Are Your Business Models and Brand Strategies Aligned?

Kay Plantes
March 10, 2010 | COMMENTS

A new client asked me a good question today: “You talk about helping us find our value promise, but my communications agency is totally focused on our brand platform. What's what and why does it matter?”

The answer rests in understanding communication challenges.

The Internal Communication Challenge

Employees need a shared and actionable aim that advances the company's success. It must be actionable so that employees and teams know how to go about their work. The aim must also be shared or else actions by one part of the organization hurt another part's success, creating distrust and silo-mentality. (These two requirements are why “Grow profits and revenue” as the only aim fails.)

The best internal directive is a value promise. It's the promise the company makes to its target customers and the basis on which it wants to win business. Internally, it tells everyone the ultimate goal of his or her work. I recently interviewed ten employees of Tasty Catering, a business caterer in Elk Grove Village, Illinois. They each knew their job was to exceed their customers' most demanding expectations. The entire company's business practices, including its values, are aligned to deliver just that.

Great companies build annual operating plans to advance their value promise and make it hard for competitors to copy.

The External Communication Challenge

The external communication challenge is to grow awareness, consideration, trial, and purchases. Clearly the value promise is a key part of this, but effective communications must also be emotional and tell a story. The brand platform captures what's needed for winning marketing communications.

• The brand promise: the value promise discussed above
• The foundation story of the company: how it became what it became, revealing the deeper values of the company
• The brand personality, which captures for example whether a company's qualities are more like Lexus or a Ford Truck
• The brand essence: a clear list of what the brand is and is not
• The message strategy: target markets, key message, and key word in the message, and reasons to believe

The brand platform drives marketing and sales, the two external facing parts of any organization.

Alignment Issues Are at the Core of Every Business Problem

When the brand platform is not backed up by a strong value promise that internal operations are designed to fulfill, ads, brochures, sales reps and websites make false promises. Marketing communications become spin and customers defect. In addition, the company creates new products and services that fail to support the brand promise, diffusing brand equity.

These problems arise because frequently inside-facing employees have no idea about the basis on which the company is trying to win business. All too often, companies have not defined their value promise, much less their business model (see Harvard Business Review's  “Can You Say What Your Strategy Is?”).

Another mistake companies make is creating a brand promise that lacks any functional differentiators around which employees can relate how they go about their work. Brands without tangible, functional legs of differentiation easily fall down. Companies that keep changing the brand promise also create havoc when internal operations are forced to follow flavor-of-the-day priorities. While business models must change to remain relevant and differentiated, value promises should evolve, not totally disconnect from the past.

A different set of issues arise when the company has a great business model and a compelling value promise, but fails to communicate it effectively to outside audiences. Awareness rates, consideration rates and attitude towards the brand remain weak, hurting sales and margin growth.

Summary

The value of the value promise is that it aligns internal and external communications. At the same time, it aligns internal operations with front-facing marketing and sales. The net result is growth and higher margins.

It sounds so simple. Why do so many companies muck it up?

Kay Plantes is an MIT-trained economist, business strategy consultant, columnist and author in Madison, Wisconsin. Reprinted with permission from her blog at www. plantes company.com/ blog.