SPECIAL EPISODE: Biggest Ahas from 11 Healthy Brand Builders

Read time: 15 min

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This is a special episode to wrap up the year. So instead of bringing a guest where I grill them and uncover the value bombs and the gems, I share my four biggest ahas from the 11 previous guests that I brought to the show.

EP. 12 SPECIAL EPISODE: Biggest Ahas from 11 Healthy Brand Builders

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THE FOUR BIGGEST AHAs

#1 Silos are comfortable, but dangerous

When what you do can change the way the enterprise does business, it can't be left to a function. Branding can't just be left to brand experts. Communications can't just be left to communicators. And it's the same with marketing and DE&I.

“You think the battle's over… I just had this epiphany just a few months ago, you know, disruptive innovation, branding is left in the sideline, you know, and to a large extent, social programs and combating society's scary issues and problems. Branding is not where it should be at all. You've got all these people running around with grants, volunteers, energy goals, nothing is branded. It's all aimless. Without brands you not only don't have something that can guide, that can inspire, but can communicate. It's impossible to communicate all that stuff without branding. So you disappear into a cloud of sameness, and as a result, people are saying, you know, maybe we should cut back on these grants and volunteering because it's costing a lot of money and we're in tough times. We gotta survive as a company. So, you know, then you think, oh, we really there yet?”

David Aaker

“Brand relevance, relationships, trust, should not be left to marketers and communicators and brand experts. That should be the core of any leadership team, right? That, I mean, look at, look, I was watching something the other night, it was a documentary on Boeing, and it was about the 737 Max where they had those, you know, really, really tragic accidents. Hundreds of people passed away unfortunately, and the company was denying it up till the end. They kept saying, our mission is safety. And people were dying. I mean because the brand, the purpose, the efficacy was nothing more than a word. It was a statement nobody was relating it to, to the reality, right? I'm not blaming anybody in this regard. I'm just saying that it can get lost quickly when you leave branding to the brand people or the marketers, right? Purpose can get lost quickly. When you leave it to just the communications people, right? Communications people, brand experts, marketing people. Our job is to infiltrate those things into the company. I tell them all the time, we're not here to communicate for the company. We're here to help the company communicate.”

Gary Grates

“You know, I, I went from, like I said, consumer product goods companies, which is all marketing. Everyone is thinking marketing from the CEO down of what is the value proposition for this, this opportunity. Who are our customers? Who are our biggest customers? What are they, how are they going to respond to these, you know, products and offerings? And constantly listening and creating a feedback loop and improving and just having your finger on the pulse of insights, community insights, your company insights. There's a loop of communication within those consumer brands that is unlike anything I've ever seen. So everyone is lockstep together, moving forward to produce products that will make people's lives better or more efficient. When I went into healthcare and what I saw from all over the world, traveling to some conferences and hearing this from other individuals, healthcare as an overall, what I saw was they really look at marketing as a tactical kind of resource group”

“To tactically implement a handful of completely disconnected items into the marketplace. There doesn't seem to be a strategic understanding of marketing at the table in order to identify and share insights back and forth with all of your cross-functional teams and a part of engaging the entire leadership team to create strategies. So there really isn't it, and I've seen multiple healthcare strategies. Marketing is a part of every single one of them, but I don't necessarily understand or think that leadership understands that, that, so, so the, the biggest issue I saw is that healthcare leaders leave marketing to just marketing. It's almost carved out. It's a separate thing. You go to them when you need something creative or a new flyer posted or, you know, you wanna create some employee engagement and have a picnic. And that is the least of what marketing is. In fact, that's not marketing whatsoever.”

Carrie Lewis

#2 Action beats everything

Whether you are working on bringing the purpose of an organization to life or faced with a tough decision, the most important thing is to take action and start learning. Because every moment we don't is a missed opportunity to get better.

