In 2 weeks time, I'm looking forward to the new experience of talking about branding to the Ukraine's primary professional association

In the 30 countries, where I have talked about brand leadership, I have always found countries that are new to me most exhilarating and often most humanly inquisitive.

If you have any ideas on what I should be emphasising most in the Ukraine, do drop me a line. Meanwhile, this is the short conference preview I drafted.

Brand Trust & Value Multiplication

After 25 years working on company brands in over 30 countries, value and trust are two very important words for me.

I believe marketing people and leaders should be aiming to multiply value for everyone they communicate with. An organisation’s people should connect their knowledge and activities to earn the trust communally across everyone they serve.

All of these should be connected through every discipline and professional expertise which helps to make organisations human : Inside (all across employees), Outside (all across customers) , and through Leadership (investments and other big organisational decisions made which govern culture, values, purpose). The whole system should evolve so that everyone is maximising the use of their time. This should be directed in a way that enjoys openly addressing the essential question of branding: what would different uniquely people miss if our brand ceased to exist tomorrow?

Branding has a duty to earn trust over time by keeping its promises and being valued because it produces its offers at a good of mix of high quality, low cost, and communal participation of all involved.

Increasingly we need to understand such changing contexts of marketing as:
More than advertising a product
>To>
Providing a great service in which both employees and customers need to win-win from the human exchanges delivered
>To>
Knowledge markets where a customer actually wants to multiply value through the brand offered.

Traditionally many brand books were written by Americans and by advertising agencies. They may suggest that advertising is the most important activity of brand leadership. I disagree. What matters most varies by context but unless the whole organisation feels that they openly participate in making the brand more and more valuable for everyone, then the company’s whole investment in branding is becoming wasteful. And once that happens, many conflicts can multiply all across the organisation until it quickly runs out of trust. Andersen, and many other case studies in recent years, have shown that if a brand runs out of trust, that is even more deadly to a company’s life than running out of cash.

Branding is like a big living jigsaw puzzle and the more ways you can enjoy of looking transparently through these connections the better your brand should be.
My talk will look at 3 main triangles of value multiplying a brand’s trust that I have written about and practised over the last 15 years:

Brand Architecture: connect the company brand, and global and local

Living the Brand Charter: connect the brand outside and inside, and with leadership

The Nature of Value Multiplication: connect openness of knowledge-sharing, and win-win demands by different stakeholders, and the way a company involves all people in auditing brand trust and preventing risks.

Chris Macrae, London, 1 October 2003
Co-Chair Chief Brand Officer Association
posted by ..., 11:36 AM  permalink