as fully enriched as a customer might desire. As a consequence, consumer and customer metrics proliferate.
Laura Barry, senior director of marketing services at AbbVie, mobilized AbbVie marketers with the phrase “moments of meaning.” After mapping the entire patient journey, Barry and her team identified the moments that carry the most importance from a patient perspective and financial value for the brand, and then created KPIs around those moments.
Momentum
Momentum is a critical—and often overlooked—part of brand implementation. The core challenge is that many branding efforts take a long time to play out. Perceptions of a well-established brand tend to change slowly and only when strong actions are taken. Strengthening a brand sometimes involves narrowing the target definition. But this does not always produce short-term results.
However, some marketing efforts work quickly. You can get on Facebook, place well-targeted and meaningful ads, and watch your traffic increase in just a few minutes. But brand-building efforts are usually not like this.
For this reason, if you aren’t careful, senior management might only see costs and expenses from the branding initiative (all downside) and not the benefit (the upside). (See Chapter 16).
As a result, it is important to ensure that there are quick wins that create initial momentum and can be used to justify a long-term commitment to the strategy. In designing brand implementation, momentum is a critical factor. You need to start with visible wins and use this momentum to proceed farther down the road.
Two Critical Roles
It is important to note the two critical roles in a branding journey. The first is the CEO’s. If top executives in companies believe in the power of brands and understand how strong brands will drive results, they will support branding efforts. This is critical, because building strong brands takes resources, and there are always trade-offs to be made. When a team debates quality and margin, which will prevail? With a brand-driven CEO, there is the possibility that quality may be a key consideration of brand building.
The second critical role is that of the brand leader—the person who champions the brand and manages it on a day-to-day basis. A CEO will not have the time to create and enforce brand design standards. Someone else in the firm needs to be responsible for the health of the brand.
The role of brand leader can reside in different places. In traditional fast-moving consumer goods firms, the brand manager often played the role of brand champion. In recent years, more and more firms, including P&G, Uber, and Noodles & Company, have created a chief brand officer position responsible for building and monitoring brand health. This role elevates the brand and addresses the cross-functional challenges, especially when human interactions are a critical driver of brand impressions.
At many firms, the role of brand leader falls to the chief marketing officer. This is a logical decision, but it can be a challenge because the CMO needs to play multiple roles and sometimes has a narrow span of control. If a company isn’t careful, people will think that brand building is the job of the marketing department. For a CMO to be a successful brand leader, the role must be broadly defined.
Summary
Ultimately, great brands come from committed organizations. Getting the brand strategy right is key, but it is just the first step. A brand flourishes when the organization embraces the direction and brings it to life, inside and outside the organization.
Eric Leininger is a clinical professor of executive education at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, where he co-leads the Kellogg Chief Marketing Officer Program and teaches in numerous executive education programs. Prior to joining Kellogg, he was senior vice president at McDonald’s as well as Kraft Foods. He received his BA from the University of Pennsylvania and MBA from the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business.