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2002 BRANDWORKS UNIVERSITY SPEAKERS: (click each name to view a summary of the remarks or scroll down) BRAND ALIGNMENT: THE COMPLETE HOW-TO ›› Marsha Lindsay, President and CEO of Lindsay, Stone & Briggs A SYSTEMS APPROACH TO BRAND ALIGNMENT ›› Larry Light, Global Chief Marketing Officer, McDonald’s Corporation STRATEGIC OPPORTUNITIES FOR MEASURING AND BUILDING BRAND ALIGNMENT ›› Sara Lipson, Vice President of Brand Asset Management for AT&T HOW TO ORGANIZE YOUR COMPANY FOR ALIGNMENT ›› Mary Jo Hatch, Professor at the McIntire School of Commerce at the University of Virginia HOW TO ALIGN INTERNAL AND EXTERNAL CUSTOMERS BEHIND A BRANDED SERVICE ›› Camille Keith, Vice President of Special Marketing, Southwest Airlines HOW TO SCRIPT AND STAGE COMPELLING EXPERIENCES THAT ALIGN EMPLOYEES AND CUSTOMERS ›› Joe Pine, coauthor of The Experience Economy: Work Is Theatre & Every Business a Stage HOW TO ALIGN CONSUMERS BEHIND A BRANDED PRODUCT ›› Ami Miesner Anderson, President of General Mills Entertainment Division HOW TO ALIGN YOUR NEW PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT PROCESS TO THE OVERALL BRAND STRATEGY ›› Jerry Perez, Executive Vice President of Marketing and Design, Fisher-Price ALIGNING COMMUNICATIONS BEHIND YOUR BRAND: HOW TO GET EVERYONE ON THE SAME PAGE ›› Denise Lee Yohn, Vice President, Segment Marketing & Brand Planning, Sony Electronics ALIGNING YOUR ADVERTISING AND PR MESSAGES BEHIND A REPOSITIONED BRAND ›› Lisa Baird, Vice President, Worldwide Advertising and Media, IBM Michele Bedard, Sub-Zero, Director of Marketing HOW TO USE ALIGNMENT TO PROTECT AND GROW YOUR BRAND ASSETS ›› Dexter Fedor, Senior Vice President Strategic Marketing, the Walt Disney Company BRAND ALIGNMENT: THE COMPLETE HOW-TO Marsha Lindsay, president and CEO of Lindsay, Stone & Briggs. She is a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Brand Management, London, has taught the MBA-level course on strategic brand management at the University of Wisconsin business school, and is a past member of the executive committee of the American Association of Advertising Agencies. Brand alignment is a simple way of saying: Harness the power of your whole company to deliver your brand promise in employee behavior, new product development, and sales and marketing efforts. A brand promise is a statement of the relevance and differentiation that gives you competitive advantage. Marsha Lindsay gave participants at Brandworks University ten ways to align their companies to their brand strategies:
‹‹ back to the list of speakers A SYSTEMS APPROACH TO BRAND ALIGNMENT Larry Light, global chief marketing officer, McDonald’s Corporation What’s the most important word in brand management today? It’s “value,” according to Larry Light, one of the world’s leading authorities on branding policy. The brand must be at the center of the strategic business plan and all of the systems that feed into it because it defines the value you give customers that makes you relevant to their lives and different from the competition. “Go back and put value into the center of all of your management systems. Go from brand management to brand value management,” Light urged attendees of Brandworks University. “It’s all about value today. People don’t buy a price, they buy a value. It’s, ‘Buy this brand and get this experience,’ not ‘Buy this brand and get this product.’” “We can’t all increase market share. But we can all increase customer perceived value of our brands,” Light said. “We have to ask ourselves how to put the brand at the center of our systems in order to create superior, enduring value for consumers. No company can create sustainable value for shareholders without creating enduring value for customers.” Light said brand building is not about advertising. “Brands are built on experience. When you walk into a McDonald’s store, you walk into the brand.” ‹‹ back to the list of speakers STRATEGIC OPPORTUNITIES FOR MEASURING AND BUILDING BRAND ALIGNMENT Sara Lipson, vice president of brand asset management for AT&T When most people think of AT&T, they think of phones and long distance service, said Sara Lipson. But AT&T is no longer about “babies and puppies kissing on the telephone,” Lipson said, and it’s not what AT&T must be in the future. The challenge is how to get the brand to help further the business goals we must achieve and help align employees behind it. Lipson measures both brand equities and the behavior of employees to deliver them. “The brand is every touch point a company has with customers,” Lipson said. “At AT&T, it starts with key insights about what attributes have high customer value in the market. We bake them into the product and service and measure them on every point of customer contact.” AT&T uses metrics to track brand performance in five ways:
