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Without A People Strategy, The Power Of A Brand Dies

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This is a collection of additional insights from industry leaders to Part 4 of an eight-part series featuring conversations from the Leadership in the Age of Personalization Summit

It’s amazing how timely and timeless the discussion around leadership in the age of personalization is.

In 2014, I wrote a Forbes article titled, 6 Brand Strategies Most CMOs Fail To Execute. With 242,000+ views and counting, I’ve often wondered why this article has had so much appeal, beyond its catchy title. So after sharing it with a few chief marketing officers, they told me that what I stated in the second paragraph applies today more than ever before:

  • Customers want to identify with a brand they can grow with, that earns their trust and makes them feel valued. People want to evolve with a brand whose products and services help give their business or life meaning and significance. End to end, a brand must become a consumer’s best friend.

Little did I know five years ago, that I was talking about how brands must be inclusive of your customers personalized values. If you re-read the statement above closely, it’s the same thing that leaders should be doing with their own employees. In fact, here is the employee version of that statement:

  • Employees want to identify with a leader they can grow with, that earns their trust and makes them feel valued. Employees want to evolve with a leader whose values and beliefs help give their careers or life meaning and significance. End to end, a leader must treat employees like family.

This is a simple example to show that Leadership in the Age of Personalization is an enterprise strategy for growth, both in the workplace and marketplace. It touches everything we do in our business. Because our businesses impact and influence everyone (at some level) on a personal level.

In our age of personalization, we want to invigorate our shared mission by elevating individual contribution. So I have invited leaders across industries to expand the conversation beyond the summit itself by providing additional reflections throughout this series of articles.

Here are a series of reactions and insights from industry leaders regarding Part 4, Allow Personalized Values To Influence Your Brand Identity:

Mike Martel, Senior Director, Rx Product Flow & Redistribution, CVS Health

Jochen Koedijk said the following about overseeing a brand transformation at ADT anchored around building an identity around what they call “ubiquitous safety”:

  • “The thought behind it is that every single person has unique things they care about. And every single person wants to keep those things safe. Things, ideas, everything.”

Ronalee Zarate-Bayani said the following about the Los Angeles Rams move back to LA (from St. Louis) and reestablishing a relationship with fans:

  • “It was important for us to make sure that as we built our identity going forward that we captured the essence of who we were, who we are, and then marry that with who we want to be and what we want to represent.”

Just imagine if we spent as much time and effort on our employees as our customers. Organizations would have a better overall product that would sustain the company long term. In this new age of leadership in the age of personalization, the number one item of importance for employees is to have a safe work environment where no one is judged. It is no longer engagement. This new generational workforce seeks purpose, fulfillment and identity.

Jim FitzPatrick, Director, UPS

Jochen Koedijk reminds us that building relationships and generating trust is about creating emotional connections by personalizing the expectations with people. The question, “What do you want to protect?” seems simple but this approach frames the narrative, elevates the brand’s accountability to the customer and makes the brand-customer relationship more intimate.

We need this same level of investment that brands have with customers with leaders and their employees. 

Glenn Llopis

Employees and customers are one and the same in the age of personalization. This is one of the reasons why the individual is influencing the business more and more each day – because people no longer believe that the business knows what’s in the best interest of the individual.

For example, employees are tired of hearing that “talent is an organization’s most valuable asset.” If this were true, organizations would invest in a more comprehensive and robust people strategy. A strategy that would allow everyone in an organization to know their colleagues as individuals and discover how they can best contribute. Much like a brand strategy that focuses on getting to know customers’ unique lifestyle needs so they can strengthen the brand’s value proposition to generate more sales and a more intimate relationship with their customers.   

So why don’t they? In the age of standardization, it was about brand over people – because the brand defined the individual. Now that we’re in the age of personalization, it’s about individual identities (of both employees and customers) defining the brand. If you don’t invest in people, you are leaving the full potential of the brand’s future behind.

Shabnam Vaziri-Sadri, Organization & Talent Development Director, Equity Residential

Glorifying an organization’s brand and dismissing one’s personalized values makes the brand inauthentic. It also forces individuals to fit and assimilate into this inauthentic narrative. This elevates the overall employee engagement risk profile.

It is as if the person is “a drop” and the organization is “the ocean.” The idea may have been luring in the past when the masses were more homogeneous and “individual identities” mattered less. After all, why be a drop, if you can be an ocean?

When the world became flat (to use Thomas Friedman’s terminology), individuals found equal access to information and to each other. The “I” rose, and the “Me” distinguished itself from the “We.”

For today’s organizations, it is a fatal mistake to ignore personalized values. The company brand and the personal identity are not mutually exclusive, just as a person’s last name and first name go together. Having a last name to relate to and be proud of, does not prevent us from having a first name we identify with. To be successful, branding efforts need to be aligned with the principles of inclusion, giving voice and recognition to the individual that we are asking to be loyal to our brand.

Llopis

Brands quickly fall into the standardization traps every time an organization believes that its brand is more powerful than the individual it serves. We know this is true today because the individual is now in charge and brands are having trouble with this shift in the balance of power. 

For example, I was recently interviewed by a prominent fashion magazine and the reporter asked, “What is the difference between an authentic understanding of diversity and merely implying diversity in brand marketing campaigns?  

My response:

The focus on diversity is important, but it’s a short-lived brand strategy. Brands that try to increase the representation of more diverse people without also focusing on inclusion will fail at both. Racially ethnic consumers are naturally skeptical (I know this, as a Cuban-American). If a brand focuses more on protecting themselves than the customers they are trying to earn trust from, the brand loses, and the balance of power continues to shift as the personalized values of those individuals are ignored. This is when brands quickly become inauthentic and they lose their value and become another commodity.

If you don’t believe this, take the time to examine, year-to-year, the top 100 brands in the world. You will see that the rankings constantly change. Legacy brands that were born in the age of standardization and continue to practice outdated standards drop or disappear from the rankings, while new emerging brands that were born in the age of personalization and respect one’s personalized values take over.   

As you reflect upon ways to integrate personalized values to evolve and grow your brand in today’s age of personalization – ask yourself, your team, and your organization the following questions:

  • Where do you see outdated standards in your industry and/or area of functional expertise now being influenced by personalization? What do you believe are the most evident areas of opportunity?
  • Why do organizations continuously find themselves stuck in the traps of standardization? Why are leaders having difficulty respecting the need to embrace today’s age of personalization? Why do you believe this is a vicious cycle? How can organizations and their leaders start to find the right balance between standardization and personalization?

Take a moment to discuss with your leaders, employees and the customers you serve to explore and address these questions. As you do, you will begin to see the power of accounting for personalized values in your brand strategy. You’ll see what others don’t, do what others won’t, and keep pushing when prudence says quit.

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