JOURNAL

OF

March/April 2003

Volume 24 / Number 2

BUSINESS
STRATEGY

SPECIAL FOCUS

The Magazine for the Corporate Strategist

HOW STRONG BRANDS

GET ON INTENT

AND STAY THERE

Jennifer Barron
Make sure your brand
isnt making promises
it cant keep.

A BRAND IS NOTHING MOREOR LESSTHAN PEOPLES

perceptions about a product or company. The closer those perceptions are
to what the company intends them to be, the stronger the brand. And
because strong brands deliver strong top-line growth, customer loyalty, and
shareholder value, every company needs to ensure that customers perceive its brands in the way the company intends.
Without astute, active management, brand intent will not translate to
what might be called the customer experiencethe thoughts and feelings surrounding people as they observe, learn about, purchase, and use a
companys product or service. Many companies, though, do an anemic job
of executing on brand intent, not because they dont care, or dont realize
the value of a strong brand. Rather, most organizations, especially large
ones, havent recognized or overcome the subtle barriers that impede their
ability to build a strong, on-intent brand.
Reprinted with permission. Copyright 2003 Thomson Media

Common Missteps
Make a promise that you can keep, and then keep it. It
sounds so obvious and so easy. Yet more companies seem
to miss this mark than hit it. They fail because they make
one or more common mistakes:
1. Ad campaigns precede or ignore brand intent.
Too often, a company building or repositioning a brand
skips to redesigning its corporate identity with a new logo
and new color scheme, or to introducing an advertising
campaign with a new tag line, before it articulates brand
intent. Or it advertises a brand promise it is unable to fulfill.
Advertising and corporate identity need to emerge from
a brand; they cant define the intent. If an organization
cant or wont live up to the promises it makes to its customers, advertising cannot make things better. In fact,
advertising will only shed a painfully bright light on the gap
between promise and performance.
The folly of thinking that advertising can build a brand
was shown vividly in 2001, when dot-com companies bid
Super Bowl advertising prices up to record levels. Few of
the commercials articulated the sponsors brand intent.
For the most part, the ads were clever, but they had no
point, and the next morning, viewers remembered the ads,
but not who had sponsored them, or why.
United Air Lines suffered from dissonance between its
advertising and its brand intent delivery. In 1997 it
launched its United Rising campaign, committing itself
to candor and improved service. The company couldnt
deliver on the advertised promise, and the campaign created great ill will among employees, who saw management
as essentially telling the traveling public, We know you
dont like the way we treat you, while not giving employees the incentives or training to change. The company was
unable to deliver on its intent, and during the sad life of
the three-year Rising campaign, Uniteds market share
actually dropped.
Burger King found itself in a similar slow-motion debacle stemming from its inability to consistently deliver its
advertised brand promise. Through most of the 1990s, it
famously bounced from ad agency to ad agency, campaign
to campaign, slogan to slogan. At one point, Burger King
launched a $70-million campaign, the largest in its history, with Mr. Potatohead as its icon, that invited the world
to judge it by the taste of its French fries, which its newest
tag line promised as being markedly superior to those of
McDonaldshotter, tastier, crispier. And in the laboratories, by all accounts they were. But on Main Street, where
the lab environment couldnt always be replicated, the
fries ended up cold, mushy, and unappealing. Again, an ad
campaign made promises the company couldnt meet. Not
surprisingly, Burger Kings sales growth lagged far behind
both McDonalds and Wendys, and in 2001 sales actually
dropped.

