Brand integrity isn’t just about doing good. It’s about doing good in a way that multiplies your company’s value.
Clients often ask what the ROI on brand work is, and my answer to that is simply: if you’re doing true brand strategy work, ROI is the wrong financial metric. It’s not nearly ambitious enough. Brand strategy helps you to clarify, articulate, and focus your entire organization around purpose, and then brand integrity insists that purpose shine through in everything you do. And a purpose-driven brand that delivers goodness to the market is the best way to ensure you’re sustainable for the long-haul. It’s why business schools have long had a track on brand strategy and positioning – because you need it to maximize your company’s value.
The invention of brand and brand strategy is about creating efficiencies that reduce costs both internally and in outbound marketing and sales. Delivering an integrated, high-integrity brand is the best way you can generate long term business value that is a multiple of your revenue, not just incremental.
How can brand create a net multiplier effect?
- You’ll be able to command a price premium.
- You’ll be able to incrementally increase the return on investment made in your sales and marketing channels, driving higher volume at a lower cost.
- You’ll be able to lower the cost of doing business over time by retaining employees, retaining customers (which is far less expensive than constantly finding new customers).
- With an empowered workforce that is all operating from the same purpose, you’ll be able to decentralize decision-making so that your business can be more agile and responsive to the market and customer needs without wasting a lot of time and money.
- You’ll be able to introduce new products with greater ease, and with a reduced cost to cross-sell.
- You’ll create a new marketing channel through your loyal customers and employees who spread word-of-mouth accolades that garner, for free, new customers.
- You’ll have a protective barrier should crisis occur, a competitor appears, or the market shifts, because your loyal base will be emotionally tied to your products in a way that will take longer to disintermediate, buying you time to address and “fix” what’s needed before customer attrition occurs.
- Your meaning – as defined by the purposeful goodness you resolve in the lives of your customers and in the world - will be more than what you make, thus making you able to pivot and weather change with more forgiveness and with greater latitude from your employees and customers.
To achieve the net multiplier effect, you can think of your investment in brand in two buckets:
1. Creating and evangelizing Purpose
This is about defining the core elements of your positioning and your purpose, and then ensuring everyone in your organization and buying or using your offerings knows what that purpose is.
2. Follow-through on your Purpose
This is about operationalizing your purpose through all aspects of your organization – from your supply chain to your hiring practices, to your customer service experience as well as in the innovation and products you develop and sales and marketing materials you produce.
Ready to identify gaps between internal and external audiences and develop an action plan to generate alignment? Contact Northbound by clicking below to learn how a Brand Integrity Map can benefit your organization.
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