Part IV of this series looked at the how the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) could use social
media to lead their peers in streamlining the economics of their business model. This
installment suggests that the true power of social media is in providing the tools build a strong, meaningful and dynamic brand identity. Read the full article.
Part V: CMO Guide to Social Media
Nurture the dynamic brand identity - the brand consciousness and conscience - through customer relationships and company behavior
Just as many marketers have been trained to view the marketer's job as focused on outbound communication, we've also been trained to equate our brand with the visual and verbal aspects of the company's identity (i.e., a logo), in other words, the pieces of that identity that have been traditionally more controllable and easier to wrap a budget around. That day is past, too, and our brand is now a function of the customer's experience with our organization more than the visual and verbal elements that trigger memories of the experience.
Customer experience has always been core to customer loyalty, and it still is, but now that customers can talk about their experience with us so easily using the social tools at their fingertips, whether we like it or not, and whether they realize it or not, each individual customer is now a direct channel taking our brand messages to market. In this context "message control" is irrelevant and we have moved into yet another co-creative space where our interaction with our customer (often in public for all their eFriends to witness), and their dialog with others about that interaction through their own postings, actively creates our brand. As a result, every single customer interaction becomes part of our dynamic brand identity. And while it's tempting to focus reputation management strategies solely on turning around negative messages many companies have been pleasantly surprised to find that their more enthusiastic fans are already saying positive things. In the latter case, one of the CMO's first challenges is to keep the traditional infrastructure (especially the legal team) from quashing such enthusiasm before it can become part of the company's more formal outreach strategies. But beyond merely trying to protect it, CMOs must take the lead in figuring out how to enable it.
There are so many ways to participate in social media and building and maintaining true relationships of any kind takes time and energy, resources not always in overflow supply in marketing departments. Of course you have to make good judgments about where your team spends its time and resources, and you have to get smart about leveraging resources outside your department because resources are another reason the marketing department can't completely own the responsibility to manage the customer relationship on behalf of the brand. Luckily, today's technologies offer us tremendous ways to engage our entire employee base in our branding-through-relationship strategy. If the U.S. Air Force can do it, so can you!
But no one says it's easy.
Relationships are two way things. If the CMO successfully understands the holistic customer but doesn't place equal emphasis on shaping the companies' holistic response, the relationship is vulnerable. Organizations are not individuals, but in relationships with individuals they do have unique identities which, just like an individuals', are comprised of more than simply a bunch of disparate behaviors. This organizational identity transcends discreet transactions, going to the level of "brand consciousness," and includes the values and motivations inherent in the company's culture which reflects itself in marketing messages, sales conversations, customer implementation procedures, support activities and financial documentation (to name just a few) as the customer experiences them.
Brand building in the 21st Century means CMOs must take the lead in helping their peers see the linkages between the customer's brand experience and all the discrete company-customer interactions that go into building it. Despite our traditional education in brand-building as advertising, at the end of the day, the only aspect of your customer's brand experience that your company controls is its own behaviors. Thus "managing" the brand means managing what the company puts into the relationship with your customer, because it is your behavior as an organization which is what the customer will end up talking about to their friends, family and your competitors. Your brand is now what you do, not what you say you do.
Your best asset in the future of brand building is your employee base, the individuals who not only touch customers most directly but also have the greatest motivation to help your company succeed. How do you prepare your entire employee base to be effective brand stewards in this crazy madcap market? Again, relationships are key. If your relationship with your employees is an effective expression of your brand, then their relationships with your customers (and other important audiences) will be equally authentic to your brand. Because this link is indirect, however, it's easy for companies to overlook its importance and short-change the employee brand experience. As a leader who does understand these linkages, it's important for the CMO to become a strong advocate of internal branding.
And this internal branding path is perhaps the road down which the CMO has the greatest opportunity for corporate leadership. Because a brand that is authentic internally and externally, supports strong relationships throughout the customer lifecycle and excites employees, customers and stakeholders enough to talk about it with others and encourage them to become engaged - a brand that strong - has deep meaning to all those people beyond just the ad slogans and tag lines the marketing department (with its trusty ad agency compadres) usually cooks up. The strong brands that become both strategic and tactical assets for their shareholders are based on core values that resonate with their audiences, and they engage these audiences' hopes, aspirations and trust.
Vitalizing your brand with deeply motivational corporate Vision, Mission and Values statements that express shared meaning and value is challenging work and means taking on a certain responsibility for the "brand conscience", but it is vitally important and something a CMO is uniquely positioned to champion in the interests of the entire company's success. To step up to this level of leadership means that the CMO must not simply take responsibility for managing the face of the brand, but to be the "brand conscience" and to take on the responsibility for growing its soul as well. It is not a path for the feint hearted because sometimes it requires a company to confront uncomfortable realities where their principles and practices are out of alignment, but this makes it work even more worth doing. Because in today's market, if the company doesn't do it, it's customers may very well force the issue - in public.
The challenge of leadership
Of course, pioneering these strategies will take the CMO out of the strict marketing arena and involve them in initiatives to be run out of the executive suite, sales, operations, development and lots of other places the company may not think you belong. While I won't digress completely into a discussion of general leadership, I will say that this article is intended to demonstrate just how pervasive social strategies need to be throughout the successful business of the future. As a result, the entire executive leadership team needs to understand and embrace the forces that are already reshaping their business. No matter how tempting it is for you as a head of marketing to want to own all aspects of the brand-building and customer relationship efforts (and you're not alone if you want to own it) the key to success is not to "own" it, because you can't. You can't control it any more than you can control your customer's mind and blog entries.
What you can do is lead by example in the areas that do fall into your purview and educate your peers - especially the CEO who arguably does own the whole shebang - about what's really going on. Become a leading thinker among your executive peers about how to use social strategies in responding to these market shifts. Still not sure where to start? Focus on strengthening the holistic customer relationship and then use your deep customer insight, gained through active listening and engaging, to guide you. If you do it really well, your customers may not only give you the answer, they may do some of the work to help you succeed.
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This is the final installment in the CMO's Guide to Social Media. Here are links to the entire series:
Part I: The CMO's Guide to Social Media (Introduction)
Part II: What's really going on underneath the market craziness of social media?
Part III: Using Social Media as Build Meaningful Customer Relationships
Part IV: Using Social Media to Engage Customers and Partners in Co-Creating Your Brand
Part V: Using Social Media to Build a Dynamic Brand Identity
To read the entire article and view the slide presentation, visit my web site or download the full article.