Oldsmobile tried to reposition the brand with a memorable advertising campaign: Not your fathers
Oldsmobile. But it was your fathers Oldsmobilenothing much had changed about the car, the dealers, or the
serviceand in 2000 General Motors announced that it
would retire the oldest brand in U.S. automotive history.
Each of these advertising-based brand strategies failed
for a single reason: They paid scant attention to consistently delivering unique experiences that customers value,
and focused on the communications campaigns instead.
2. Responsibility for the brand is isolated in the
marketing department. Ask an audience of business
people where it thinks responsibility for the success of the
brand lies, and the answer, overwhelmingly and consistently, is marketing. Yet marketing has little influence over
sales, customer service, product development, order fulfillment, billing, or other important points of interaction
with the customer. Meanwhile, somewhere else in the
organization are customer-facing managers and employees
who have limited authority to make organizational
changes. They may even lack access to channels through
which to propose those changes.
Launching an ad campaign or developing a new visual
identity can, and perhaps should, be kept inside the marketing silo. The mistake is to define those activities as the
sum of building the brand.
3. Efficiency and productivity goals trump the
customer experience. Efficiency and productivity measures are unarguably important, but when they outrank
customer-centered measures, trouble looms. Perhaps
nowhere is this more evident than in the world of call centers. Typically, call center managers and staff are evaluated on the number of calls they handle, call length, and
operator utilization. The goals are to minimize the number
of calls that require a live agent and, for calls that do
require live intervention, to minimize the time spent on
each. (Some call centers, notably in the computer technology world, do not offer the option to reach a live rep at
all, and seek to divert customers to pay-per-incident troubleshooting.) The better the call center performs against
these goals, the lower the companys telecom and personnel expense. But at what cost to the customer experience?
At what cost to the brand? No one argues against a filtering process that distinguishes between serious issues and
frivolous ones. Yet a company that focuses single-mindedly on volume and speed can cost-reduce itself out of a
strong brand position.
4. Key insights about customers are outdated.
Most companies arent geared up to replenish the knowledge necessary to create a durable, competition-beating
brand. They do have demographic data about customers,
of course, as well as brand equity tracking and usage and
attitude surveys. But those are statisticslagging indicators. They seldom signal the need to shift direction or indi-

SPECIAL FOCUS

cate a course of action that would strengthen the companys relationship with customers.
Synchronizing the Brand Intent, the Organization, and the
Customer Experience
By constructing a solid internal foundation before reaching
out to customers with a clearly articulated brand intent,
companies can deliver the promised customer experience
and avoid the common missteps. Building the internal
foundation is, in fact, as challenging as defining brand
intent, because it requires employees to change longtime
habits, not to mention their way of thinking about their
relationships with colleagues, the product they make or the
service they sell, and even the company for which they
work. But when brand intent, the organization, and the
customer experience are synchronized, the result will be
an enduring, on-intent brand.
The blueprint for building the internal foundation is
based on four fundamentals:
Create the brand intent
Align the organization
Deliver the customer experience
Measure and refine
1. Create the Brand Intent. A winning brand intent
maximizes the area of intersection between what a company can do well and distinctively, on the one hand, and what
its target customers want or need, on the other. The ideal
intent is compelling in its appeal to both the logical and
emotional sides of the customer (BMW, a superbly built
car thats fun to drive). It gives the customer a sense of how
it will make his or her world a little bit better, even if for
just a while (Coca-Cola). It differentiates the company and
product from the competition by emphasizing enduring
strengths that are hard to match (NTT DoCoMo). It is
aspirational for employees and helps guide them in how
they approach their jobs (Apple). And for customers and
employees alike, it rings true.
Be authentic to the company culture. The best brands are
indistinguishable from the companys culture. In the 1960s
and early 1970s, IBM didnt have explicit brand management. The brand was simply what we do, and what
employees did was consistent because of the strong culture. At Wal-Mart, the formula is simple: Management
respects the workers, and workers respect customers, quality is good, and the prices are the best.
Apple clearly articulated its brand intent and adhered to
it faithfully over two decades, from the launch of the
Macintosh in 1984 (Super Bowl advertising done exactly
right) through the recent Think Different campaign.
Apple never abandoned its vision for the brand, even in
dire times, and as a result, even the computer-illiterate
know Apple stands for: A customer experience that isnt
matched anywhere else in the world of technology, arising
from a combination of innovation, product quality, and

