Brand clarity: align your strategy, unique value and offerings to stay focused

Should branding and corporate strategy be aligned? We think so. Robin Tooms visits with David Skinner, CEO of KCA, an energy consulting firm focused on technology and strategy.

Robin: Hello and welcome to this edition of Brandonomics, an inside look at top brands and their marketing strategies. I am Robin Tooms, VP of strategy at Savage Brands and my guest again is David Skinner, CEO at KCA. SO David, so glad you’re back on Brandonomics.

David: Robin thank you for having me back.

Robin: Well you’ve been wonderful talking about the brand story of KCA but one thing that’s also really important is how this brand aligns with the business strategy and that’s key for what you guys are doing. So tell me first, how are you doing that at KCA?

David: Well I think you always have to have your branding and your overall corporate strategy aligned. If you don’t, I think you send the wrong message or mixed messages to your clients, and the public and your employees too. For us what we’ve really tried to do is be clear about what it is that we do for clients and a lot of times consulting firms it’s kind of like well if you’ve got a checkbook we’ve got an answer; we’re not that way. There’s a lot of things that we get asked to do and we just say we’re not the people for that.

Robin: That’s not us.

David: That’s not us. More than happy to recommend somebody else but these are the things that we do and what we do really well. And if you kind of focus on those things that tends to tie back to so what’s your brand. And people can identify you very quickly by the type of work you do, the people you employ and even down to so what does you PowerPoints look like when you give them to a client. I can pick out consulting firms left and right just by the PowerPoint format. So it has to be I think very tightly integrated.

Robin: Well one thing I like what you said is about how the employees make decisions from that, putting it into action, so how do you make sure that happens at KCA?

David: So we have of course meetings and luckily we’re not so big that we can’t have everybody to a dinner or a company-wide meeting, but we sit down and really explain to them this is what the company’s about, these are the things we do. And a lot of times you have to do that because there will be projects that come along and everybody’s like why didn’t we do that project, why did we turn that client down? And you have to I think have a good way of explaining the reason we don’t do this is because of X or whatever. But as the employees start to really see sort of the leaders I think emulating what it is that they want the employees to do and act and so forth, that starts to really kind of take hold. I think you have a problem when it’s just kind of like we’ll do whatever. If you’re just trying to grow a company and I often tell people you’re just chasing dollars; you know it’s easy to chase dollars and sort of do anything that a client might want you to do.

It’s harder to be disciplined and say these are the things we’re really good at, these are the things that we’ll do for you, these other things you need to find somebody else.

Robin: Well I would say as a both a marketer and a business owner it warms my heart to hear you say all of this so thank you.

David: Good, thank you.

Robin: This has been another edition of Brandonomics, an inside look at top brands and their marketing strategies.

 

KCA, is a team of expert consultants providing strategic insights and great results to clients in the energy, technology and legal industries. KCA helps clients create smart, robust strategies to solve tough business challenges. https://kca-us.com/