How to find your true story and win back trust
By Kitchen's Head of Strategy Vaila Robertson
At a time of great global uncertainty and in an “age of cynicism” it’s a challenging time for brands to win the trust and loyalty of their customers. Havas Media Group found that less than half of brands are seen as trustworthy and that 75% of brands could disappear overnight and most people wouldn’t care. Brands are on shaky ground(1).
A brand, just as much as a house, needs to be built on firm foundations. Building a brand takes huge creative effort and investment. But the hard work and expense poured into developing and promoting your brand can be undone easily if it’s shakily constructed.
A strong brand can weather upheavals and challenges when it is deeply rooted in the organisation’s culture and values – such brands are harder to copy, can resist pressure to discount and are better able to ride out social media storms or product recalls.?
Strong brands don’t materialise by magic and their construction has become more fragile as businesses are put under more and more scrutiny. Consumers are hungry for authenticity, transparency and substance in a fast-changing, volatile world. Brands built on these pillars have a better chance of generating loyalty and lifetime value.?
But to be trusted storytellers or communicators, brands need to understand their own story. We’ve been through an age of intelligent marketing, rooted in behavioural economics narratives that sway people into a particular course of action. Perhaps the way to gain trust now, is to stop “telling stories” to get what brands want and start sharing stories based on what brands are.?
Good stories need good characters
And all stories begin with people. It isn’t a revelation that a business’s most important asset is its employees and that “culture eats strategy for breakfast”. In 1975 83% of the enterprise value of organisations were attributed to physical assets. By 2018 that value had flipped and human capital was found to attribute to 84% of the value(2). But many companies still seem to overlook this fact. Humans deliver long term value creation – and part of that value lies in helping unlock and shape the DNA of a business.
People want to buy from brands that are more aligned to their core values without a credibility gap between what they say and what they do. We no longer live in a time when marketing and traditional media can mask the internal dynamics of an organisation. The digital age means you will be caught out if your stories do not match their actions. Think of how Brewdog’s positioning as ‘beer for punks’ was undermined by the revelation of an internal culture of bullying. It takes a long time to restore trust in brands who make these missteps.
The inside skinny
Instead of trying to spin a story a brand thinks its customers want to hear, there is much more power in uncovering the real human character of an organisation and using these insights to develop and articulate a unique story that really resonates.
The inside-out concept is not rocket science but there is science involved. Many HR and recruitment departments already use psychometric testing when interviewing new recruits but there is so much more scope to apply the techniques and insights to brand creation.?
At Kitchen we bring our own proprietary psychometric data tool, called Kulturelab, to our projects and survey all teams across the business, from the C-suite to ‘front of house’ employees. This information is overlaid with a brand archetype analysis framework, rooted in Jungian archetypes and expounded by Margaret Mark and Carol S. Pearson in their book The Hero and The Outlaw (3).
By way of this cultural analysis, we can then understand what kind of people work at the business and help shape an authentic brand personality. Understanding the intrinsic, internal brand allows comms, creative ideas and assets to be generated that are far more genuine than generic messaging – the kind of comms that just tries to be the loudest voice in the room. It also creates an army of brand advocates, activating employees as a brand’s greatest marketing channel.
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The use of Kulturelab is well-suited to companies built on direct human interactions with customers where service is paramount – think retail, hospitality and travel. It also works wonders with founder start-ups whose own personality is a key component of brand culture and identity. Or with Mergers and Acquisitions where conflicting cultures and identities need to find common ground.?
Build a home not a house
Recent Gartner research shows 82% of employees say it’s important for their organisation to see them as a person but only 45% believe this isn’t how they are perceived(4). It’s essential that your ‘household’ – read employees – are happy, energised and feel valued. Understand them and you’ll better understand how to shape and develop your brand for competitive advantage.
Ultimately, a business that wants to develop a strong brand and associated benefits needs to understand its own culture and develop an identity with deep roots. Looking to the future we firmly believe this will depend on greater cross-departmental collaboration and a richer relationship between HR, Marketing and the C-suite. Brands formed in this way can articulate their reason for being and are more attractive to potential employees.?
In the current turbulent landscape where hard-pressed consumers are more likely to switch preferences, brands need to make sure they are built on firm foundations. But remember a house is not just a building – it’s also a home with all the characteristics and associations that it brings.
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