stylish design, together with a certain genteel rebelliousness and in-Microsofts-face impudence.
Learn Why Customers Behave as They Do. Brands center on customers as much as they center on companies and
products. Why do people prefer one overnight delivery service over another? How do they make choices among cars
in a particular category, or between first-class carriers from
London to New York? Peoples personalities and views of
themselves are as important in their buying decisions as
product attributes.
Knowing how and why customers make decisionsnot
only the choices they make, but also the motivations, the
needs, the hopes, and the self-image that underlies those
choicesis essential. A strong brand will respond to those
motivations rather than seek to shape peoples motivations
to fit the brand. Customer-centered companies embed
customer insights into the brand fabric. They paint an
accurate portrait of the whole customer and learn what is
happening at all the points of interaction between customers and the brand. They rely not just on occasional surveys and focus groups, but reach out to solicit customer
input on an ongoing basis, by wandering the floors of manufacturing plants, call centers, and stores, by listening to
customer complaints, and by encouraging customers and
employees to provide feedback.
Most companies lack that level of insight, and few strive
to achieve it. Home Depot, Audi, and Target excel at gaining customer insight, to name just a few. Target appeals
mainly to the needs of middle-class moms, but it also has
a team of trend-spotters whose mission is to find out whats
going to be hot this season. With Gap and Abercrombie &
Fitch losing some of their cachet among younger consumers, Target has begun to try to attract the coveted Gen
Y customer by introducing private-label fashions that are
well-made, cool, and reasonably priced.
2. Align the Whole Organization. Armed with a
clear brand intent and an equally clear understanding of
how and why customers make choices among options in
the brands category, a company is ready to fashion the
means to bring the two together. Five principles apply:
Involve Everyone Whose Job Can Affect the Customer
Experience. The chief executive cannot tell marketing to go
forth and build a brand. Brand stewardship is a responsibility of the entire organization. Delivering an on-intent
customer experience is always a company-wide endeavor.
It requires continuous coordination and the regular
involvement of executives who have pan-functional
authority. In this respect, brand-building is no different
from any other change management program.
Brand councils are a highly successful mechanism for
managing brands strategically. Typically, these councils
include high-level representation from every important
area, not just marketing. The councils identify issues, analyze options, and make smart decisions more efficiently

than functional units can by themselves. They also have

the authority to implement across functional silos. Equally
important, the council, merely by virtue of its existence
and the seniority of its membership, demonstrates the
companys seriousness toward its brands.
Educate and Train Internal Constituencies to Keep
Employees On-Intent. Employees need to accept and
understand the importance of brand, their role in delivering the brand intent, and the process for turning intent into
a positive customer experience. Research has shown that
employees who believe in a brand are more loyal and more
motivated.
The mechanics of communicating with employees, of
educating, coaching, training, and retraining, will always
be company-specific. But no matter how the employee
programs are designed, the effort has to be sustaineda
workshop or two or an occasional newsletter will not
accomplish the job.
Management can apply the principles of superior customer marketing internallysegmenting the internal audience, designing customized internal messages and media,
encouraging interactivity, sustaining the campaign, and
measuring impact. Increasingly, corporate intranets play a
central role in transmitting and reinforcing the brand
intent. Ketchum Public Relations, an Omnicom unit, is
relying on its intranet, called myKGN, to instill a new
brand positionpassion and precision in communicationthroughout the firm. MyKGN ensures consistency
in values, procedures, and practices and continually reinforces the intent through its content and imagery.
One company in a resources-related industry repositioned its brand to emphasize financial savviness. That
meant recruiting differently; the company also launched a
job-rotation program under which some of the top people
in each functional area spent up to a year in financial type
positions. Those actions and others like them not only bolstered the organizations financial competency but also
sent a powerful signal throughout the company about the
new brand intent.
Use Rewards and Incentives to Reinforce the Brand
Intent. At Southwest Airlines, employees who excel in
their jobs are recognized not with cash but with a profile
on the companys Web site (global recognition) or, better
yet, a weeks ownership of the best parking space in the lot.
You will be surprised, one Southwest executive said, at
how much people, employees, and customers are willing
to give when they feel loved and acknowledged. Other
companies go against prevailing practices in their industries by giving entry-level employees benefits such as
health insurance and stock. As a result, employees develop a remarkable commitment to the company and to its
brand intent.
Nordstroms brand promises that no customer should
leave the department store without being satisfied and