“There's just so many things that, that you learned by just, by just doing. You know what I mean? Yeah. And I'm a huge believer in that learning by doing Trump's trump's learning by kind of reading or seeing all day long, right? You just don't, there's so many sort of unknowns whether known or not, right? That you just don't, you don't, you won't really fully appreciate until you start actually doing. And so it's so that, that's another kind of thing that I'm a, I'm a huge believer in now even at like, even even with decisions that we're making at like fast wave and Crossfire, is that if you're, if you're 80% sure about that, right? We, we all work with enough smart people that have given us a lot of thought. If we're 80% sure, we just like, action trumps everything, right? We need to see momentum and action versus, you know, getting caught in a death spiral of, of, of paralysis by analysis”

Scott Nelson

“Community health workers on a motorcycle going hut to hut to hut giving people the drugs they needed. And when you see that happen, I mean that, that kind of, of innovation and willingness to think creatively and, and all funded by the US and we turned, we and other countries eventually participated too. But there's no question the US led the effort. We turned HIV in these places where it was always fatal into a chronic condition. It was transformative. But for me, standing there and seeing that, seeing what we were able to do in one of the poorest places on earth, we built the infrastructure, delivered the drugs, transformed healthcare. Cuz once you built the clinic, right, you didn't just treat h hiv, you could treat child mat, you know, children's health and maternal health, right?”

“It's infrastructure. All of a sudden, you, you transformed healthcare. So I'm standing there in the middle of nowhere, Uganda <laugh>, one of the poorest places on earth. And I, I remember just saying to myself, if we could do this here, there is no reason why we can't have a healthcare system that works in America. We've got the wealthiest country in the history of mankind. We, we have resources that are just, it, it, it's, it's hard to even count the zeroes behind how much we can spend. And yet we're d yet our healthcare system doesn't work for everybody. That's not acceptable. That can't we, we just can't let that go on. And I, and then I say to myself, ABNA, you can talk about this. You can, you can moan about it and, and talk about it or you can do something about it. Here's your choice. Moan and <laugh> and, and, and, and vetch about it or do something about it. And that's when I decided that I was gonna start what has become same Sky health. Cause I said I can't, it's not enough to talk about it. That, that we need to do better. We, we need to actually do better, right? So I want to be part of, of doing better and that's what I'm trying to do with SameSky Health.”

Abner Mason

“There's someone, there was someone who once told me the nannies come from Trinidad. So don't tell people you're from Trinidad. Just tell them you went to school in Canada, cuz that sounds better. It's like amazing the thing, the microaggressions that like you see in it here. But I mean, I kept on trucking because my mother famously said to me before she died, when I experienced something terrible at work at the time, she was like, one of these days, your haters will be your waiters. Just keep that in the back of your mind. And so that's one of the things that has just also kept me going. You know, I also truly believe in leaving a legacy for those who are also coming up behind me, right? Because I was like, if I fail, what does that say and mean for the people who are more junior to me?”

Abenaa Hayes

#3 Your brand is not about you

It's what the audience wants. It's who the customers want to become. When you focus outwardly on those you serve and wish to influence, your stories will start to matter and your brand will start to gain true fans.

“And so when you study the science of influence, you realize that you have to communicate a couple things really well. One, what you make, absolutely what do you make? How is it better? What are the functional facts, features, benefits. But you also gotta communicate what you make happen. And what you make happen is a feeling. And for so long as strategists and as creatives you'd see on the creative brief, we want people to feel confident, we want them to feel empowered. We want them to feel peace of mind. And to execute against that was, you know, these are like bankrupt words that we see every brand. Chances are every healthcare brand wants their target audience to feel empowered, peace of mind in control. And so what we did was we dug deeper and we realized who really knows how to influence people, role models, role models, know how to influence people. And when you know how to role model something, then people don't just wanna buy you, they wanna be you. That's the goal. So then we said, okay, well how do we role model? We have to go a step further. What do you make? Yes. What do you make happen? Yes. What are you gonna role model is based on your target audiences fantasy self.”

Stephanie Ouyoumjian

“You know, the challenge is your goal from a company point of view is to have your story and your wording and phrasing used by the journalist. And journalists don't want that. You know? As a journalist when I was at Bloomberg, you know, I, we had, I had four screens in my desk with headlines constantly streaming up. And my goals were at a story or a headline. So amazing that you stopped your tracks and clicked on that story and shared it with your friends. And so a journalist wants a story that hasn't been written before, or an angle or a perspective that hasn't been told. Because, you know, it's like, say you pitch a story to your editor and they just google the topic and there's like a hundred their stories or the exact same thing. It's not really interesting, right? So they're gonna say, well come up with something different.”

