Brand Knowledge: What are Brands all About?

Assist your staff with their general brand knowledge. Help them become knowledgeable of the role branding plays in business today. In the same way you ensure your staff know how to operate their computers, make sure they know at least as much about how brands operate. Remember, your brand may be your organization's most valuable asset. Protect it by investing in knowledge about the field of branding.

GENERAL BRAND KNOWLEDGE

A great deal can be learned about brands by simply studying the many strong brands that exist in today's marketplace.

• Ask your staff to list the characteristics of strong brands. Choose well-known brands such as Harley-Davidson or McDonald's, and ask them to figure out what makes them such strong brands.

• To increase awareness of taglines, find out how many well-known brand taglines they can recognize.

• Determine how many organizations they can identify merely by looking at the brand logos.

• Ask if they can state the brand promises of strong brands.

• Show examples of well-known service-related brands, such as entertainment parks, hotels, and fast-food restaurants. Ask about perceptions of these brands and then inquire how they arrived at their views. These questions will help your staff think about delivery of brand values connected to strong brand names.

• Build a brand resource center. Create a library of current books on branding. You can use the list at the end of this book as a start for your collection. Post current news articles about brands on a bulletin board.

Wrap your staff in an environment that is imbued with information about branding. Just as you want your customers to have exposure to your brand as many times as possible, so, too, do you want to create multiple references to your brand or the topic of branding in general.

WHO OWNS OUR BRAND, AND WHAT DOES THIS MEAN?

Branding experts say that brands live in the minds of people. So at best, brands are co-owned, shared by the guardians of the brand (the organization) and the perceivers of the brand (consumers).

• Ask your staff for examples of products or services about which they feel a sense of ownership.

• Gather a number of printed ads of branded products. Ask who feels connected with any of them. Ask what this connection means to the strength of the brand.

• Then ask what type of reaction consumers have when they see your logo, product, or place of business.

• In a legal sense, the corporations own their brands; but in a figurative sense, consumers share ownership. Ask your staff to list all the implications if consumers, in fact, owned the brands.

• Discuss how your organization and its staff would behave differently if, in fact, the consuming public were literal owners of your brand. Would any of these changes be beneficial to your organization?

ON- AND OFF-BRAND SERVICE EXPERIENCES

The purpose of this exercise is to teach your staff the difference between generic service and branded customer service. This is a subtlety that your staff must learn to distinguish if they are going to be able to enhance your brand proposition with their own service and customer interactions.

Most customer service programs ask for examples of good and bad service. That's an important question, and people learn while discussing such examples. This exercise uses the same question but about branded service. When you first ask questions about on- and off-brand service experiences, people may not be able to think of a single example. They will no doubt think of dozens of examples of poor generic service but not necessarily off-brand service.

Let this discussion be an ongoing one to which you keep returning. Publish examples in your company newsletters. Post them on your intranet.

VISIT STRONGLY BRANDED COMPANIES

There are many examples of strongly branded organizations to visit. Check the Web site of any company you are going to visit so you have a strong sense of what it is trying to do. Your field trip will be more instructive.

One strongly branded company is the Great Harvest Bread Company, and you can visit one of its many shops. Here's the Great Harvest Bread Company's mission statement: "Be loose and have fun. Bake phenomenal bread. Run fast to help customers. Create strong & exciting bakeries. And give generously to others."

If you are not near one of Great Harvest Bread's 140 locations across the United States, find another strong brand and take your staff on a field trip. Ask them to observe

• how and which staff behavior contributes to the brand experience

• the total experience and whether it is on-brand or not

• any off-brand experiences

At Great Harvest Bread, observe if Pete Wakeman, one of its founders, has done what he writes about the company's mission: "Recruit the nicest, most generous, most honest and authentic people we can find—who love learning for the plain fun of it, who see business as an excuse to play, and love all of life for the sheer thrill of a bumpy ride—and bring them together in a caring community which supports these entrepreneurial types to TRULY run their own thing, make their own mistakes, have their own successes, and be 100 percent themselves." ^[1]

^[1]Pete Wakeman at http://www.greatharvest.com.