Successful digital transformation for a business requires embracing transparency, collaboration, accountability and intimacy — but if the corporate brand doesn’t support and encourage it, and if the brand isn’t used as a lever to impact culture, the likelihood that investments in new technologies will be met with slow adoption rates, or worse, resistance altogether, is high.
But with change happening as fast as it does, how do you know if your brand is transformation-ready? We’ve identified five key indicators, as part of our extensive research amongst leading Scandinavian companies, to help you gauge your brand’s readiness.
Five signs that your brand is transformation-ready:
- Your brand foundation fits the new market reality
To empower the digital business, your brand must embrace its most powerful attributes: transparency, collaboration, accountability and intimacy. But what does that entail exactly?
A brand that embraces transparency is open, truthful and sharing. It doesn’t seek to control the information and knowledge that its stakeholders receive as much as it tries to curate and influence it. This principle guides the brand’s presence across digital and physical platforms, internal as well as external. Transparency is a powerful concept that leads to new value creation opportunities when combined with collaboration (when a brand enables and encourages teamwork, participation and partnership), accountability (when a brand values responsiveness and responsibility) and intimacy (the strength of the emotional bond between the brand and its stakeholders).
A large B2B industrial company with more than 40,000 employees that we spoke to as part of our digital transformation research has made transparency a core pillar of its transformation approach. By pairing transparency with a corporate brand anchored in fairness, respect, honesty and empathy, the company has succeeded in breaking down global silos and minimizing hierarchies. The intranet plays a key role in this process, serving as an information hub for its employees around the globe by sharing company learnings and data, hosting an idea exchange and posting current job opportunities — with the brand always serving as the bearing element.
Other companies, both large and small, had equally-interesting experiences and results obtained through the open sharing of key business indicators, e.g., sales performance, customer metrics, campaign performance, etc.
The reason the brand plays such a vital role as the proponent of transparency and the other seemingly universally-attractive and defining digital attributes is that they are in fact making us uncomfortable, as they represent a different way of doing business. We aren’t really sure that we like and value them, and not sure that we want to take the time to learn how to embrace them. That’s why the brand is necessary — it’s the single-most effective asset the company has to effectively explain why transparency, collaboration, accountability and intimacy is relevant to employees, customers and other key stakeholders.
- Your brand is an unequivocal North Star and
master storyteller
The new market reality requires that your brand foundation be both crystal clear and compelling enough to tell a multifaceted story. Digital Transparency has brought about an overload of impressions and messages. If your brand foundation is not robust and understandable, the communications that stem from it will invariably get lost, as employees, brand managers, the media, bloggers and other external parties will deliver their own version and shape an uncontrollable story. If it’s not relevant and versatile, it will not be able to cut through to its target audiences and make them take note of its messages. The transformation-ready brand, therefore, needs to be a master storyteller that combines stakeholder insights, be they from employees or customers, with a powerful core to reach, affect and impact its targets. It’s a new type of challenge that doesn’t require a brand manual, but a brand tool box.
A brand tool box contains a combination of firm and flexible brand assets that form the essential foundation of the corporate brand story. Having a brand tool box enables the organization, and specifically its brand managers, to convincingly expand and deliver the brand’s story in myriad situations and to a variety of audiences.
GE has always had innovation at the core of its brand, but after over 120 years, the company realized it needed to reimagine how and where it applies that innovation in order to thrive in a digital economy. “If GE is truly going to be a digital-industrial company, we can’t be separate here,” William Ruh said of his software division. “Digital tools and habits need to be embedded in how people do their jobs”.
To transform, GE knew that it had to tell a new brand story, one that would help it focus its communications around being a “digital industrial” business. It also knew that to engage its 300,000 employees, the brand stories needed to tap into more emotions than a sales pitch, value proposition, or list of features and deliverables ever could. The storytelling began at the corporate level and cascaded down to the businesses and industries, leveraging multiple forms of content and efforts, such as unexpected video campaigns, unconventional podcasts, intriguing research missions and engaging competitions, as well as the more customary industry marketing narratives, white papers, case studies, and brochures.