“So the challenge is for, for companies is how do you, you know, give journalists something unique and special at at when they're interested in it? And again, you know, as a journalist, I was kind of loathed to do profiles of companies cuz it felt like we were fawning over them. You didn't wanna wanna be seen as in the tank for a company or, you know, wanting to support a company. You wanna be neutral. So the other kind of thing challenge I see is from a comms point of view versus a journalist's point of view. This, a lot of times the journalist, I'd write a story that thought was really balanced and a showcase a company, but it talked about that quote unquote to be sure paragraph. We always had a Bloomberg where, you know, this sounds awesome to be sure. Some people say it sucks, you know, or it won't ne it'll never happen to give balance. And a lot of companies at pr, people I was friends with coming after go, we thought it wasn't worth doing the story because of this to be sure paragraph. So I think, you know, it's important to set expectations like, look, you know, you can get a story in a media, but it may not come out like you want, or it may have, you know, your opposite or or competitor mentioned. So if you're, you know, not fine with that, you have to rethink your approach”

Ryan Flinn

“When they've gotta go out and raise 20 million or they need to attract employees or they need to sign on to vendors who don't have space for them, but they need their capacity in order to get their work done. Even in the early stage, even before patients, before you have, you're in humans. And then don't even talk about like, then you're recruiting investigators and you're recruiting patients and the families of patients to wanna come on and put and i I and take a pill that no human has ever taken and you're already sick. Like, just think about that, right? Like, what does it take to be willing to do that? So I think there are, and, and of all those people, of the investors and the employees and the potential investigators and the patients and the vendor partners, all of those stakeholders, sure there may be some that are just laser focused on tell me about the atoms and molecules and tell me exactly about how this science works.”

“And I will with a completely cold heart determine whether that science appeals to me or not. I'm sure there are people in that system that I just described that don't need to have a feeling, but I would argue that most of those people need to have some level of trust to give us their money, give us their bodies to test things on, give us their capacity and space, which has an opportunity cost for other clients that these vendors could have give us their livelihoods as an employees. That is not nothing. And it is very rarely completely on the like front part of your brain that you make those decisions. There's a do I fundamentally trust these people? Do I feel good about being attached to these people? How will I think, how will people see me if I'm in, you know, standing in the same room as, as this group of people? Well then how are, how is everybody seeing this group so I know what kind of halo effect I will or will not have as I'm connected? I mean, I think that's just human nature.”

Lisa Bowers

#4 Take the opportunity before you and ask what if

We have a tendency to wait, wait for the right role, the right problem, the right opportunity, then we will really do what it takes. But time and time again, learning from my guests, one thing is certain, don't wait. Use the opportunity in front of you and make it what you will. The limits we artificially place on ourselves are the limits of the opportunity in front of us.

“Wow. You know you, you, you move your family there to launch a product which is, which everybody was super excited about. And then the FDA doesn't, you know, doesn't accept the file. So that that forced our team to figure out, you know, how do we survive? You know, how does the business survive? How are we gonna keep our employees? How are we gonna keep our customers? What, what are we gonna do? We're just gonna lose market share. That's a whole nother, that was a whole nother experience that wasn't a lot of fun when it first happened, but probably wow, probably the most probably one of the most valuable lessons I've learned by, by having gone through it. And it was about a five to six year technology gap.”

Brennan Marilla

“When I started out, I was making no money. I had an entry level job wire cable company, a thousand people upstate New York get in there and I, they, there's a four page newsletter and they say, Gary, you know, this is, you gotta publish this every month. It was bowling scores and all this other stuff. And I started walking around the mill and I realized within, you know, two or three months, it's like nobody talks to each other. These people hate leadership. Leadership doesn't like them. There was a union involved. There was strikes every two years. And so I did two things which changed the company. I, I basically redesigned the newsletter to be. We, we sent it to the home instead of just distributing it. We became 12 pages. I talked about the business, I talked about competition, talked about the marketplace, how we priced products.”

