Brand Is Culture, Culture Is Brand

Article taken from: http://blogs.hbr.org/taylor/2010/09/brand_is_culture_culture_is_br.html

Brand Is Culture, Culture Is Brand

8:33 AM Monday September 27, 2010


Two weeks ago, I spoke to a conference of marketing executives organized by the American Bankers Association. The talk among these bank marketers — a young, energetic, change-minded bunch — ranged from the needs and interests of Generation Y to the power of social media to the design of new products for new times.



My message to the group was much simpler than all that, almost a throwback. You can't really think about your bank's customers, I argued, unless you also think about your bank's people. Even the most creative business leaders I know recognize that success is not just about marketing differently from other companies: more daring ads, more new products, more aggressive use of Twitter and Facebook. It is also, and perhaps more important, about caring more than other companies — about customers, about colleagues, about how the organization conducts itself in a world with endless opportunities to cut corners and compromise on values.


That's what helps you stand out among your customers, and stand out from the crowd in a hyper-competitive marketplace. The new "power couple" inside the best companies, I concluded, was an iron-clad partnership between marketing leadership and HR leadership. Your brand is your culture, your culture is your brand.


So imagine my surprise when right after my talk, a banker by the name of Jana Dobbs, an executive with Corner Bank, a 138-year-old outfit based in Winfield, Kansas, shook my hand and handed me her business card. "Take a look at my title," she said with a Cheshire-cat grin. Jana's title, it turns out, is senior vice president of human resources and marketing. Forget a "partnership" between HR and marketing. At Corner Bank, the two functions report to the same executive. It's a title I'd never seen before, and I asked Jana how her fellow bankers tended to react to it. "They're usually kind of shocked," she admitted, "because at most companies the head of marketing and the head of HR have very different personalities."


Corner Bank has a great brand position in the Kansas cities and towns in which it operates — as an advocate for the little guy in an industry dominated by giants. That means the day-to-day interactions between customers and front-line employees are a huge part of the bank's brand identity. "Our people are our best marketing tool," Jana explained. "Advertising is important, the design of the website is important, but if customers have a positive experience every time they come into the bank, that's what builds our reputation. We've got mobile apps, we've got Internet banking, but what we rely on is a hometown feeling. When you walk into our bank, we know your name."


That's certainly a winning value proposition for a small, family-owned financial institution. But it works for major organizations too. One big company that embraces the connection between brand and culture is USAA, the insurance and financial-services juggernaut based in San Antonio, Texas. It's a huge, successful operation with 7.4 million members, 21,000 employees, and annual revenues of $18 billion. What most distinguishes USAA, though, is that it only does business with active or retired members of the U.S. military and their families. That's the customer base it serves — and it serves those customers fabulously well. Its customer-loyalty rankings are off the charts and it has become a legendary brand, both in terms of technology innovation and service.


One reason for its strong performance as a brand is the strong sense of identification between its front-line employees and its customers. USAA does business almost exclusively over the phone and the Internet, and it has more than 13,000 customers-service reps. The company has a much-admired training program in which employees learn the myriad technical skills they need to work efficiently. But what they really learn is to empathize with and see the world through the eyes of a soldier on active duty in Afghanistan who needs to wire money to a sick parent, the wife of a soldier in Iraq who needs to finance a car, and all of the other unique pressures and demands on its 7.4 million members.


How do employees develop that sense of empathy? A BusinessWeek feature tells the story well. When they are about to start their training, employees review "deployment letters" that real soldiers get: "Report to the personnel processing-facility" tomorrow, the letter reads, and get your affairs in order beforehand. They eat MREs (meals ready to eat) on many occasions during their training, to get a "taste" for the life of a soldier. They walk around in 65-pound backpacks. They read actual letters from soldiers in the field to their families back home. USAA calls it "Surround Sound" — immerse employees in the real life and emotional needs of customers. "There is nobody on this earth who understands their customer better than USAA," one consultant has said.


That kind of personal identification between employees and customers is what gives USAA the drive to not just provide great service but to unleash big innovations. For example, it was the first financial-services company to allow customers to deposit checks by iPhone. You get a paper check, you take a photo with your iPhone, and email it to the bank. It was the first financial-services company to allow you to check deposit balances via text message. You text your account number and get a return text with the relevant information. USAA has proven itself to be a technology leader — not because the company is obsessed with technology, but because it is obsessed with customers.


