Management Support for Brand Champions

When the brand champions are well integrated in an organization, the team becomes highly visible. This group needs to be treated as special but without elevating it to a position where members are held in disdain by the rest of the staff. (That would be highly counterproductive!) It requires a delicate balancing act of using the talents of such a high-energy group while not creating animosity or jealousy about its existence.

Brand champions must not be set up to fail, so their beginning efforts need to be positive and look good to the rest of the organization. They normally need help with this in the form of a brand toolbox that includes guidelines, suggested activities they can implement, access to organizational leadership, and even a budget.

Finally, the position of the brand champion team needs to be viewed positively by senior management. Making sure the team is well supported at the highest levels of the organization will help enormously. You clearly do not want a situation where your brand champions are spreading the word that this is a process only on paper and not being lived and supported by management.

For this reason, the idea of brand champions has to be sold to senior managers first. They need to know what this group of people will be doing. Situations must be anticipated where toes may be stepped on. A brand champion team needs to have the ability to move throughout the entire organization, and a single manager who opposes the team's efforts can weaken the entire process.

We once led a process that involved upwards of twenty brand champions. They were an extremely engaged group. People fought to get onto the first team. Everyone on the team exemplified the values of the brand; we were assured of this because of our involvement in selecting the team members. A three-day team-building process began the team's integration. We planned a special opening in a darkened room with music, rich graphics, and a themed Mission Impossible ("Should you decide to accept this mission ...") introduction of all the team members. By the time we finished with the introduction, all the participants were on their feet, clapping and shouting—clearly involved with the process!

At this point the managing director came into the room to offer a welcome to the team. Normally, he was fairly upbeat, but he had had a bad morning and was under considerable budgetary stress—at least, these were the only explanations we could find for his completely off-brand behavior. He walked to the front of the room and opened his remarks with a dash of cold water: "This isn't about fun. This is about hard work."

Actually, one of the organization's brand values did involve fun, so the remarks particularly stung the group. It took a lot of skill on the part of the facilitator to handle this issue so that the director's welcome to the team members did not become their reality. Fortunately, that did not happen, though we often wonder how much better this team might have performed if it had had a different welcome.