In thinking about the post my colleague Karl recently shared on the importance of culture I couldn’t help but ask myself, “how about vision?”  Culture is critical in successfully connecting brands with customers, but we have to recognize that the long-term vision for the organization and its brand(s) are what shape culture.  Not having a clear vision and applying it across the organization will result in cultural differences that lead to external and internal misalignments such as the ones that Karl spoke about.

And before you dismiss vision or mission statements as consultant speak or items that only appear on a company’s website or in an annual report, consider brands like Apple, Old Spice, Samsung, and Xerox.  These are leading organizations that used redefined brand visions as the catalyst to achieve newfound success, turnaround their failing businesses, and reposition themselves as brand leaders.

“Even while Rome was burning people wanted to know what the city of the future would look like.  What will Xerox look like after it comes through this period of survival and turnaround?” – Anne Mulcahy, CEO of Xerox

But having a vision of what to strive to achieve will only get you so far.  A common tenets that these successful brands shared was decisively directing their resources.  From operations to R&D to marketing communications, investments were made to support the new brand vision.  Another key component was leadership’s ability to have the entire organization adhere to the vision.  Commitment to a singular idea over time, in some cases more than 5 years, is what’s needed to turn a brand around.

It’s unfortunate that such foundational issues are often times put off to the side, possibly because leadership isn’t ready to make a commitment or because it’s so difficult to measure such efforts within the short-term.  But for a successful brand to thrive over time, it needs a solid foundation.

As the saying goes, Rome wasn’t built in a day.

If you need any convincing that employees play a vital role in building a brand, talk to Michael Williams, who wrote this seething letter to Delta Airlines yesterday.  To give you the flavor of his letter, here is the opening paragraph:

“Please allow me to share my experience with one of your standout customer service agents, today. Feel free to use this incident in the unquestionably effectual training program this person must have completed. If I may be so bold, I’d recommend titling this exercise; ‘The ROI of Hiring Ass Hats.’”

Michael went on to talk about his previous years of loyalty to the airline, which was all erased by this one, single experience with a Delta customer care rep.

While we don’t know what was really at fault in this case – the rep’s poor judgment or his/her inability to do what was right for the customer because of Delta policies – in the end it doesn’t matter.  As we point out in our article just published on brandchannel, “employees have the power to either reinforce or break a brand’s promise every time they interact with a customer, shareholder or even another employee.”

Unfortunately for Delta (and Michael), Michael’s experience resulted in a broken brand promise and a lost customer.  Delta would benefit by learning from the likes of Virgin Media and Red Hat, two companies featured in our article, who have successfully engaged employees in living their brand.

According to a recent Wall Street Journal article Starbucks is revamping its brewing process to bring the aroma of fresh ground coffee back into the shop. This return to their roots is happening in the name of injecting “romance and theatre” back into the Starbucks experience to win customers over from chains now offering a cheaper cup of Joe. I’m not sure regularly rotated brewing cycles are enough to convince recession-weary Americans to pay an extra buck for romance, but I applaud the move anyway. It appears as though it’s being done for the right reason – to reinforce the sensory elements that in part drew customers to Starbucks in the first place.

Can the smell of fresh ground coffee bring Customers back to Starbucks?

When I read the article I couldn’t help but wonder what led Starbucks to make the change. Was it customer research? Howard Schultz intuition? Or part of a larger undertaking to turn profits around? It struck me that this effort at its core is about marketing – focusing on your customers and delivering the Starbucks brand experience. But the matter-of-fact details in the article brought the nuts and bolts of this goal to life, describing the 24, 12, or 8 minute alarm-controlled brewing cycles that will be behind that fresh ground coffee smell.

