3 Keys to Elevate Your Brand Management Excellence

A NOTE FROM THE EDITOR

Hi All! This week’s topic is Branding & Positioning. While we all use brand guidelines to ensure the use of our marks, colors, fonts, etc., there are more impactful branding enablement approaches that deliver even more go-to-market excellence. This week, I share a few of them.

What are your thoughts on brand and positioning enablement in your go-to-market? How good is your firm at it? Share your feedback on The Buzz Community.

And, of course, from the bottom of my heart, I want to thank you for being part of the Buzz community. This endeavor is not possible with you -- our readers. For questions, comments, and feedback, please don't hesitate to let me know.

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3 Keys to Elevate Your Brand Management Excellence

As B2B marketers - or marketers, generally - branding is typically an exercise in logo development, brand color selection, etc. which culminates in a set of branding guidelines for “branding police” rules enforcement. But there are many other elements to branding enablement that are often underserved and can be just the thing to drive your business forward.

First, why as B2B CMOs should we care? Because branding is the foundation of your company’s story. It is the origin story, the logo, colors, USP messaging, and so forth. And as CMOs it’s our job to protect the brand for long-term business value. And brand valuation is so important that it’s even being added to income statements. In addition to adding to a company’s valuation, strong brands can deliver improved revenue, customer retention, and pricing - all of which can deliver incremental top and bottom-line value to a business.

However, there is a significant gap in understanding how to ensure brand management excellence in the context of a digital-first go-to-market. This is beyond just standing up brand guidelines, but how your marketing organization manages brand excellence at scale. Here are some best practices to elevate your brand management and enablement game to ensure your firm is delivering go-to-market excellence.

Key #1: Brand as Enablement

Frequently when I audit B2B brands, one consistent deficiency I see is the operationalization of brand in the day-to-day management of marketing execution. It’s a big gap that marketing leadership usually fails to address, because they think, “I have branding guidelines” so I’m covered. But that isn’t the answer and it costs your business money every day. And for larger B2B brands this can be more than your daily marketing spend.

Let’s start with an example we all can recognize, Sales Deck creation. One element in my branding audit is collecting between 5-10 sales decks from the field and quantifying all the brand discrepancies among them. A very simple exercise, but extremely illuminating on how well a company manages its brand. Typically, I see between 10-20 missteps per deck in these audits. While this may sound small, think about the number of reps times the number of meetings, and suddenly the scope of the problem is material to your brand’s integrity. And this is just what your sales team is delivering to prospective customers. Gulp!

Sure, this is a theoretical business case (or at least part of it) for sales enablement solutions. But it is really a cultural shift in Marketing to develop brand enablement programs. That is, delivering the brand as a service.

Key #2: Brand as Modules

Many experienced marketers don’t think through the challenges of operationalizing a brand in the day-to-day. But to be successful in today’s complex marketing execution climate, you need to modularize your brand. You must break your brand, its story, USPs, etc. into parts to drive consistent application at scale. Why? Because the applications we use in B2B go-to-market are so vast and diverse.

Building a modular brand is the discipline of telling your brand story both visually and with words in both small and larger spaces with the same favorable outcomes. This discipline is the effort to break up your brand its design, lexicon, storytelling, messaging, etc. into snippets that enable consistent execution at scale across all go-to-market motions.

This discipline will deliver two key benefits, better consistency of execution which will result in improved favorability, recall, and NPS. Which will lead to more pricing elasticity as your firm grows. And the foundation for our next key, creating Brand greatness.

Key #3: Brand as “Greatness”

We’re all familiar with Emerson’s quote in Self-Reliance, “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds…” But the real crux of the passage is, “To be great is to be misunderstood.” What does this have to do with Brand Management Excellence? Everything.

Brand consistency is important and we need to ensure ways to deliver it through others consistently. But a strong brand is the floor, if you will, not the ceiling. Think of the great brands over time, Apple, Nike, etc. They are great because you can build on top of them creatively to tell an amazing story.

Many B2B brands are good, but not great. Even my alma mater MSFT, and many other business brands show up on Interbrand’s best list year after year they are truly just good brands, well executed. But they aren’t great. They aren’t inspirational. They don’t make you get out of your seat and do something. As my creative director boss used to say to me early in my career.

But to get there you need Key #1 and Key #2 in place to enable brand greatness. Is your firm ready for brand greatness?

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