Proven Tactics and Clever Strategies Revealed at AMA’s Corporate Branding 2003

Top marketing executives, representing both well-known household name brands more than a century old and fast-growing brands in their first dynamic decade, shared their experiences and insights in Chicago at AMA’s Corporate Branding 2003, October 21-22, 2003.

Nearly 150 attendees from 29 states, 6 countries and dozens of industries had a chance to interact with the 24 presenters, concurrent session leaders and panelists during question-and-answer sessions, at breaks, lunches and a networking reception.

Here are just a few highlights:

“Brand smarter, not harder” was the overall theme established for Corporate Branding 2003 by Conference Chairperson Scott Davis, Managing Director of Prophet, a branding and marketing consulting firm. “Specifically,” he explained “we will look at means to align brand and business strategy, and the keys to ‘operationalizing’ the organization around brand strategies.”

“Brand building,” said Mr. Davis, “is all about defining, creating and consistently delivering a valued and differentiated customer experience.” He went on to review the four key drivers of brand success:

• Shift senior management’s mindset to understand the link between brand and business strategy, and to making brand a strategic priority. Brands can create strategic value such as defining Ralph Lauren as a brand which stands for elegant living, enabling it to expand from apparel to bed linen and household paints.
  
• Operationalize your brand by identifying, prioritizing and optimizing your high-impact brand touch points. This involves identifying all touch points in the pre-sale, purchase and post-sale experience, prioritizing them in impact and importance and, then, continually measuring and improving the customer experience.
  
• Develop a brand assimilation plan to help employees embrace and embody your brand. Educate, communicate with and train employees to change behavior as they move from “hearing it” to “living it.”
  
• Measure the success of your branding efforts. Since what is not measured is not managed, it is important to establish methods to regularly measure perceptions, business and financial results.

Chris Lowe, President, Food Service and Hospitality, Coca-Cola, North America, explained that for Coca-Cola, brands like Coke, Fanta, Minute Maid and Powerade are so powerful that they become the strategy driving corporate vision.

To fulfill that vision—which is to be the world’s premier total non-alcoholic beverage company—Mr. Lowe said, it is essential that Coca-Cola have a broad portfolio of beverage brands to meet diverse tastes. The company, focusing on fulfilling consumer needs, has over 250 brands.

Mr. Lowe reviewed the four trends at work in North America that have the most bearing on Coca-Cola’s current brands and future planning:

• the increasing ethnicity of the consumer landscape, especially the growing Latino population
  
• the aging population
  
• the desire to live healthier and more active lifestyles
  
• the increasing independence and size of the teen population

“Because brands are the face and voice of your company to consumers,” concluded Mr. Lowe, “they speak for your organization more often and more directly than any other form of communication.”

“Nothing beats simplicity,” advised Amy Curtis-McIntyre, VP Marketing of JetBlue Airways, the four-year-old carrier that has made profits every year. “Just give people more than they pay for, with consistency, reliability and just a few bells and whistles.”

“Our goal was to create the best coach product in the U.S.,” she explained “to bring humanity back to air travel with style and a sense of humor. We set out to stimulate more travel. To give people a reason to leave the house.”

Ms. Curtis-McIntyre’s rules for brand-building are simple: create a great product, market it right, take really good care of it, repeat before necessary.

JetBlue’s success to date can be traced, she summarized, to selling something people want (in this case low cost and on-time performance), starting with an experienced management team, communicating openly and honestly with customers and employees, staying focused on what you are and passionately believing in what you sell.

Jennifer Powell, Sr. VP and Director of Marketing of U.S. Bank, explained how the institution, now the fourth largest in the country with branches in 24 states from Ohio to California, had been forged by a succession of mergers and acquisitions. Such brands as First National Bank, Star Bank, Firstar and U.S. Bancorp preceded the current name.

U.S. Bank was launched with a 5-star service guarantee after extensive research indicated that service can be the deciding factor in the banking business. A high level of service can be hard to match. The bank strives to provide a common and consistent high quality experience at every touch point with customers.

To deliver on this brand promise, U.S. Bank has focused on having the right people and then trains them in its tenets of service:

• to take ownership
• to make it personal
• to add value to every interaction
• to make courtesy common, and
• to share knowledge with customers and co-workers

It has been innovation and design that has transformed The Stanley Works, a 160-year old company, into a fast-growing 21st century leader. That’s the story Gary Van Deursen, Corporate VP, Innovation and Design, told participants, in a presentation richly illustrated with numerous product and packaging photos.

In the past five years, The Stanley Works has developed a consistent and distinctive look in packaging that conveys its brands product essence—durable, reliable and rugged tools. In addition, the packaging now strongly conveys user benefits, not just product specs.

Further, Stanley has developed new products, ergonomically sound and elegant in design. It has “reinvented” such common tools as the screwdriver, the hammer and the tape measure, creating new, higher-margin opportunities and broadening its penetration of hardware and do-it-yourself stores and departments.

One of the more noteworthy initiatives Mr. Van Deursen reported is the Innovation Team’s “free fall” sessions in which 9 to 12 people gather for an eight-hour session at least once a month to identify challenging problems and creative solutions for them.

“Complexity is easy,” explained Martin Homlish, Executive VP of computer software giant SAP, “simplicity is difficult.” But it was simplicity he and his team were striving for when they tackled the SAP brand image. To better communicate the virtues of a global organization “with unrivalled reliability, unmatched innovation and an unprecedented customer base,” it was essential to establish a common look and feel, one unified voice. So SAP simplified everything, by moving to one ad agency, for instance. And looked at everything that touched customers on the outside and employees inside the organization.

“The ‘one voice’ movement gave everyone throughout the company a renewed sense of focus,” Mr. Homlish reported. “And everything we did was based on three principles — keep it relevant, keep it simple, keep it consistent.”

For information on Future Corporate Branding Conferences, click here.

For AMA Marketing seminars, click here.