“I gave profiles to people. I took pictures. I mean, we, we were, we were producing 3,000 copies for a 1,000 person workforce because people wanted extra. And then the other thing I did is I got a grant from the federal mediation and conciliation service to, to form a labor management committee. I was 22 years old and the Labor Management Committee was, was every month we sat down outside of the contract, 12 union people, 12 management people on each side of the table. And we talked about everything but the contract, safety, communications, you know, not, you know, all the things outside quality. And within what maybe 18 months they signed their first six year contract. They, there was no more this side was labor. They, they were actually intermingling. They were, we had holiday parties together. We broke the barrier because we discovered each other. I was only 22. I'm not saying I'm smart, I'm just saying all, all I'm saying is communications can, can do that.”

Gary Grates

“It's a lesson I'd learned later, but I think, I wish I had known it earlier. And that is that every person that comes into your life has something to give you. And you've gotta be humble enough and open enough to acknowledge that and to receive it and to, to see people as sort of opportunities to learn and to grow that they have something to give you. And if you haven't figured it out, that's on you. You need to keep, you need to figure it out. I think I missed a lot of opportunities and didn't take advantage of them in the way they should because I didn't understand just the importance of people in your life and that they have something to give.”

Abner Mason

“Businesses are in a position where they can help regardless of industry. And it's just as long as it's aligned with your values, it's aligned with what your employees believe in, what your CEO, what your executives believe in, it can be beneficial. You say we're not Patagonia, why can't we be Patagonia? Yeah, you're right. We're not Patagonia, we we don't make clothing, we make medicines, but that doesn't mean that we can't go beyond what we're doing from a medicine standpoint, as you rightly pointed out. Why not? Why can't you? And I think it's just, it's broadening the thinking and really digging in to think about what your brand is, not only internally, but what it means externally and what you're putting out there. And I think that saying we're not is obviously an obstacle. And I'm always asking people why, why, why can't we do that? Who else do we need to involve? Why, why can't we have these crazy ideas?”

Geoff Curtis

Conclusion 

It’s been incredible to interview leaders in marketing, communications, branding in the world of healthcare and learn from their experiences. I hope you've enjoyed this special episode and took away something that can help you build your brands and your career.

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Ways I can help you:

1. Subscribe to Healthy Brand Mondays: Leverage brand thinking to accelerate your growth

2. Download free guides and tools: Learn from my years of experience as a brand strategist

3. Work with me: Be a podcast guest or hire my services for your brand

Unleashing the Power of Consumer Marketing & Branding in Health Care with Carrie Lewis

Read time: 5.5 min

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What happens when a consumer marketing veteran gets into health care? Expect drama, sparks, and transformation.

Carrie Lewis is a lifelong marketer in the consumer space, leading marketing for global brands like Sherwin Williams and Stanley Black and Decker. Most recently she pivoted and became a CMO at Metro Health System in Cleveland. Today, she works as a fractional CMO as part of Chief Outsiders. In our conversation a few weeks ago, we get real about what it was like to take her marketing chops into health care and her counter intuitive strategies she uses to turn around and generate $2 Bn in revenue for a struggling community hospital system.

EP. 11 Unleashing the Power of Consumer Marketing & Branding in Health Care with Carrie Lewis

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In this episode, we cover off on a variety of tips and topics:

• As a new CMO, start with curiosity, humility, and share why you are there

• Use the power of personal stories to give patients hope

• Health care organizations typically have marketing carved out - that needs to change

• Show the executive team what is marketing, never tell them

• Be a cheerleader for the CEO and help them reach their goals

• Close the great divide in provider organizations through marketing and watch the culture improve

• Take the first 100 days to digest all research and learn everything you can

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KEY LESSONS

Embed marketing and branding into the entire organization, bringing together the “great divide”

Marketing is typically seen as a peripheral function. Especially for health care organizations, and companies, whose leadership are typically clinically trained or grew up in finance and operations. Carrie contrasted that to her experience in consumer brands.

“Everyone is thinking marketing from the CEO down about value proposition for this opportunity. Who are our biggest customers? They are constantly listening and have their finger on the pulse on the company, the community, and their customers.”