‹‹ back to the list of speakers HOW TO ORGANIZE YOUR COMPANY FOR ALIGNMENT Mary Jo Hatch, Professor of Commerce at the McIntire School of Commerce at the University of Virginia “If you can get human resources and marketing together, you can align the whole company,” says Professor Mary Jo Hatch. “They are the hardest two functions to integrate, but two of the most important.” Hatch told Brandworks University participants that branders and marketers often make a big mistake by ignoring the effect of human resources and corporate culture on brand alignment. The wrong corporate culture, she explained, can kill a brand. “Don’t worry about getting your people behind your brands,” Hatch said. “Get your brands behind your people” with experiences that allow employees to understand the brand. “What is the most exciting thing human resources could do to put the brand behind you in an exciting way?” Hatch also advised that companies measure the gaps between employee behaviors and delivery of the brand promise to customers. ‹‹ back to the list of speakers HOW TO ALIGN INTERNAL AND EXTERNAL CUSTOMERS BEHIND A BRANDED SERVICE Camille Keith, vice president of special marketing and one of the earliest employees of Southwest Airlines “You can’t talk about an airline without emotion,” says Camille Keith. “We’re there when people get married, go off to war, go to college, get divorced, become grandparents. We’re there when they’re emotional, when they’re happy. We realized that our emotional benefit, as a low-cost airline is that we give people the freedom to fly. We’ve been doing that consistently for over 31 years.” Southwest takes it so seriously they have created an internal brand promise (freedom begins with me) to ensure that employees deliver on the customer promise. The freedoms of employees include things like financial security, the empowerment that gives them the security to focus on making customers feel valued, and the freedom to be who you are and to have fun serving the customer. ‹‹ back to the list of speakers HOW TO SCRIPT AND STAGE COMPELLING EXPERIENCES THAT ALIGN EMPLOYEES AND CUSTOMERS Joe Pine, coauthor of The Experience Economy: Work Is Theatre & Every Business a Stage Delivering goods and services to our customers isn’t enough anymore, according to B. Joseph Pine ll. Staging branded experiences for them is the way to competitive advantage. “Aligning customers behind your brand through compelling experiences creates more of what the consumer wants,” Pine told attendees of Brandworks University. “Done well, economic value is created in the experience arena. People experience the product and are willing to pay more for it.” ‹‹ back to the list of speakers HOW TO ALIGN CONSUMERS BEHIND A BRANDED PRODUCT Ami Miesner Anderson, president of General Mills Entertainment Division “Experience marketing extends the consumer’s exposure to your brand’s equities. It builds loyalty and impressions through active participation, and it builds relationships with the consumer,” said Ami Miesner Anderson. Her division immerses families in the General Mills cereal brands at the Cereal Adventure in the Mall of America, where kids can experience how cereal is made and make their own cereal concoctions. In developing an experience, determine what your brand’s equities are, and bring them to life in the experience, Anderson said. If what you offer is relevant and different, and based on a strong brand promise, customers will pay to experience it. ‹‹ back to the list of speakers HOW TO ALIGN YOUR NEW PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT PROCESS TO THE OVERALL BRAND STRATEGY Jerry Perez is executive vice president of marketing and design, Fisher-Price Unlike many companies, Fisher-Price sees no separation between new product development and marketing. To efficiently review 5,000 new product ideas every year and successfully launch 300 of them, the disciplines must work together seamlessly, said Jerry Perez. The brand promise, Perez said, isn’t about producing fun, high-quality toys. That is a functional benefit that is easily copied by others. It is about the emotional benefit of giving your family the best possible start in life. To operationalize the brand promise, Fisher-Price designed its new Team Center building so it brings design, engineering and marketing together. “They used to be housed in different buildings,” Perez said. “Now they are in the next cubicle, literally over the wall from each other. There’s a no-barriers attitude now.” The right brand promise not only defines the company’s relationship with customers, it