Strategic Planning and Brand Management Must Align

I have always believed that brand management is an outgrowth of strategic planning. Too often, a so-called brand company--usually a firm focused primarily on design, or a PR or advertising agency--comes in to an organization and goes through a brand audit and proposal. Far too often, the recommendations of these firms have no connection with the overall strategy of the company. They do not look at the mission. They do not understand if the company has the internal culture to meet the brand promise. All they seem interested in is a creative solution in terms of design or messages. These activities are doomed to failure and are very costly to the organization in more ways than one.

The costs are not just monetary. Organizations that engage in superficial brand activities actually create a division between their brand promise and its actualization, both internal and external to the organization. Employees look at the brand as being disconnected to the reality they know, and customers learn that the organization makes promises it cannot keep. This creates additional cost in terms of diminished reputation. In one study by Majken Schultz and Mary Jo Hatch (the Expressive Organisation), it was found that some 70% of employees at companies the researchers studied, did not understand and were not committed to the brand strategy of the company. Considering that it is impossible to have a corporate brand if the organization cannot live it, what the authors found is a typical recipe for disaster.

Because of these problems, I developed a process called DIFFERS, which starts with strategy before getting organizations into branding, organizational engagement, and marketing communications activities. It forces companies to think strategically and not jump to the more creative aspects of branding.

Recently, I had the opportunity to work with a strategic planning company, Ambler Growth Strategy Consultants, on a brand process for an organization. While strategy should be done before branding, the organization had actually engaged my firm first. We had developed a great positioning, tagline and new name for the organization. It was based upon the best available information we had. Then, the organization began working on its strategy for the future and we realized that everything we had done had to be changed. We developed a new positioning and tagline for the organization. The strategy consultant expressed happy surprise that we were so willing to change our direction and admit that we needed a new positioning since the target markets had changed. She indicated that many brand and advertising firms she had worked with would have remained committed to their original work. While this was nice praise, it was a poor statement on the brand industry. Most branding firms I have worked with in the past are more committed to the "artistic" aspects of what they do rather than the strategy.

Most organizations are suffering from a "trust deficit". Is it any wonder trust is diminished? Stakeholders have come to expect that companies care more about what they say rather than what they do. This is the fault of bad management, but it also is the fault of a marketing and communications industry that is not doing its job correctly.

There is a Huge Need to Integrate Strategy and Execution

The July-August issue of Harvard Business Review has another excellent article by Roger Martin, Dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto. In the piece, he argues that strategy and execution must be linked, but that they are not in most strategy courses in business schools, nor by consulting firms. It should be noted that Martin used to be a partner in a consulting firm prior to becoming Dean at Rotman.

It is clear that most people separate strategy and execution. How many times have we heard about a company engaging a strategy firm and then finding it difficult to implement the strategy once the firm is finished. I used to have a CEO who was fond of saying: "strategy is fine, but 90% of success is in execution". As Martin notes, one cannot be successful in execution independent of a good strategy, and one cannot have a good strategy independent of good execution.

It is interesting that in the brand and reputation world, most of the firms operating are execution-type firms. The brand firms do brand audits and then develop a new logo and set of identity guidelines. The advertising firms do advertising; the PR firms do PR. On the strategy side, McKinsey, Boston Consulting Group, and others are doing some brand strategy, but this is a very small part of their overall offering. There is a gap where Martin sees one. And, it is a wide gap that needs to be bridged.

Execution is becoming more and more commoditized in the brand world. Strategy is where the money is. So, implementation firms are typically staffed with junior people who do not really understand strategy; and the strategy firms are staffed with senior people who do not want to be bothered with implementation. When the strategy is done, it is "handed off" to the company which typically hands it off to a PR or advertising firm. The latter are typically not involved in the strategy discussions so they often implement against a strategy that they do not fully understand, unless they are briefed directly by the strategy firm or unusually well by the client. Advertising and PR firms say they do strategy, but they don't. They do advertising or communications strategy, not the type of strategy taught in an MBA program.

The difficulty is often with billing. Strategy firms bill thousands of dollars per day for even middle-ranked people; execution firms bill a fraction of this. So, when strategy and execution firms have tried to talk about mergers or working together, they often get stymied with billing. Clients who hire advertising or PR firms are usually not willing to pay $5,000-$10,000 per day for strategy; an strategy firms do not see the need to have an implementation group on the pay-roll.

In my own consulting practice at Brand and Reputation Management, I focus on linking strategy, brand management with employee engagement. I try to lay out implementation plans for the client, but I do not do the execution. I usually ask the client if I can help them brief the implementation firm so that there is a smooth transition to execution. But, this request is not always accepted. So, I have not connected all the dots, as Martin has pointed out, and could be serving my clients better if I were to connect with an implementation firm.

I have said to many people that there is a huge need for a brand and reputation management firm that has business and marketing strategy people, brand experts, researchers and implementation staff. There is nothing like that right now. Perhaps a first step would be to connect a few good firms together in common practice.