While these details certain ruin some of the magic Starbucks is gunning for, they also caught my attention. As a marketer, the interesting point in all of this is being able to map how a simple change to the customer experience can require the cooperation of so many parts of the organization. It is this complexity that makes the art of delivering a great customer experience such a challenge, and yet, without it the brand promise is never fully delivered. Customer experience is a favorite topic of ours at CMG because it’s so critical to building loyalty, reinforcing your brand and ultimately driving sales. But customer experience can also be one of the thorniest areas we help clients with.

To pull off a change like this Starbucks likely needed collaboration from marketing, sales and retail, and countless other teams to revamp process, create new training, make changes to product and install the equipment for these new brew alarms, all in the name of the Starbucks experience. While this one switch is probably not a silver bullet, I’m impressed to see Starbucks doing the heavy lifting to reclaim their differentiation.

This is the seventh and last in a series of short posts related to The CMO Agenda research. Informed by recent CMO conversations and CMG Partners‘ collective experience helping top marketers develop marketing strategy, we have compiled a list of seven ideas or jump starters for further conversation. These are meant to spark discussion, ideas, and action as we all enter a difficult 2009.

Over the past few years, measurement of marketing has dominated the vernacular of lead marketers and marketing literature - ROMI, ROI, campaign tracking and management, etc.. The reality is that not everything worthwhile can be measured and it takes an equal or greater effort to generate insight from measurement.

Watch out… As the pendulum swings back, companies are re-evaluating the right mix of measurement and management. When they do, will your staff’s talent and skills be seen as they key to decision-making or a weak link in the connection between metrics and action?

Skills of successful top marketers and marketing executives are evolving. More business orientation and holistic approach to decision making are a must to continue to demonstrate value. This means marketers are adopting revenue as a measure and some are responsible for a P&L.

What is your next move?

This is the sixth in a series of short posts related to The CMO Agenda research. Informed by recent CMO conversations and CMG Partners‘ collective experience helping top marketers develop marketing strategy, we have compiled a list of seven ideas or jump starters for further conversation. These are meant to spark discussion, ideas, and action as we all enter a difficult 2009.

Whether developing new products or looking to increase loyalty, having a continuous stream of customer insight that draws on many different sources is important. This feed needs to be constant and plentiful. Technology is making it easier to find new ways to gather and make use of customer insight with limited resources.

Customer research and voice of the customer programs like councils and feedback meetings are the more traditional ones many marketers employ.  Marketing organizations should not forget the many simple everyday ways to accomplish this via tools like email, google alerts, RSS feeds, Twitter or talking with the services or sales representatives. The important thing is to make it an integral part of your day / week.

What can happen if you are not watching/listening?

Many should not forget the Motrin campaign that had so much twitter backlash over a weekend after the launch of a new “hip” mommy ad that the parent campaign pulled the ad. Don’t let this happen to you! Ensure your insight and listening post are capturing as much feedback as possible.

An example of a company doing this well is Dell with their IdeaStorm.com, where users generate ideas for new features or often irritating sales and marketing practices or service policies. The community can then vote on them which helps Dell focus and prioritize.

[Repost from http://alanhart.wordpress.com]

Many brands talk the talk, spending millions to create compelling marketing campaigns but only a select few actually walk the walk by activating a consistent brand experience that fulfills their brand platform throughout the customer experience.

Hosted by the Business Marketing Assocation (BMA) of Boston, Mark Carr, partner at CMG Partners will present Activate your Company’s Brand next Thursday, June 18th at the Hilton Garden Inn Waltham.

If you’re interested in attending or would like more information, click here

You can sign up to receive invitations to our future events, or you can sign up for our general mailing list which automatically signs you up for our quarterly newsletter as well as event announcements.