When Carrie arrived at Metro Health System, she observed an issue which was front and center “Health care leaders leave marketing to just marketing. It's a separate thing. You go to them when you need something creative or a new flyer posted, and that is the least of what marketing is.” My perspective is that this doesn’t only exist in health care providers, it’s pervasive within the health care industry.

The other important observation is the “great divide” between clinicians and leadership, where the power struggle between groups lead to contempt and an extremely misaligned organization, which is almost always felt by the employees, the community, and the patients. Carrie found a way to bring them together by heavily highlighting the physicians as the individuals and the service leaders that they were. It created trust and bolstered employee culture, which started to bring the two groups together. Moving from a world of “what can you do for me” to “what can we do together”.

Personal stories are incredibly powerful, they bring hope to patients and can rally an organization

Carrie Lewis and late husband Andrew in a cab going from New York to Columbia for chemo.

Carrie’s story about why she entered the health care industry as a marketing executive is extremely personal. “I was with Sherwin Williams as Vice President of marketing for their consumer brands channel, and he had passed away when I was there. When you lose your husband at 40, you need a moment. A moment to reflect. A moment to digest that. I took a year off… I did anything physical I could to have silent moments of just pure reflection - where did I go wrong? What could I have done better? Like divine intervention, I got a call from a local hospital… they said, help, we need a real marketer.”

And when she started, she was incredibly humble, curious, and shared her story with physicians and leaders of the health system, “I'm here because I want people that were in my situation to be able to know exactly what this team can deliver them, and they don't”

 When asked what was THE thing that health care organizations are missing out on in terms of branding and marketing, Carrie didn’t hesitate – hopeful patient stories.

“I really truly believe that my job as a caregiver to Andrew and what got him from two years to 10 years was his endless idea that there was hope. I needed him to have a placebo of hope wrapped around him. Stories shed light on very specific human experiences that the healthcare enterprise has with patients… Those are stories and messages of hope that individuals, caregivers, and patients that are ill cling to.”

She also acknowledges how hard it is, but that’s why these stories are special.

“Writing those stories, having that amount of content to constantly generate and produce, get them into the right platforms so that people can find them. That's a marketer's nightmare. But that's what needs to be done and that's why it's not being done”

Gain trust from the executive team and get more budget for marketing by showing, not telling

As a new CMO to a team that doesn’t get marketing and branding, you don’t start educating folks.

“Show them. Don't tell them a thing. I'm a huge advocate of pay by the drink funding. You carve out a little bit of funding, you do something, you show incredible return… After a while, your CEO comes to you and says, how much money do you need to make this incredible return even more incredible?”

And a secret strategy Carrie use is to make sure she allocates a percentage of her priorities to achieving the goals of the CEO.

“Your number one job is to be the CEO’s cheerleader. So what I secretly do is to divide myself by maybe 80/20 making sure the CEO’s goals are being delivered, that’s my 20%”

If she is faced with big negative voices, Carrie runs toward them, instead of avoiding them, an effective but counter intuitive tactic.

“A squeaky wheel that hates marketing? You're my first guy. Because when you flip that guy and he goes, oh my God, marketing generated 30% new patient prospects for me. That guy starts to tell your story, and every single department chair comes to you”

There is no marketing hack – results require a stringent process and an ecosystem of tactics

When talking to Carrie, I asked her about her process and what she tends to do first in every engagement. And while she feels that every project is different, she follows a familiar approach. It all starts with data and insights.

“In my first free 100 days before they can fire me…is insights, complete saturation of insights, customer insights, every single patient insight. I want data, I wanna understand the competitors. I wanna understand every single thing that they're bringing to market. Anything that they've talked about bringing to the market. Their ups and downs, their weaknesses, their specialties. I wanna understand our company. So I meet with every single senior leader executive to try to understand their purpose"

Next, she dives into strategy development, understanding the market place and the opportunities for growth before them. After that, it’s getting into positioning and all the foundational branding elements right. The last step is activating on the tactics, and this is where Carrie offered up a story as a green marketer putting her all her eggs in one tactic, thinking it would be the unlock to revenue growth, but alas, a costly mistake.

