Chapter 4: Defining Your Brand DNA


Whether or not you have taken the time to formulate your brand, your organization, your service, and your products are still a brand. Your brand may not be on Interbrand's one hundred most valuable brands list; nonetheless, your brand is what consumers and staff think about you. Your choice is whether to take control of shaping your brand's destiny or to let consumers and your staff haphazardly define your brand. If customers define your brand, they will do so in large part based upon their experiences, influenced by employees who have no clear idea about the brand they represent.

What is Your Brand DNA

Defining brand DNA, the unique components of a brand, is key to beginning the process of consistently delivering on-brand service. This is a concept that most organizations struggle to understand, at least outside the marketing department. Many management teams have become conditioned to looking for the next quick fix solution that can be bolted onto their existing business infrastructures. While we were recently discussing branded customer service with a group of HR professionals and trainers, they simply said, "Show us the training program." This mind-set is undoubtedly one of the major reasons so many service-related initiatives fail to deliver any real competitive edge.

Clayton Christensen and Michael Raynor highlighted this problem in their book, The Innovators Solution. [1] They use the analogy of man's early attempts in aviation, where researchers observed the correlation between birds, which have wings and feathers, and their ability to fly. Yet when man followed these apparent "best practices," the results were an unmitigated disaster.

If your requirement is to improve the level of generic skills, then a shrink-wrapped solution may suffice. But if it is about branding, about creating a point of true differentiation and distinctiveness, there is no one size that fits all. Branding is not something that you can copy from another company, no matter how successful it has been. We have heard many companies refer to their "internal brand," when all they mean is a stylized logo, color palette, and communication template developed for internal communications. Only by understanding the underlying processes that drive the relationship between brands and people can companies achieve successful alignment to customer service.

The underlying process of defining the space your brand occupies involves

  • establishing a justification for the value of the brand and a picture of the brand's future aspirations

  • defining how the brand's promises and differentiators are to be delivered

  • clarifying how the brand is to be seen in the marketplace and establishing its personality in relationship to the organization's business ideas, staff capabilities, and customer needs

Figure 3, while not exhaustive, shows critical components that should be considered.

click to expand
Figure 3: The DNA components of brand space

Brand professionals look at these components from a marketing perspective. Those who are interested in branding their customer service must look at each component as it relates to service delivery.

In defining brand DNA most comprehensively, brand strategists will undertake extensive research of various customer groups segmented by both demographic and psychological needs. They will peel back the layers in search of the underlying motivations and drivers of these groups. They will test the various competitor offerings to better understand what is working for consumers and what is not. Ideally, they will also analyze the internal culture to define what its unique characteristics are, what makes it special. Finally, they will analyze where the industry is heading in terms of its product and service offerings. All this will then be distilled to determine a core brand proposition supported by underlying brand values. Done well, this brand architecture will provide the basis for a deliverable and compelling point of differentiation.

Like Southwest did in its early years, many companies fast-track this process and intuit much of the proposition themselves, at least as a starting point. Certainly, history suggests that success, and indeed failure, can result from a range of methodologies. However, that has as much to do with the fact that success is dependent upon actual execution of the brand strategy as it does with defining it. Your "big idea" can be the most compelling and interesting concept imaginable, but if you fail to inculcate it across all the various customer touch points, it will not resonate with customers.

[1]Clayton M. Christensen and Michael E. Raynor, The Innovator's Solution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Business School Press, 2003), 15.




Branded Customer Service(c) The New Competitive Edge
Branded Customer Service: The New Competitive Edge
ISBN: 1576752984
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2006
Pages: 134

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