happy. The company identified employees as the most

important asset in delivering on that promise. So
Nordstrom adopted Rule Number One: Use your good
judgment in all situations. There will be no additional
rules. Nordstrom treats its employees as partners in the
enterprise. Daily, before each store opens, sales associates
are greeted by the store manager, who celebrates someone
who went an extra mile the day before to exceed customer
expectations. As the legendary loyalty of Nordstrom customers shows, the companys emphasis on a well-motivated, well-informed employee is the key to fulfilling its brand
intent.
Weave Brand Concerns Throughout Business Planning
Processes. Most companies have a core planning forum,
where major decisions are made about budgets, investment plans, and the like. The brand program has to be
incorporated into those top-level planning sessions.
Central to Ketchums planning process, for instance, is
screening a proposed activity on its relevance to the firms
brand intent.
Acquisitions, spin-offs, product-development initiatives, and other decisions that could reshape the character
of the company or its product portfolio have to be considered partly in light of the questions Will this proposal
improve the customers experience in light of the overall
brand intent? How? Unless such a review happens routinely, the concept of an on-intent brand isnt really embedded in the business.
3. Deliver the Customer Experience. Its at this
pointwhen organizational capabilities, processes, and
incentives are securely in placethat a company is set to
deliver the promised customer experience. That means
delivering the customer experience across all contact
points, every time, all the time.
If the goal is to get customers to think differently about
a brand, they have to experience it differently, and they
have to notice the difference. For example, if K-Mart were
transported tomorrow into a world where it had an onintent brand, its customers would exclaim, Hmm, K-Mart
isnt what I thought it was; its better.
Companies can go about improving the customer experience in any number of ways; there is no single template.
In one instance, a business-unit-by-business-unit
approach might be right. In another, the best approach
may be to focus on specific aspects of the customer experience, such as e-commerce or after-sale service, redesigning them to make them more consistent with the brands
intent. In another, a company might focus on a particular
qualitative association it wants its brand to reflect in customers eyes (speed, price, variety, simplicity). In yet another, the company might zero in on a particular customer segment, as Harley-Davidson and Starbucks did.
Here are four strategies that pay off:
Eliminate Off-Intent Actions. Continental changed its

SPECIAL FOCUS

incentive programs to encourage employees to adhere to

customer-service standards and reduce avoidable delays.
IBM redesigned its sales process to make it more consistent with brand intent. Lord & Taylor, seeking to recapture
its upscale image, eliminated the display tables that cluttered its aisles and became more selective in the styles it
carries.
Reinforce On-Intent Actions. Early wins are important
substantively and symbolicallyamong employees and
among customers. They are usually easiest to achieve by
taking things that work and making them work even better,
or shining a brighter light on them.
Add New, High-Leverage On-Intent Actions. At Lord &
Taylor, brand-focused action steps ranged from the prosaic, like improving the lighting, to the dramatic, such as
bringing in new suppliers and narrowing the assortment of
fashion brands. Virgin Atlantic substantially improved the
customer experience by outfitting even economy class with
eight-channel televisions and Nintendo game sets.
Recover from Off-Intent Actions. Customers are loyal to
brands that consistently create and deliver experiences
that meet their expectations, but that loyalty is always the
brands to lose. How a company responds to a mistake can
determine whether the customer sours on the product
(and tells others why) or whether he or she becomes more
loyal (and tells others why). When an airline or hotel
empowers front-line employees to give on-the-spot
upgrades to customers who are justly annoyed, or when a
mail-order catalogue merchant waives handling charges
because a shipment is late, both the customer and the
company win. Its the right thing to do, the cost is not
great, and the return on that minor investment is almost
certain to be high.
Audi has developed a highly flexible response capability
by establishing a customer advocacy group whose 100 or
so members see themselves as ambassadors of the brand.
When an owner has a persistent problem, an advocate
takes on the case, reaching out to the customer, getting to
the cause, pushing for a solution, and following through.
Its hard to say whether dealers or owners are the more
enthusiastic fans of Audis advocates.
4. Measure and Refine. However resonant its brand
intent and excellent its products, a company cannot succeed over the long haul if it does not know what occurs at
the points of customer interactionwhat happens to customers, how they are treated, how they perceive they are
treated, what matters to them. A good brand evaluation
program gives management an early-warning system that
flags problems and opportunities. It continuously gauges
the extent to which a brand remains on intent and how
customers motivations change. Like Target, companies
that invest in listening to customers, not just in formal dialogue but by watching where theyre heading, are able to
establish a new position ahead of the rest of the market.