“It was a very expensive, I mean, this would be a year to create all of this data and content… it’s horrible, I think it was like $380,000 of iPads”

Conclusion 

If you want to get the behind the scenes look at how a consumer marketer sees health care and the strategies and stories of how she helped generate a whopping $2Bn in revenue for a struggling health system, download and listen!

Learn more about Carrie:

-        LinkedIn

-        Chief Outsiders

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Ways I can help you:

1. Subscribe to Healthy Brand Mondays: Leverage brand thinking to accelerate your growth

2. Download free guides and tools: Learn from my years of experience as a brand strategist

3. Work with me: Be a podcast guest or hire my services for your brand

The Untold Truths in Strategic Communications & Business Transformation with Gary Grates

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What comes to mind when you hear the word communications? When people hear “communications”, they might think PR or they might think of it as a non-critical function. But they could not be more wrong…

In this interview with Gary Grates, a globally renown strategic communications expert and C-suite whisperer who has worked with the world’s biggest brands from Pfizer to United Airlines, we uncover the hidden truths in the world of comms and business transformation. This episode will change the way you build company brands forever.

EP. 10 The Untold Truths in Strategic Communications & Business Transformation with Gary Grates

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In this episode, we cover off on a variety of topics:

• Communications is not just about communications, it’s everything

• Business transformation often fails, start with the brand in mind, not the business

• Forget your title to determine what is the real problem to solve

• Never let your job description stop you from doing what the business needs

• When working with the c-suite, stop selling and start listening

• Careers are not a vertical progression, careers are for learning

• Develop a point of view or be replaceable

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KEY LESSONS

Communications will fail if it’s just about communications

Everything communicates. This is something that stuck in my head after talking with Gary. If you want something to be successful, you need to communicate well.

“Communications touches everything. You could have the cure for cancer. You could be the smartest dude on the planet. If you can't connect and communicate and convey and listen and interact and collaborate. It doesn't matter. All that stuff doesn't matter. We (communicators) are the oxygen that keeps life moving.”

Gary tells a story in the podcast episode about his first job as a communicator, in charge of an internal newsletter. Instead of just being a newsletter editor, he used that as a vehicle to bring manufacturing and management together, changing the way business was conducted and the atmosphere of the company. Think about that for a second – from owning a newsletter, to changing the entire culture of the company. That’s communications.

To perform this type of miracle, Gary was adamant that you can’t stay in the lane of communications, you need to understand the entire company.

“A lot of communications people feel, oh I don't belong there. I was in manufacturing meetings, design meetings, brand meetings… I wanted to be in every freaking meeting. You’ve got to finagle your way into the conversation. That’s the only way you’re gonna make a difference.”

He also talks about how if communication is left to just communicators, it will all fall apart. It should really be the core of any leadership team.

“Purpose can get lost quickly when you leave it to just the communications people. We're not here to communicate for the company. We're here to help the company communicate.”

Start business transformation with the brand in mind, not the business

Gary has helped many businesses transform and his advice? Start with the brand. How is the transformation going to impact the purpose, identity, and the people? Then align the business against that.

“We have always looked at business transformation, again, through the lens of the business side, the financial side, the operational side, the structural side. And 70% of business transformations fail. And they fail because we start there. But if you start with the brand identity, which nobody does in business transformation. Here's who we and what we are. Here's our relevance, here's our reputation, here's our promise, here's our identity. Here are the things that we've done with all our key stakeholders over the years to establish our personality. Now let's talk about what do we have to do as a business to ensure that that's still gonna happen, that's still relevant. Then the transformation becomes much clearer.”

It's counter-intuitive because most of the executives in charge of transforming the business aren’t trained in communications or brand. This is the exact conversation I had with David Aaker in Episode 8 where branding is usually never mentioned in disruptive innovation or social program discussions, because executives aren’t trained in these disciplines. They are usually operations or finance trained. Gary laments:

“I think it comes down to sheer ignorance. And I don't mean that people aren't smart. That's not what I mean. These people are very smart. I'm talking about ignorance about communication. I sent an email, I communicated. I put a poster up, I communicated, I created a logo, I branded my company. I created a theme, I gave my company some type of personality”

And so our job is to insert ourselves into transformation meetings to positively alter the trajectory.

