Part of the formula for a vibrant and sustainable culture is hiring inspired and talented people. But, it’s not enough for you to bring people on board who share your values and your purpose. You need to keep these people on board. In most cases, if you’re charismatic, passionate, and compelling enough, you’ll usually be able to sell something to someone, whether it’s a product, service, or a position within your company. The real challenge, however, is holding onto the client or the talented employee. So what’s the formula? Let me be clear that it does not involve a constant state of inspiration—those big movie moments are really few and far between, and anyway, the sort of energy it would take to sustain them would run you down in short order. The formula for sustaining long-term engagement does, however, involve a fair amount of work and corporate training. That’s because it requires being consistently genuine. Depending on the size of your organization, you should have regular, organization-wide meetings where people can share best practices, learn about what others’ jobs are like, and how areas of the organization overlap. If you are part of a very large organization where company-wide meetings are not possible, then be sure to arrange for regular departmental meetings and some sort of annual organization-wide gathering, possibly even a few corporate team building activities or team building workshops. Remember that you want people who will actively engage with you and each other without fear of your ego getting in the way. But part of that active engagement requires that people have at least a basic understanding of how the different areas of the organization fit together. One of the biggest challenges in running my advertising agency was getting people in different departments to not only understand what the other people in other areas did but to also appreciate the work. For example, our account executives and account coordinators were solely responsible for keeping the client informed and happy. They were the face of the company. Part of that work included responsibility for keeping their programs on schedule, which meant they would have to provide pertinent information to the client for approval, such as creative samples, media proposals, and costs for production. So, if they promised a client that they would have the media plan to them within a week, they did so not knowing what it took for the media planners and buyers to get accurate and cost effective information. If they promised the client a creative briefing within two weeks, they did so not knowing what other jobs were already in the queue and how long it actually took to come up with great ideas. The creative and media folks on the other hand never really worked with the clients, therefore, they did not have an understanding of how demanding and inflexible some of them could be. As you can imagine, there was a lot of stress and frustration on both sides. The solution? We created a cross-training or cross-pollination program, wherein periodically, everyone in the agency at some point had to spend a week working next to someone from a completely different department. Account executives would sit in on creative meetings and listen in on the negotiation process the media buyers went through. Creative types would sit in on client meetings and calls to better understand what the account people had to deal with on a daily basis. This program helped to create a greater understanding within our company from department to department and from person to person. This tactic developed corporate communication skills and also eliminated an awful lot of fighting and finger pointing! Recently I was the keynote speaker for a large, international bank. I also created and monitored a two-hour breakout session, which was titled, “Perception is Reality.” The premise was the same as my cross-pollination process I describe above and it was created for many of the same reasons—to facilitate a better understanding of what others do and to eliminate fighting and finger pointing within the organization, which, by the way, was beginning to run rampant. In this session, loan originators learned from loan processors, who learned from underwriters who learned from the credit department and so on. Just as there was at my own company, there was the same lack of corporate communication and understanding of what others did, from department to department, and what reasonable expectations should be. My guess is that these issues occur within your organization as well. If so, do yourself and your company a big favor and start educating people on what others at the same company do on a daily basis. It will create realistic expectations, eliminate assumptions, and create a more harmonious, productive, and profitable environment.
The Company That Plays Together Stays Together
In this morning’s Wall Street Journal, writer Ben Fritz talks about Disney’s ability to turn movie hits into “Profits Ever After.” Each movie mega hit becomes its own franchise, with a dedicated team focused on turning that movie hit into successful and profitable rides, toys, clothes, video games, and more. In the advertising business, we would call this “having legs.” Think about your current business model. Do you have the ability to turn your knowledge and your skill sets into additional revenue streams? Does your current business model have legs? Let me give you an example of what I’m talking about. I am a corporate speaker. That’s my main area of business revenue. To put it simply, I am hired by corporations to fly to their conferences or conventions and be their opening or closing keynote speaker. Many times, a company will also hire me to do a breakout session or a seminar while I’m there. Now, let me show you how I turned that into “legs.” From my experience in business ownership, advertising, and board positions, I have created a knowledge base of several different topics, ranging from leadership to brand building. Now, I could easily just go out and do my keynote presentations, but there are many other opportunities I can create with this information. Opportunities that turn into additional revenue streams or “legs.” I’ve written books, and from the books I’ve created presentations and training programs. I’ve turned the training programs into consulting contracts. The consulting contracts have led to additional marketing and advertising projects. I’ve turned my presentations and knowledge base into instructional DVDs and CDs. I’ve turned my books into audiobooks. In fact, I’ve turned my knowledge and skills into not only additional income, but passive income. I’ve put my knowledge into something people can actually see and touch. Obviously, I cannot compare myself to Disney. My revenue stream is certainly not in the same stratosphere as theirs, but the concept is the same. I have franchised myself. I have turned my name and knowledge into a brand and into brand products and services. Now, let’s look at your business. Whether you’re in the financial sector, manufacturing, marketing, health care, or any other business, what other opportunities are you leaving on the table? Can you turn your knowledge and your skills into additional revenue streams? Do you have current products that have additional products in them, but you just haven’t seen them? Can you turn a product that really can’t be seen or touched into something that can? In other words, if you’re selling insurance, banking, or intellectual property, what can you do to create a software program, game, or any tangible product that not only creates additional revenue but also puts your brand on something your customers can touch? Is the customer experience great enough that your customers will want to experience you more, or in other ways? At Disney, that’s exactly what’s happening. “When people love a Disney product this much, they expect to be able to somehow experience it,” said Kathy Mangum, a senior creative executive in the Imagineering theme-park design group. What can you do to create additional experiences for your customers that will ultimately turn into additional revenues for your company? Think of your company as a bicycle wheel. Your main product or service is the hub. Anything additional you can create becomes a spoke. The outside, or the wheel itself, becomes your customer base and revenue stream. How large is that wheel? How many spokes do you have?
