FutureBrand news, views & insights: November 2021
Hello again! How are you?
It’s the first of the month, welcome back to this latest edition of our newsletter. As I write this, New South Wales has opened up and Victoria seems to be following suit. October’s Mental Health Month has just come to a close. And I daresay care and consideration for both our physical health and our mental wellbeing will now live much closer to the surface for all of us.
In light of all we’ve experienced over the past 18 months or so, ‘how are you?’ now seems to have reverted from a general salutation to a genuine question we ask people when we meet them.
It’s also the reason why we leapt at the opportunity to work with Innowell and help them make mental health care more open and accessible by reimagining their own brand strategy, identity and experience.
A change in business? A change in brand.
When explaining what we do at FutureBrand, I often say that a change in business means a change in brand, one things inevitably leads to the other.
This was exactly the case for the team at Innowell:
“In early 2021, we started planning a transition to become a commercial SaaS company, so we needed to evolve our brand to reflect that. It needed to bring together our purpose, our research-backed origins and our mission-driven future to open up mental health care for everyone." – Syed Ahmed, Chief Digital Officer
Having now relaunched as a digital mental health care platform following successful clinical trials, Innowell’s brand is in lockstep with the business and ready to open the way for more people to receive the mental health care they need, when they need it.
Follow these links to read the news coverage in the media and the case study on our website.
Naming a brand, how hard can it be?
Since our recent Q&A with Vibeke Stisen on the challenges of rebranding MCEC in the midst of the pandemic, I had the tables turned on me and this time it was Lisa Lintern from New Payments Platform asking the questions. Specifically, how did FutureBrand create the name PayTo?
You may well have heard me to talk about the possibilities and pitfalls of naming before now. On the one hand, I always say that if a picture can paint a thousand words, then a word can start a million stories. On the other, I still vividly recall coming to the close of one particular naming presentation many years ago and, having impressed upon the executive team in attendance the importance of a strategic framework and a disciplined process to enable naming success, the CEO then turned to his teenage son and started the feedback by asking him for his thoughts first.
Click this link to listen to NPP’s Soundbites podcast. I didn’t get to cover the dos and don’ts of inviting feedback from family members who happen to drop into the office for lunch, but we did talk about the transformation from Mandated Payments Service to PayTo and pull back the curtain on the process for anyone naming a business, product or service.
Objective happiness: Does consumerism purely come down to the feel-good factor?
I always love seeing the world through different people’s eyes and so I enjoyed reading our Emma’s perspective in her recent article for AdNews.
The editor was quite right to pull Emma’s pivotal question from the article into the headline and what follows is equally insightful – and I daresay, even prescient.
“Perhaps it's a way for consumers to gain some sense of control, when much of what's unfolding around us is beyond our control…Consumerism may be a temporary solution for which people reach in times of uncertainty, but to ensure long-term, sustainable growth, connection and relevance, we need more than that.”
Emma also draws on the data from FutureBrand Index, something that’s never far from our minds given that it’s a tool we regularly use in our work. In fact, I also had the opportunity to reveal some of the big highlights and key insights as part of this year’s Mumbrella 360 Shorts – feel free to watch if you’re interested in a 15-minute wrap-up of this year’s study.
Writing for CMO: strategies, tactics & tools for marketers
I’m enjoying my time as a contributing writer to CMO and my latest article covered the role, importance and value of employee engagement.
In case you missed it, I thought I might share it here…
Power to the people
Purpose is the ultimate statement of intent for many organisations. Why are we here? What are we trying to achieve?
For me, David Packard put it best when he described the nature of a company and its shared purpose: “A group of people get together and exist as an institution that we call a company so they are able to accomplish something collectively which they could not accomplish separately.”
What’s of fundamental importance is not necessarily to accomplish whatever higher goal has been set but rather to accomplish it together. Because it’s the shared sense of accomplishment that makes the vital difference in connecting employees to an organisation and to one another.
However, many organisations lose sight of their employees in the melee that can often accompany the articulation of their purpose. By not understanding that a purpose equates to not much more than some well-intentioned words if there is no meaningful employee engagement, those words fall flat and their goals go unfulfilled.
Creating a believable future that is understood and shared by employees is essential in order to successfully deliver your brand. Simply put, when employees believe in and are compelled to act to deliver the brand’s purpose, you’ll have a greater ability to deliver the brand experience.
