Can Corporate Brand Management Be the Way to Real Values?

The new document from the Arthur Page Society entitled "The Authentic Enterprise" is a remarkably good piece that is designed to spark a dialogue about the changes going on tha impact corporations and the changing roles and responsibilities of the Chief Communications Officer. A key focus on the document is on values and the role of the CCO in helping to lead the company toward an identification of its core values.

I responded recently to a blog on the Arthur Page Society's website (www.awpagesociety.com), in which Roger Bolton, formerly the CCO at Aetna talked about his role as the leader in the definition of the "Aetna Way". I suggested that I believed that companies with solid values were those who respond well in times of crisis versus those who only gave their values lip-service.

It is only in about the last 20 years that companies have given so much concern to crafting "values statements". Such statements were spurred on by consulting firms, but many organizations adopted them mainly as ways to "speak to their values" and gave little real focus to how they might actually "live the values".

Bill Nielsen, former head of communications (CCO) at Johnson & Johnson gave a speech last year in which he quoted President Lincoln who said that reputation was like the shadow of a tree. The tree was the reality, the shadow was like reputation. Bill noted that company's need to "fertilize the tree rather than the shadow". Well said, but what does this really mean and how do companies do it?

Rather than spending so much time on the words of value statements, companies should instead focus on what business they're in, what they stand for, vis-a-vis their stakeholders, and how they see their responsibilities to these stakeholders. The famous J&J Credo, a true statement of values, was written when J&J was getting ready to go public. General Johnson wanted investors to know what kind of company they would be investing in. In essence, J&J was putting forth its brand promise and assuring that there were no surprises between the promise and the experience by investors.

This is an important concept for companies to adopt. Rather than trying to mimic the J&J credo, they neek to be true to themselves, i.e., "authentic". The organization needs to define its core values, its attributes, and how it will behave and will not behave, including what businesses it will and will not enter. This is not a job for the writing of values statements, but rather the real job of corporate brand management, a process that focuses on all of these aspects. The new "second wave" of brand management, as Prof. Majken Schultz of Copenhagen Business School calls it, is not narrowly focused as brand management might have been in the past. It is integrated with and is used for the kinds of organizational change management needed to close the gap between organizational intent and behavior that is needed to become authentic with stakeholders.