A Plug for The Brand Who Cried Wolf!
My first book, which was published by Wiley Press in 2007, has made a sudden resurgence. On top of business consulting, I’ve been requested several times over the past few months to do a book signing, not just with Powered by Purpose, but to also bring The Brand Who Cried Wolf. It seems that as the business climate gets more challenging and competition gets fiercer, companies of all sizes are trying to figure out how to get their people on board and gain that competitive edge. So, I’ve decided to blog the opening of Chapter One from The Brand Who Cried Wolf. Read on and see if this book is for you! Whether or not you work in management, accounting, manufacturing, customer service, sales, marketing, or any other department in an organization, you need to understand the difference between marketing, advertising, and branding. That’s because, regardless of what your job is, you build and sustain the brand, not marketing and not advertising. Once you understand how branding is a different animal from marketing and advertising, you’ll understand why this book is for you. You’ll see how important it is for you to be concerned about your company’s brand, and what your role is in creating and sustaining it. Suppose you work in manufacturing, and your job is to sit at a station and assemble a product. Because you have absolutely no contact with the customer, and you’re not involved in marketing, you might think that your work has nothing to so with your employer’s brand. Therefore, you might mistakenly think this book isn’t for you. But consider the following scenario: Imagine that the product you manufacture has a flaw in it. It goes to the store, and the salesperson, who doesn’t know about the flaw, is busy selling it. She’s advocating on behalf of the product, which people know about because of the company’s wonderful advertising. From advertising to sales pitch, the brand promise has been made. What happens to the brand when the customer learns about the flaw? It tanks. You, as part of the manufacturing and brand building process, fell short. Because of this, in the mind of the customer, the advertising was false and the salesperson was dishonest. The brand is damaged. Or suppose you work in accounting. You might also conclude that this book isn’t for you. After all, you’re “internal.” As such, you think you have nothing to do with the brand building process. But this is another mistaken conclusion. Imagine this scenario: A vendor calls asking for clarification on an invoice. You happen to be very busy that day. Because you don’t consider your role as important to the brand building process, you treat the call as an intrusion, as insignificant. In the mind of the vendor, however, you represent your company, and you are the brand. He tells friends and colleagues about his “negative” experience with your company, not with you. You’ve just damaged your company’s brand. This book will show you whatever it is you do, you impact your brand. So, it’s crucial that you learn about my new brand paradigm! Professionals and laypersons alike often don’t properly distinguish between advertising, marketing, and branding. They think they are synonymous terms for a single function. The result, ultimately, is misapplication: people think they develop brands through advertising, or that their brand is simply the product or service for sale in the marketplace. This chapter is designed to dispel these mistaken ideas by defining what advertising, marketing, and branding are, and clarifying their relations to one another. By the end of this chapter, you’ll have a woking knowledge of each of these three concepts, both in their common usage and as I believe they should be understood. In Chapter 2, I’ll focus exclusively on defining the concept of branding in a way that has not previously been articulated. Advertising as Awareness Most people focus on advertising as the single most important feature of both branding and marketing. It’s understandable to think that advertising is the most important feature of a business’ brand, given the fact that most of us are bombarded with advertising. A good ad makes consumers aware of a product or service, but it also makes the item attractive in order to compel the consumer to seek it out. Advertisers have gone so far as to promote the idea that the product or service is so iconic it generates a culture—Coca-Cola’s “Coke is it”; Nike’s “Just do it”—to which the consumer should want to belong. But at the end of the day, the function of advertising is simply to create brand awareness and hopefully drive customers to your place of business. No matter how flashy, savvy, sophisticated, or manipulative an advertisement is, the best it can do is make consumers aware of a product or service, and possibly move them to investigate or even make a purchase. Convincing a customer to make a purchase, however, doesn’t mean you’ve created a brand. What it does is give you an opportunity to create and build a brand. Interested? Pick up The Brand Who Cried Wolf, either on Amazon.com or right here on our website and learn more about emotional branding, marketing seminars, business consulting, and your company’s future.