- Your corporate brand masters flexibility
Multifaceted storytelling requires flexibility at both a strategic and tactical level, which is now made possible by sophisticated digital platforms. MBLM’s brand management software “Brand OS,” which has been specifically built to enable brand flexibility, is one such example. One of its key feature is its dynamic marketing database and production center that enables company employees to create their own ads, campaigns or other marketing material by leveraging a library of pre-selected templates, images and messaging. The platform has the capability to inform the user of an image’s past performance and is constantly updated to ensure timeliness and relevance, which is especially important when addressing the needs of today’s “insta” society. In this manner, the user can independently generate locally-relevant campaigns while contributing to the overall corporate story.
A construction company that we spoke to as part of our research shared how developing a tailored intranet for its almost 50,000 employees across the world has unearthed a global mindset that’s sparking new forms of company-wide collaboration. The success of the intranet is a result of a dedicated effort to measure and gain insight into employee usage patterns and a refined corporate brand that has adapted its value to meet the new reality of
its employees and customers.
Flexibility is an excellent tool for global and fast-growing companies that need effective methods to on-board new employees, integrate acquired companies and consistently tell an effective and engaging story.
- It embraces social media and platforms
Needless to say, the transformation-ready corporate brand is present and active across internal and external social platforms, and, most importantly, knows how to create value from its interactions. In addition to the obvious ways in which social media and digital platforms generate value, such as increased insight into both customers and employees and the ability to deliver tailored campaigns, companies are learning to cross-leverage employee activity on internal platforms to build reach and momentum on external platforms. This is one area where corporate communications may find a sweet spot as they learn to identify, curate and influence the dispersion of popular intranet stories with external value.
Maersk impressed the world by using Facebook and Twitter to garner greater insight into its followers and create intimacy between them and the brand by broadcasting stories, images and video of key personnel, such as its ships’ captains, carrying out their daily duties. What distinguishes Maersk is that it not only connects with its audiences with tactics like these, but the company also generates real business opportunities and new leads through its social media activity. By visualizing key services such as “anti-freeze” and tying this to both a white paper and an offering, it has successfully brought in new leads from a difficult-to-target category. In 2016, Maersk deployed a live Twitter feed during a customer event to reach customers and prospects unable to attend, another tactic the company successfully utilized to create actual new business opportunities.
- It champions the organization
The last and most difficult criteria is that the transformation-ready brand makes its impact felt throughout the organization. While many companies may succeed with points 1–4, number 5 requires much more effort. To enable the corporate brand to influence the organization and lead a transformational mindset, the branding department must collaborate with Corporate Communications, Human Resources, IT, R&D and Sales to find ways to integrate their data and insight. This is one of the most effective ways to truly overcome the huge cultural divide between digital natives and digital novices that digitalization has brought upon many companies.
To be a proponent of change, the brand needs to not only tell a good story, but deliver proof that the change is worth it to the individual, team and management. Essentially, this means finding ways to correlate brand and digital engagement data with company performance.
During our research we spoke with a global consumer company with almost 60,000 employees that has taken some initial steps in this direction by correlating line managers’ behavior on internal digital platforms with external indicators such as sales and customer satisfaction measures. With the initial data indicating a positive trend, the focus is now on finding a model that can be replicated and rolled out across its complex organization.
Ensuring that your brand is transformation-ready
From our client experience and research into digital transformation, we’ve learned that the important part of creating a transformation-ready brand is less about ticking all the boxes, and more about starting to apply some of the main ideas. Thus, the key priority for any CMO, SVP Communications or Head of Global Brand is to create a roadmap for how the brand can add value within the organization.
Using the five indicators above as brand checkpoints, the following should be considered:
- Does your brand embrace the digital attributes of Transparency, Collaboration, Intimacy and Accountability? How well does it do this and to what extent?
- Is your brand an unequivocal North Star for your company — or does its foundation require revision?
- How good are you at storytelling? Do you have the tools to respond quickly with tailored, on-brand answers?
- Is your brand flexible enough to reach both global and local audiences? Can your brand handle the transparency this entails?
- Is your brand social in a way that’s meaningful and adds value?
- Do your social media activities create measurable engagement and/or lead to new business opportunities?
- Does your brand champion the organization?
Based on your brand’s performance across these indicators, you will be able to define a clear and structured roadmap for how to increase its influence and ability to add value — helping your organization become more digital faster.
