How Politics Kills Brands

If you happen to be on the brand side of business, I have some bad news for you. The internal politics that complicate your work, numb your brain and unnervingly distract from your real challenges – are about to take a turn for the worse.

On my business card, it says that I am a brand builder. The reality? I’m 10 percent brand builder, 90 percent politician. It’s about the same for all of us who work with brands.

Were you to ask your colleagues (and perhaps you should), most of them will say they embarked on their careers because their industry stood for courage, nimbleness, and creativity. These, after all, are the qualities that once defined how brands appeared in a brand-star heaven and how they kept their orbits.

These defining qualities are long gone. Anyone involved with communication at a Fortune 100 company is now all too familiar with the new defining terms.

Politics. And frustration.

As a consultant, I’m amongst the lucky individuals who fly in, temporarily immerse myself to become part of the reality, and then fly out again. Having done so for 15 years, I’ve learned some tricks of the trade, skillful ways to address politics and steer around sensitive issues, well-honed techniques to boost creativity, and—perhaps most important—ways to ensure that even the wackiest, seemingly least deserving idea gets its chance to prove itself.

Here are my top 3 tips for you.

1. Forget your own industry

Bankers are the worst. Visit any of the top banks in the world, and you’ll find them focusing, first and foremost, on how they’re performing within their own industry. How are we doing vis-á-vis our competition?

Is this any way to create and build a top performing brand? Does it even matter any more, considering the very concept of banking, as we know it, may be on its last legs. After all, do customers actually need a bank when they can wire money, invest funds, and make payments, all online?

Banks are not alone, of course. With very few exceptions, companies seem obsessed with comparing themselves to everyone else in their own pond. This myopic perspective leads them to miss golden opportunities to leapfrog right past the competition. As my dad used to say: “If you want to get ahead of the leader, why do you keep following his tracks in the snow?”

My question to you is: What if Apple were a bank? What if PayPal bought your bank? Or the founders of Skype decided to redesign your bank? Can you picture your bank as re-imagined by these players?

I picture a bank that would be simple, user friendly, built around customer needs, and yes, probably very successful.

My point therefore is this. By benchmarking your company against completely different industries, you can transform your primitive industry into a courageous, nimble, and creative enterprise. And—even more than that—you’ve already distanced yourself from the politics.

2. Your Secret Weapon…Making Genuine Contact With The Consumer

Some years ago, I had a heated discussion with the CEO of a large FMCG company. He disagreed with the results of a report, even though it was based on empirical data coming from more than 11,000 of his own consumers.

However, what happened afterwards was even more surprising.

I’d arranged to take the CEO on a visit to the homes of some of his customers in order to conduct what I call “ethnographic interviews.” My philosophy has always stressed the singular importance for a top manager to disconnect himself from the insulated world of computers and reports, to get into the real world, to go out and meet those people who, in cold reality, are paying his salary.

That afternoon’s interviews were interesting, but even more remarkable was the quarterly board meeting the next day. Instead of making pointed references to the $1 million, 11,000 respondent research report, the CEO instead made 19 observations and used the quality feedback he had gleaned during that four-hour excursion to visit and have one-on-one contact with ordinary consumers. His consumers.

My argument? We’ve lost contact with the consumer.

Sure, we learn about them through our reports, our Big Data, and our never-ending stream of Google stats. But the reality is that we have no clue about their true emotions.

This leads me to one of the most important things I’ve learned. If politics seems to be controlling you more than you control politics, then the time has come to identify your essential stakeholders in the business—those individuals whose buy-in you need— to escort them into the homes of a few random consumers, and let them witness first-hand the consumer’s reality. See the world through their eyes. Share a meal with them. Listen closely to their stories. Trust me, it will forever change the way you think about your consumers.

I’ve done it more than 1,000 times, and I’ve never once been disappointed. Not even an AC Nielsen report beats listening to a real consumer.

3. Align Everyone, Overnight

Does that sound like a dream? Your worst nightmare?

Yet it’s absolutely do-able.

When decisions need to be made, don’t drag them out. Don’t work against two- or three-year-long deadlines.

Rather, work with ultra-short, almost na?ve deadlines. Why? Because short deadlines generate momentum.

Far too many innovations fail because the innovative process loses momentum. Long deadlines generate second thoughts, doubts, and counterproductive corridor discussions. Over time, these will compromise—even kill—the best concepts. This is not conjecture, this is a human truth. Yet when you create short, simple, yet measurable deadlines, something interesting happens. The group unites around common goals. It become so engaged solving seemingly impossible challenges that politics, the serial killer of progress, has no option but to flee.

When working on projects both small and large—whether that be transforming a supermarket chain in the U.S., building a mall in Saudi Arabia, creating a toy company in Russia, or restoring a major bank in Europe to its former glory—I’ve learned that politics is the greatest destroyer of innovation and transformation. Crafting great ideas isn’t easy, but compared to managing politics, it’s a no-brainer.

To summarize.

Whenever you’re initiating new projects or transforming your brand, you need to understand the game you’re about to enter. Encourage your stakeholders, influencers, and supporters to benchmark your company against completely different industries. Send your senior management into the homes of real people. Challenge everyone to dream up bold, creative new ideas, and give them just two days to do it.

This makes everyone uncomfortable (a good thing), resets the conventional situation, forces everyone to assume new roles, and causes them to think differently.

And this is the secret. If you play the game on everyone else’s terms, if you let them dictate the rules, if you allow politics free rein to control the process, then chances are your ideas never will fly.

But if you choose to bypass the politics and play on your terms, you’ll find your branding game infused with fresh thinking and incredible new energy. And you’ll never look back.