Developing brand champions is critical
Good brand strategies don’t stop at defining why the brand matters. They go further to define the attitudes and behaviors that will define the brand experience in ways that truly matter.
Behavior is best defined on two levels: brand and workplace.
Brand behavior
Brand behavior focuses on the tangible and controllable aspects of your brand. These include the brand’s visual identity and it’s voice in marketing and advertising. Brand behavior identifies the shifts that will generate the feelings with which the brand seeks to be associated. Coupled with new messages that blend the brand’s promise with its key benefits, your brand presence will start to be seen in new, more appealing, and better differentiated ways.
Workplace behavior
Workplace behavior addresses the way leadership, management, and staff can all shift what they do, and how they do it, to better fulfill the brand’s promise. These shifts focus on the role of people who either shape (by designing customer interactions), or who actively create customer experiences (by making a presentation, doing a demonstration, etc). The ideas within the workplace behavior show how they can make the brand’s promise come true, while at the same time evoke the brand’s feelings within every brand experience.
Making everyone a brand champion
Good brand behavior is extremely practical. It helps those specifically involved in managing and promoting the brand to ensure a coherent brand presence. It also helps everyone else in the business see the role they can play in the helping the brand succeed by fulfilling on its promise.
Brand behavior is also an invaluable tool when dealing with outside vendors, including PR and advertising agencies. While brand behavior does not proscribe PR or advertising executions, it does provide these important partners with a strong sense of what makes the brand matter, what they can do to help make the brand promise come true, and how they can evoke the brand’s feelings within the executions they create and manage.
Brand behavior is much more than a set of rules
Brand behavior is helpful advice and guidance, not a set of strict rules or harsh dictates. It recognizes that the brand needs to be able to remain current, and to react to emerging trends and opportunities. It also needs to establish its presence in an increasing number of places.
As such, good brand behavior invites individuals within the organization, and outside vendors, to explore a constant stream of rich and relevant ways to convey the brand’s truths, engage people in the brand’s promise, and change the way people feel about the brand.
All together now
By aligning internal leadership, management and staff, as well as external vendors, brand behavior plays a vital role in shaping brand experiences that are consistently meaningful to customers and prospects. It helps make your promise come true. It helps you create a unique emotional aura around your brand that makes it more appealing and gratifying. Most importantly, it draws more people closer to your brand, so prospects are more likely to try it, customers are more likely to be more loyal, and your brand is more likely to thrive now and in the future.
It’s never been more important to matter as a brand. You take the first steps when you identify what’s most rationally and emotionally valuable about your offering, and embody that in a single brand promise. Your brand thrives when you couple that promise with brand and workplace behavior that’s designed to make it all come true. As shifts in behavior take place, more and more customers and prospects see the truth of your promise, realize its benefits for themselves, and respond in kind.
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IMG credit: http://www.markcypher.com/dusseldorf/dusseldorf.php