The best brand evaluation programs provide real-time

information. Tracking surveys and sales growth are lagging
indicators. Deterioration in either of those measures
almost certainly reflects a misalignment of the brand intent
that began months or a year ago. The company with winning brand intent generates forward-looking indicators.
Creating the Vision
A successful brand always emerges from a set of promisesthe brand intent, or visionthat the company can
actually keep. In keeping its brand promise, the company
creates a distinctive customer experience. Although the
attributes of a good brand intent are easy to discern, theres
no formula for creating one. Like good taste, some are born
with it and some acquire it later.
Born with a Vision. In companies whose vision is in
their DNA, the organization and the vision are perfectly
aligned; the organization is the vision. These companies
tend to share several attributes:
They emerged under the leadership of visionaries
who created a customer experience not previously seen in
the categoryfor example, Henry Ford and Henry Luce
80 years ago; more recently, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak,
Richard Branson of Virgin, Sam Walton, Ben and Jerry.
They built organizations with a strong focus on creating a distinctive customer experience.
They recognized that person-to-person interaction,
i.e., employee-to-buyer, can have the strongest impact on
how customers perceive the brand. They invested heavily
in equipping their employees to carry out these interactions in ways that satisfy customers.
Take Starbucks. It doesnt sell coffee; it sells an experience. The companys chairman and chief global strategist, Howard Schultz, saw an opportunity to create a
European-style, coffee-centered culture. He made sure
that employees were well trained and highly motivated and
that stores were far more appealing than the typical corner
diner. Shultz built an organization that delivers exactly
what it promises, and Starbucks grew exponentially over
20 years, even without a major foray into advertising
investing that money on building the customer experience
instead.
Virgin operates in myriad disparate businesses. It distributes music and movies; it operates three airlines; it sells
mortgages, soft drinks, wedding dresses, and bicycles.
Conventional wisdom would argue against applying a single brand to all those operations. But in fact they all share
a common brand intent, centered on value and fun, and
deliver on that intent consistently and well. The Virgin
intent reflects the personality of Richard Branson: an
unlikely stew of irreverence and flamboyance and elegance. It has more to do with attitude than any functional
benefit. Look at the difference between Virgin Atlantics
upper-class experience and British Airs first-class product.

