Focus on building consistent brand

The inter­net and in par­tic­u­lar the advent of social media means that the num­ber of con­tact points a con­sumer has with a brand has pro­lif­er­at­ed. If these touch­points fail to con­vey a con­sis­tent mes­sage, con­sumers can respond instant­ly through a tweet or a Face­book post with poten­tial­ly dam­ag­ing con­se­quences for the brand’s rep­u­ta­tion.

Tim Ambler, senior fel­low at Lon­don Busi­ness School, recalls his ear­ly days in mar­ket­ing when the dif­fer­ent dis­ci­plines were all han­dled in the same place. “Moët & Chan­don became a brand leader in the UK though PR alone; it didn’t spend a pen­ny on adver­tis­ing,” he says. “Bring­ing the dis­ci­plines back togeth­er again allows the chief mar­ket­ing offi­cer [CMO] to make bet­ter choic­es about how to build the brand.”

Con­ver­gence allows CMOs to find media-neu­tral solu­tions to devel­op­ing their brand and sat­is­fy­ing their cus­tomers. This is desir­able for a num­ber of rea­sons – not least cost effec­tive­ness for the com­pa­ny and rel­e­vance for the cus­tomer – but it is also essen­tial for cre­at­ing con­sis­tent brand mes­sages.

But Tim Pile, chief exec­u­tive of agency Cogent Elliott, points out: “Inte­grat­ed com­mu­ni­ca­tion isn’t just about exter­nal com­mu­ni­ca­tions; it’s about inter­nal com­mu­ni­ca­tions too. Your employ­ees are your brand rep­re­sen­ta­tives and, even if they don’t work in cus­tomer-fac­ing roles, they com­mu­ni­cate with cus­tomers and poten­tial cus­tomers, whether on Face­book and Twit­ter or down the pub. You build brands from the inside out.”

We have, in one place, all the levers we need to pull to make sure we live the brand inside and out­side the organ­i­sa­tion, and to man­age our rep­u­ta­tion

While employ­ees need to be “on mes­sage”, so do oth­er key stake­hold­ers, such as City financiers, opin­ion for­m­ers and sup­pli­ers. This means that the mar­ket­ing direc­tor has to work close­ly with the sales direc­tor, the human resources (HR) direc­tor, the finance direc­tor and so on.

How­ev­er, a suc­cess­ful inte­grat­ed stake­hold­er engage­ment strat­e­gy depends on a strong core idea. At insur­ance giant Avi­va, this idea is encap­su­lat­ed in the brand promise “No one recog­nis­es you like Avi­va” and in the group’s ambi­tion to be “the most rec­om­mend­ed brand”.

Aman­da Macken­zie, Aviva’s chief mar­ket­ing and com­mu­ni­ca­tions offi­cer, explains: “A brand is as a brand does. I am for­tu­nate in that all the rel­e­vant dis­ci­plines – PR, pub­lic pol­i­cy, finan­cial media, inter­nal com­mu­ni­ca­tions, brand and mar­ket­ing – fall into my patch, which we call ‘the cus­tomer exec­u­tive’. It means that we have, in one place, all the levers we need to pull to make sure we live the brand inside and out­side the organ­i­sa­tion, and to man­age our rep­u­ta­tion.”

Increas­ing­ly, agen­cies are organ­is­ing them­selves to pro­vide a more inte­grat­ed ser­vice to clients. Some agen­cies com­bine dif­fer­ent ser­vices under one roof, while oth­ers offer a sort of one-stop-shop with­in an agency group.

There are pros and cons to each: for exam­ple, inte­grat­ed agen­cies, in the­o­ry, offer neu­tral­i­ty, short com­mu­ni­ca­tion lines and val­ue for mon­ey, while the group mod­el allows clients to retain a cer­tain degree of cher­ry pick­ing. And some clients pre­fer to do the inte­gra­tion them­selves, select­ing agen­cies, as they always have, accord­ing to chem­istry, exper­tise and busi­ness need.

“I’m still not con­vinced by agen­cies who say they can do every­thing,” says Char­lotte Borg­er, com­mu­ni­ca­tions direc­tor at Divine Choco­late. Oth­ers sug­gest that the com­pe­ti­tion between dif­fer­ent agen­cies under a group umbrel­la com­pro­mis­es a neu­tral mar­ket­ing and com­mu­ni­ca­tions solu­tion.

Social media encour­ages a more coher­ent approach. Ms Macken­zie describes it as “a great big mega­phone for every­thing you do”. She says: “You have to be real­ly open and hon­est and thought­ful – and be pre­pared to act on what you hear. The inter­net acts like a gigan­tic echo cham­ber, which is great because you often don’t see prob­lems when you are sur­round­ed by like-mind­ed peo­ple.”