• Brand: failure to recognize the impact of a company’s culture on their brand and overall customer experience. An area that we are passionate about, and what we refer to as activating the brand (essentially employees embodying the brand), is critical for a brand to achieve its full potential and appropriately manifest itself in the marketplace across all stakeholder touch-points.
• Marketing & Sales alignment: inability for marketing and sales functions to respect each other, collaborate, and align in the best interests of the organization in order to accelerate and improve the purchasing process. An age-old business challenge that can only be addressed if there is mutual respect and understanding of how each function can best collaborate to deliver on the overall organizations goals.
• Marketing performance: lack of respect for marketing analytics/operations to measure and improve marketing performance. We whole-heartily believe that the best companies measure, learn and improve over time and this requires having an appreciation and belief in the science of marketing as well as the art.

The learning that I would pass on is when faced with a business challenge first ask yourself if there is a cultural problem associated with the challenge. In many cases without addressing the cultural aspect, all of the fancy planning and strategery will undoubtedly fall short of expectations.

They say step number one is admitting you have a problem.  Brand stewards have big questions stirring in their heads sometimes:  “where are people talking about us?”, “how big of a bang am I getting on this program?”, “am I actually generating the level of buzz I need to create awareness for my brand?”.  So, of course, consultants like us love to try and answer that question.  In an article we wrote on product launch, we give our take on the old saying “it’s a mixture of art and science”:

The tools used in the product launch process, such as market sizing and market research methodologies, alpha and beta frameworks, launch checklists, etc., are “the science”,  whereas, deciding on which tools to apply and how to apply them, is “the art”. 

Well, when it comes to the science of monitoring web presence and social media impact, I must admit my addiction to Trendrr.  I haven’t been using it long, but so far I’ve found it incredibly useful for gauging the play certain terms, brands, companies, and people are having on the web.  For any given topic, you can get everything from the number of matching Twitter posts per hour to the number of Google searches conducted.  The best part is you can create your own data sets which will be captured and synthesized for you.  This is particularly useful if the term(s) you’re searching for are too obscure or not mainstream enough for Google trends.  You can also easily compare sets of data by using the Trendrr sketchpad, a spiffy feature that allows you to mashup multiple data sources into one easy-to-read graph.

Of course, measuring online brand reputation is not all about quantity .  Quality, tone, passion, and other factors can be just as important as prominence.  For a great list of free social media monitoring tools, I’d recommend starting with Andy Beal of Marketing Pilgrim’s 8 Essential Free Social Media Monitoring Tools.

So, while measuring and assessing brand reputation on the web can be an all-consuming exercise, simple free tools like Trendrr can be a great place to start!

IKEA did it again.  For their most recent US store opening in Tampa Bay, Florida IKEA placed large bottles containing select pieces of furniture on the St. Petersburg pier to promote its new store location.  You can see images taken by MediaPost here and here.

Although stunt marketing might be considered corny, if it’s done right, it can be a more effective brand building tactic.  For IKEA, the continuous usage of stunts has helped it to associate its brand with creativity, cost consciousness, and a quirky personality.  These efforts have allowed IKEA to clearly differentiate itself from its competitors.  What other furniture store would think of doing something like this?

One of the additional benefits of stunt advertising is the extended PR and word of mouth effect that can be generated from one event, like this blog posting.

IKEA does what so many brands strive to do; get people to interact with its products in a non-retail environment.  IKEA did that a few years ago in Copenhagen, Denmark where it furnished bus shelters with IKEA furniture so they looked like miniature IKEA stores.  The government objected to this an eventually had IKEA pull out the furniture but by then IKEA got what it was looking for, huge impact.  So IKEA decided to do something similar for Fashion Week in New York.

But stunt marketing, like other word of mouth campaigns, can backfire on you if not properly thought through, as it did for the Head of the Cartoon Network.

Do you know any other brands that have launched similar successful stunt marketing events or campaigns?

The most recent issue of Perspectives, our e-newsletter is now available online and includes several articles:

• How Solid is Your Foundation?  Addressing CMO Tenure
• The Case for Customer Intimacy: Transforming Retail Financial Services
• Rewriting the Rules of PR

You can also read Sparking Transformation within your Organization, recently published by CMO Council in its monthly e-journal, Marketing Magnified.