also gets employees to feel that their job has meaning. Having an internal version of the consumer brand promise gives employees a reason to get up and come to work every day. “People need to be involved in the brand in a way that’s bigger than just getting a paycheck,” Perez said. Even the human resource department is brought on board to make sure Fisher-Price’s “best possible start in life” promise is reflected in the company’s HR practices. Pregnant women get special perks, like choice of close parking places. There’s also an on-site day care center. ‹‹ back to the list of speakers ALIGNING COMMUNICATIONS BEHIND YOUR BRAND: HOW TO GET EVERYONE ON THE SAME PAGE Denise Lee Yohn, vice president, segment marketing & brand planning, Sony Electronics How can a company align 27,000 employees behind multiple brands in a complex brand hierarchy when the employees are spread out all over North America? For Sony Electronics, the answer is a rich and engaging intranet site called “Being-Sony.com.” “Can you imagine a brand more diverse than Sony?” asked Denise Lee Yohn. “Brand diversity requires brand clarity,” Yohn observed. The Being-Sony intranet site explains Sony’s complex brand architecture for employees, details how employees can affect the brand at 250 different customer touch-points, links to a virtual toolbox for marketing partnerships and includes a frequently updated brand dialog area. The three goals of the site are “information, inspiration and empowerment,” Yohn said. “We want to create a culture of joy both inside the company and in our outside communications.” The site is fully integrated into Sony’s recruitment and training system. “The Web site is our primary brand communications tool and is the first step in our brand alignment initiative. “True integration begins with human resources. Sony has training workshops that align daily decision-making to the brand. We give each other feedback on living the brand. And the brand values are infused into seven characteristics in the employee performance evaluation.” ‹‹ back to the list of speakers ALIGNING YOUR ADVERTISING AND PR MESSAGES BEHIND A REPOSITIONED BRAND Lisa Baird, vice president of worldwide advertising and media at IBM Ten years ago, IBM was a troubled company, Lisa Baird told attendees at Brandworks University. “The brand was eroding and becoming irrelevant,” Baird said. “We had multiple agencies. Ad creative was not in sync. There was no alignment of responsibility or accountability and we had low employee morale.” “We had to stake out a different position to be a more relevant brand in the Internet era. We redefined the playing field by standing for helping businesses do business using Internet technologies.” When IBM started using the term “e-business” to define the new position, it also aligned its marketing messages behind e-business. “Because IT decisions can take months to make, we mapped out when to use different forms of marketing communications depending on where consumers are in the purchase decision process,” Baird said. IBM aligned its messages in all forms of communication including advertising, public relations, direct mail, Internet and email. “Integration isn’t just about marketing. We talk about its value to non-marketing folks. Our revenue is up, and stock prices were up at the end of the year. In addition, customer satisfaction and the value of our brand are also up,” Baird said. ‹‹ back to the list of speakers ALIGNING CHANNEL PARTNERS Michèle Bédard, director of marketing for Sub-Zero Aligning with channel partners was key to the successful incorporation of Wolf-brand ranges and cooking appliances into the Sub-Zero freezer family, said Michèle Bédard. Sub-Zero has an exclusive commitment to its 15 regional distributors, Bédard said. “They make us look bigger than life. They connect us to the market.” The keys to making the relationships work are a strong brand, trust based on mutual respect, shared brand experiences, and common brand tools and programs, Bédard said. ‹‹ back to the list of speakers HOW TO USE ALIGNMENT TO PROTECT AND GROW YOUR BRAND ASSETS Dexter Fedor, senior vice president strategic marketing, the Walt Disney Company Perhaps more than any other company in the world, the Walt Disney Company has to be careful to align every brand experience, storyline and icon, according to Dexter Fedor. “People expect a lot of the Disney brand and we get in trouble when we disappoint them.” Fedor outlined a multi-step process that defines the brand promise, identifies the qualities that bring it to life and then creates guidelines and rules that make the whole structure actionable in everyday business settings.
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