The simple lesson behind the success of both small-fry Corner Bank and big-boy USAA: You can't be special, distinctive, and compelling in the marketplace unless you create something special, distinctive, and compelling in the workplace. How does your brand shape your culture? How does your culture bring your brand to life?


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Win-Loss Studies and Four Sequential Steps to Synchronize Sales & Marketing

Extract taken from:
http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2010/09/why_sales_and_marketing_are_at.html

Struggling companies all share something in common. Their sales and marketing efforts are at odds. Sometimes, they are even at war. The marketing team lectures the sales department, saying that if only the salespeople would follow their advice, their problems would be solved. Meanwhile, the sales department always says it needs something else from marketing. The salespeople are clamoring for the silver bullet that will convince the most ardent skeptic to buy.



The root cause of this situation is that sales and marketing have different views of the world. To the marketing department, selling is a series of steps that you guide a prospect through. These steps are based on the logic of purchasing the product, and the marketing team's job is to provide the tools to move the prospect to the next step.


Meanwhile, salespeople must work with the unpredictable part of the process: people. Their job is to formulate an account strategy based upon the people to whom they are trying to sell. They need intuition about what to do and say in a particular competitive situation.


As a result, friction between the two areas develops. Salespeople feel they must translate what they see as marketing's theoretical arguments into a practical message, while the marketing team often believes the salespeople themselves are the problem because they are not following their product positioning. Having analyzed hundreds of sales cycles and conducted thousands of interviews as part of the win-loss studies I have performed on behalf of my Fortune 1000 clients, here are four sequential steps to define the intuition that sales needs so sales and marketing are synchronized.


Step 1: Identify Customer Decision-Making Politics


The premise of most marketing departments is that the customer is purely a rational decision maker. Therefore, the best product should naturally win and they believe their product is always the best. However, prospective customers have personal biases and are influenced by organizational politics and the personalities involved in group decision making.


The first step is to understand the people involved in the sale. Analyze at least thirty recent key sales cycles (consisting of an equal number of won and lost accounts) and map out all of the people who were involved. List their titles and roles in the organization, and hypothesize about the selfish interests that motivate them to buy.


Step 2: Determine Sales Cycle Turning Points


Every deal has a critical moment or turning point that determines the winner and the losers. In some cases, the turning point is easy to spot. For example, while a salesperson is presenting his solution, he encounters a deal-breaking objection that he is unable to overcome. Even though the customer remains cordial for the rest of the meeting, a turning point has occurred and the deal is lost. Recognizing when and why you lost momentum during the sales process is necessary to keep it from happening again in the next account. List the turning points for each of the sales cycles analyzed in the first step.


Step 3: Conduct a True Win-Loss Analysis


Win-loss analysis is very important, but unfortunately, it's a lost art. True win-loss analysis based upon extensive customer interviewing is the best way to understand customer behavior during the selection process. The goal is to have customers comment on the company, selection process, competition and give their perceptions of the sales cycle experience and product opinions. They should also be solicited for their advice and recommendations.


Step 4: Perform a Marketing Tools Audit


The final step is to amalgamate the data from the steps above in order to perform a marketing tools audit. Summarize important qualitative information about the political, organizational, and technical aspects of customer decision making into common themes. Then make a comparison to find where gaps exist between the tools marketing provides (customer success stories, product demonstrations, competitive comparisons, analyst reports, etc.) and the materials needed to counteract business or technical objections and overcome key deal-stopping turning points. After the audit is completed, sales and marketing leadership should then define the nature of their relationship and how they will interact in the future (see this excellent HBR article for more insight on this).


Closing Thoughts


The ongoing conflict between sales and marketing is the "elephant" in the room at many companies. No one wants to talk about the problem until it becomes so disruptive that it must be dealt with. By following these four steps, the divergent viewpoints between sales and marketing can finally be aligned.


Steve W. Martin teaches sales strategy at the USC Marshall School of Business. His latest book on sales neurolinguistics, Heavy Hitter Sales Psychology, is based on his successful 20-year sales career.

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