"CEOs Must Manage Brands for Value"

One key model we use to describe the power of brands started with a Fortune 50 client’s desire for her brand. "To be like a halo, an aura of positive feeling and receptivity that would buoy our offerings in the marketplace."

It’s little wonder she saw it like that. The ‘brand halo’ metaphor embraces all the positive benefits one would associate with goodwill and positive recognition: customer loyalty (and a lower cost of sales); permission to make mistakes (and retain credibility until rollout); perceived "ownership" of a specific position in the marketplace (and the attendant barrier to entry by competitors); compelling personality attributes (and the perceived added-value that enhances pricing flexibility).

These attractive benefits are enough to warrant a concerted effort to harness them. And, over the years, successful, large companies have acknowledged this with more than lip service, and sometimes even with a fully developed brand management program aimed at leveraging the brand as a marketing asset.

But what is remarkable, given the stakes, is that too many CEOs, unless they came up through marketing ranks, still manage their brand(s) at arms length, failing to understand either the breadth of returns on brand investment or the present-day tools available to measure brand value.

Investments in brand specialists, processes and systems are poised to return a bonanza to the corporation. The winning companies of tomorrow will take that brand discipline they have honed for marketing advantage and apply it to the two other corporate realms that are a current preoccupation for most CEOs: employee relations and stock price.

Moreover, competitive forces are demanding even more effective brand management in its traditional arena: the marketplace of goods and services. Why now? Because of the new investor, and the new competition.

First, perhaps the newest, most compelling reason why the CEO will attend to the brand is that it is the most potent, direct, emotional link to the individual investor. And today, the individual investor is a powerful force in the stock market. Those millions of consumers of product are evolving into consumers of stocks. With voracious appetites. The brand of product that has a broad enough halo will put a glow on the stock, too. Now consumers can extend their brand experience by purchasing shares in its very future.

Second, a recent survey of corporate leaders shows employee dislocations as a primary headache for CEOs. They are plagued by the layoffs and by the retraining and morale-building and redirection that must happen at a very human level once their companies have been merged or acquired. The brand and its personality-halo is a flag around which to rally the spirit and behavior of employees.

Third, the pressing need to differentiate in the marketplace cries for the attention of top management. The threat of commoditization has taken on immense proportions in a global economy: nano-technology cycles and broad access to capital have heightened performance standards and created stunning opportunities for new upstarts with the flexibility to play by new rules.

How? Evolve the management science. The corporate brand is moving four-square into the top executive suite and – through the stock market – the Board Room. But brand management is only beginning to work its way into management science. "Branding" has only recently entered into common parlance in the executive ranks, but is still a subject confused with each of the fragmented disciplines that contribute to it.

Going the next step and extending the brand halo into the market for the company’s shares and into the realm of internal behavior change will be evolutionary and iterative. It will grow from, among other sources, practices of the current brand management team. In any case, two primary dictates from the marketing arena will continue to apply:

1. Position the brand for inspiration deeply into constituents’ personal values. Many today would argue into "higher, soulful, values."

2. Deliver on that promise by calibrating the expectations that the brand positioning creates with the milestones of corporate behavior that will mark credible delivery of the message.

Today’s brand managers and their intellectual capital will be the catalyst, the jumping off point, for more effective management of the investment markets as the brand halos brighten the caverns of Wall Street.

Copyrighted 1998 ASM Communications Inc.
Used with permission