Research studies have routinely provided the empirical evidence that businesses with strong brand perceptions attract more people to want to work for them. The FutureBrand Index is one such research study and it includes the underlying statistic that the top five companies that people want to ’work for’ are also five of the top six brands in the Index overall.
To put it another way, you can’t be a top-performing business if your own people don’t believe in your brand.
It’s a correlation echoed by Diane Gherson from her time as IBM’s Head of HR: “Employee engagement explains two-thirds of our client experience scores. And if we’re able to increase client satisfaction by five points, we see an extra 20% in revenue on average, so clearly there’s an impact. That’s the business case for change.”
That is indeed the business case not only for change management but also employee engagement: for connecting employees with your brand and therefore giving your business a measurable competitive advantage.
So why doesn’t it happen? The answer, more often than not, is simply because organisations and their employees do not want to change. And, by overlooking this simple yet fundamental fact, any chance of changing how employees connect with the brand for the better is ended before it’s begun.
Here are three approaches you can use to bridge the gap between your brand and your employees, the inertia of the present and the potential of the future.
1. Understand the needs, motivations and barriers
Tapping into employees’ needs and motivations can be a strong lever, but the barriers to change are often even stronger. Part of the challenge is inevitably acknowledging the change itself and the likelihood that the natural forces of inertia will likely create resistance or worse – and if you don’t understand what might be stopping employees from embracing the brand, then anything you do to push them harder might simply ossify that very hurdle you’re trying to overcome.
When you surface an organisation’s modus operandi or employees’ ways of working, then you not only identify where the brand fits within the organisation at a very practical level but you also create the conditions – or at least the conversations – for challenging those habits and exploring opportunities to better connect with the brand.
For example, this recent Harvard Business Review article highlights five reasons why employees might not understand the company’s vision and they each imply very different strategies for overcoming the resistance at work. A lack of communication, for example, requires a different approach from a change in the ‘altitude’ at which a brand’s purpose is set.
2. Identify the roles played by different groups of employees
Few brands are one-size-fits-all when it comes to how employees might get to grips with its implications for delivering the brand experience – whether they’re working front-of-house or behind-the-scenes, building the product or providing the service. Consequently, employee engagement programs need to offer something equally versatile.
The pivotal question I routinely get asked is where to start?
My answer is always to look for the ‘pivotal population’ and start there.
Every organisation seems to have one. In a retail business with a network of physical stores, it might be the store managers – if you have a good store manager, employees enjoy working there, customers like shopping there too. In a service-based business, it might be team leaders, one level up from the front line – few employees will ever call the CEO directly on seeing the new brand, but they will ask their line manager and that right there is the make-or-break moment for the brand.
Starting from these ‘pivotal populations’, you can then map the other segments of the employee population according to how they might drive or support the brand’s delivery, and how engaging them might be more hands-on or simply consultative.
3. Engage employees in delivering the brand experience
For employees to make a meaningful contribution to the brand experience, they need the right tools for the job.
For frontline employees, those tools might be brand experience principles to guide their actions and reactions, or brand language to help them communicate in a way that connects customers with the brand. I always joke the two most popular words in branding are lorem ipsum but language is the one brand tool that everyone in your organisation will use, knowingly or not.
Tools inevitably require training if you’re to use them to their full effect. Branding tools are no different if you’re to engage and equip your own employees. By doing so, you will give power to the very people who will ultimately turn your brand’s purpose from something written in PowerPoint to a powerful experience that lives and breathes in practice.
Last but not least, drumroll please…
If you’re still reading this far down, then I can safely assume you’re a supporter of ours – thank you! In which case, it’s also probably safe to assume that you won’t mind a quick mention that we’ve been shortlisted together with our clients Guide Dogs Australia, Macquarie Group and MCEC for 9 Transform Awards across 7 different categories including Best Brand Evolution, Best Creative Strategy and Best Visual Identity for NFP, Finance and Travel & Leisure.
We’re all very happy for the recognition and excited for the awards ceremony in December when the winners will be announced.
As ever, thank you to all our clients for being such great thinkers and doers, collaborators and decision-makers and, ultimately, partners.
That’s it for this month! Hope you enjoyed reading and found some useful insights for own brands. Please subscribe, comment and share – and, as ever, happy to hear all and any feedback.