Theyre essentially the same in terms of getting a traveler

from A to B in X hours. Virgin, however, provides manicures and massage and almost any kind of music you can
think of; it takes you to the airport in a limousine. Further,
Branson doesnt manage any of Virgins units closely and
they are, if not exactly freewheeling, allowed to take risks.
When Home Depot opened its first store, founders
Bernie Marcus and Arthur Blank had a simple vision:
warehouse stores, filled with a wider range of products
than any competitor ever contemplated, catering mainly to
do-it-yourselfers but to professional builders as well, and
offering a vast array of home-improvement services, from
helping design a bathroom to potting an arbor vitae. Two
decades later, the companys stock price exponentially surpassed that of its competitors in the building-materials
industry. Today, the vision is intact, and the brand intent is
so strongly entrenched that the depot concept has been
copied not only on the same turf (Lowes) but also in retail
arenas from soft goods (Bed, Bath and Beyond) to office
supplies (Staples and Office Depot).
Transformed with a Vision. What if a company is not
born with a vision? Can it create the same strong alignment of brand and company? The answer is that it is possible to transform existing brands and companies by deliberately developing a brand-based culture and skills set.
Sometimes the galvanizing force is a quest to improve business performance; often it happens when the business is at
a difficult crossroads.
Harley-Davidson is a good example: A brand is indisputably strong when its customers tattoo themselves with
its logo. The company was on the brink of bankruptcy
twice, and in the early 1980s decided to refocus on making bikers passionate about the product. The company
massively improved the quality of its product, and it reconceived its employee and management incentive programs.
Harley chose not to manufacture as many bikes as it might
have, knowing that at a certain point, quality would begin
to suffer. It created the Harley Owners Group (HOGs) to
reinforce the brands sense of community. With minimal
advertising, the re-intending of the brand has led to
impressive long-term sales growth and financial performance: Harleys stock price significantly outperformed the
S&P 500 over one-year and three-year periods.
In 2000, oil company British Petroleum was at a critical
juncture. BP has pulled off three major acquisitions in as
many years, finally giving it the size it needed to become a
top player in the oil industry. However, CEO John Browne
strongly believed that, even with its new assets, BP would
never reach the top spot unless it made a radical change.
BP executives had evaluated the characteristics common
to the worlds top 10 global corporations and found something that BP lacked: a strong corporate brand.

BP developed a new brand positioning with four key

attributes: green, innovative, performance, and progressive. It initiated a three-phase campaign to activate the
brand both internally and externally. The first phase was to
clearly communicate the new brand to the market with
new advertising, more aggressive PR, and redesigned stations, as well as to strengthen employees sense of identity
and common purpose. Phase two focused on training
employees to create the knowledge and capability to live
the brand. And the third phase was to actually change the
behavior of employees and the company at large, to deliver on-intent customer experiences. This step included a
new recognition system that regularly gave awards to
groups and individuals who best lived each value.
BPs repositioning generated response outside and
inside the company. Consumer brand awareness increased
significantly, and in 2001 BP was voted the No. 1
European Most Admired Knowledge Enterprise, up from
No. 4 in 1999. Internal surveys indicate that employees
felt favorable to the new brand, 80% were aware of the
brand values, and 90% thought the company was going in
the right direction. And BPs stock price has outperformed
an index of major integrated oil/gas companies.
Both Harley and BP developed a clear, achievable vision
of what they wanted their brands to say; they changed their
culture and their operations to align with the vision; and
they consistently delivered everything the brand promised.
Building a brand-based company demands plenty of time
and effortbut its worth it.
The Payoff
A brand is on-intent when the promises a company makes
and fulfills are the same ones the target customer values.
Staying on-intent requires aligning the organization to
deliver the customer experience, motivating employees to
change their beliefs and work habits, dismantling organizational walls, and constantly reassessing and refining. It
requires skill, judgment, intuition, sensitivity, farsightedness, patience, and, perhaps, even a little bit of luck.
It is worth the effort? Ask the shareholders of companies like Heineken, Wal-Mart, and Dell Computer that
have invested in developing strong brands and keeping
them on-intenttheir efforts have yielded top-of-category
share performance. Or ask the customers themselves,
whose loyalty to on-intent brands such as Audi, FedEx,
and Wendys have brought those brands to the top of their
categories sales growth.
Jennifer Barron is a partner of Monitor Group and a
co-founder of Market2Customer (M2C), the marketing
strategy division of Monitor Group. She may be reached
at jennifer_barron@monitor.com.

Reprinted with permission of Thomson Media

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