Ask the Expert: The key to becoming a top brand – Purpose
Author Savage BrandsCategories Branding, Culture/Employee Engagement, Savage Thinking
Creating an authentic brand is all about being consistent: your vision and messaging need to align with employee behaviors. That’s why having a clear purpose is so critical to branding. Robin Tooms, Vice President of Strategy at Savage, talks about how purpose makes it easy to spot a top brand.
How do you recognize a top brand?
I look for four key factors when I assess the quality of a brand: clarity, consistency, credibility and community. What that boils down to is that the best brands not only have a clear purpose, but that they communicate their purpose clearly from top to bottom. Those top brands create a believable, authentic experience that resonates so strongly with customers, employees, leaders and investors that it has to be shared.
How do companies build that brand experience?
In B2B branding, people are the brand, so its their behaviors that breathe life into the brand experience. Companies have lists of core values – but to customers, those are just words. It’s when employees connect with those values, and their behaviors are based on those values that the brand experience rings true.
What is the most difficult challenge in establishing authentic branding, and how do you address it?
When companies are in a state of change and consolidation – whether it’s driven by internal needs within the organization or external M&A activities – the need for all the separate teams to work together is critically important.
This is a great time for establishing a clear purpose and building a brand around it. Once a group of employees starts to identify with common values, it’s easier for that team to meet goals because they’re moving in the same direction. That’s the power of branding – it connects people to a shared purpose.
Read more from Robin Tooms and fellow experts Vikas Mittal, J. Hugh Liedtke Professor of Marketing at the Jones Graduate School of Business, and Lisa Gordon, director of brand at Waste Management, in a Jones Journal article about authentic branding.
