The Branding Dilemma: Maximizing the Impact of Improvement Efforts

There is a tendency for companies to brand their improvement efforts into programs with fancy titles, and there are certainly advantages to this approach. But there are also downsides. One of those downsides is that people tend to treat the program as a “black box” with mysterious tools and methodologies unique to it. It feels foreign to them and, as a result, they tend to not realize that much of what these programs bring builds on what they already know. This ends up delaying progress.

I don’t want to completely disregard the benefits of branding a program and rallying everyone around it as a vehicle to drive improvement. As long as the decision is made for the right reasons and steps are taken to mitigate the potential risks, there are rarely any issues.

There are plenty of companies that have successfully branded their improvement systems. Toyota Production System (TPS) has gained worldwide fame for its efficacy. P&G’s Integrated Work System (IWS) was so successful that it enabled the company to form an alliance with Ernst and Young and market the program to other companies who were willing to make the sizable investment that EY charges.

Of course, some consulting firms have a vested interest in branding their programs and making them seem new and different so they can charge more for them. The shiny new thing will always attract more attention and seem more valuable, so it’s not a bad marketing strategy. In my opinion, however, you ought to pay more for programs that are easily integrated into what you’re doing, rather than programs that feel foreign and guarantee your dependence on consultants for the foreseeable future.

Whether your company’s program or your consultant’s methodology is heavily branded or not, I would recommend that you focus on ensuring that people quickly get over the perception that it is something new and different that they can’t relate to.

One experience I had doing just that was at my last corporate assignment. I came in as the HPO (High Performance Organization) “expert” and as I traveled to various sites, I got countless questions about what HPO was all about and what people should do to implement it.

This not being my first rodeo, I took the approach of deflecting the focus away from the program’s HPO branding and onto the business challenges at each of the sites. I asked a lot of questions about what was working and what was not. I asked about their existing improvement efforts. Rather than jumping into how “HPO” was going to help them, I listened with the intention to find out what was missing. Only then I began to make suggestions on tools and approaches they could take to build on what they were doing already. Even then, I chose not to share that the tools were part of the HPO “program!” We began to work together without having to carry the burden to unpack some black box and force-fit any unfamiliar tools and processes. After a while, when they began to have some success and they started to ask for more, I would point out that the tools I had been sharing with them were part of the HPO process!

This resulted in a less flashy start to the implementation but it also meant more sustainable benefits in the long run. This approach accelerated our progress and put us on an exponential growth curve, because rather then resisting some program that corporate was trying to force feed to them, people were pulling to themselves because they saw value in it.

I take the same approach to training programs as an external consultant now. We identify a few early adopters and invest in them to have them become “walking billboards” for what’s possible. It works like a charm every time because instead of a bunch of people reluctantly taking a training course that they were “voluntold” to participate in, we have a few eager people who deliver extraordinary results and grow at a rapid pace, causing everyone else to be interested in experiencing the same.

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Further Reading

If you’d like to learn more about topics covered in this week’s newsletter article, check out the related resources I’ve included below.

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