Forget your job description to figure out the problem to solve

If you approach your work as a communicator, as a branding person, you’re going to miss the boat. Because if all you have is a hammer, everything becomes a nail. You might be focusing on something that is not helpful to the business. Gary shares his experience in his first company:

“We were focusing on the numbers, and we weren't focusing on how to get the numbers. How to get the numbers was the people, how to get the numbers was the process, how to get the numbers was the priority. That's how you got the numbers. But we focused on the numbers. We were up, we were down, we were sideways.”

Often, when communicators are brought to the table, leaders may think it’s a communications problem, but if we approach it as a neutral participant, we might start to realize it’s anything but.

“Start with what are you trying to solve? That's number one. Cause that's basically altruistic, that doesn't take sides. That doesn't go after it as a brand issue or communications issue. Is it a communications problem? If everything's a communications problem, you're chasing symptoms. I see this in politics. It's a communications problem, no, no, no, the policy sucks. The communications people should be working with leadership to figure out how they need to reconstruct the policy or the decision”

His personal experience is a very powerful reminder that if you’re looking out for your company, you can be sure your job will never be limited and you will be valued.

“I never looked at a job description in my life. Never did. Even at GM. My goal was to figure out what we were, what the company needed and any company that I worked with, it was never about - you're only supposed to do these things, you report to that person. I never let that get in the way.”

When working with the C-suite, stop selling and start listening

As a C-suite whisperer, I couldn’t forego the opportunity to ask Gary how he approached the highest levels in an organization. He has two specific pieces of advice for folks like me:

Number One: Listen intently

“One is - always listen intently. Cause you're trying to figure out what they're saying, but also what they're not saying. You're trying to look for the shadow behind the person.”

Number Two: Never go in with an answer

“Never go in with an answer. Always go in with a set of questions. Everybody wants to be a hero with the CEO. Everybody wants to go in and say - I think we should do this. I've never done that. I've always gone in, as I said before ask, how smart and engaged do you want your people to be? Where do you see the organization? You guys have been changing so much over the last five years. Can you tell me what business you're in? I mean, having provocative questions that stop the CEO in a way that says, Hey, this, this person's paying attention.”

And never sell them, instead have a conversation and see where it goes.

“CEOs hate salesmen. And yet so many people go in with a PowerPoint. I've yet to see a CEO react to a PowerPoint. It's always the discussion. You want to have a conversation and walk away where you can say, hey, there's a mind meld here, let's see what we can do.”

There is so much more to our conversation, and this is one of those episodes where there will be something new every time you listen to it. It’s jam packed with learnings from decades of experience in the field of strategic corporate communications. I really do hope you enjoy it and it changes the way you build your company brands, making them the healthiest brands on the planet.

Learn more about Gary:

-        LinkedIn

-        Website

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3. Work with me: Be a podcast guest or hire my services for your brand

A Framework for Getting What You (Your Company) Wants

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Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) is a goal setting and management tool created by Andy Grove at Intel and taught to John Doerr. Doerr coined the term OKR and was the one who introduced the philosophy to Google’s founders in 1999.

Since then, many companies have adopted the OKR model to simplify and clarify what they were doing and how they are going to get there.

So what are the components of an OKR?

The model is simple -

1. Objective

   An objective is what you need achieved over the course of a year or even longer term. They should be significant, concrete, and aspirational. It serves to align a company, department, or for individuals.

2. Key Results

   What needs to happen? Key results are specific, timebound (usually a quarter), aggressive, and measurable/ verifiable. As work progressed, they can be revisited and restated.

Each set of OKRs should be held accountable by one person, and each key result can be assigned to another accountable individual if appropriate. As long as it brings clarity to who is doing what to reach the OKRs, the framework is doing its job.

WHY OKRs?

There are many benefits to use this framework, and John Doerr always talk about the five that matters:

F.A.C.T.S.

Focus: OKRs help a team to do a few things really well instead of a lot of things poorly

Alignment: OKRs, when used across the organization, points everyone in the same direction that is critical to execute on the business and brand strategy

Commitment: OKRs push teams and individuals to sign up for specific outcomes, sticking to the agreed upon priorities

Tracking: OKRs are meant to track progress and uncover when tactics need to be changed instead of failing at the “end”

Stretching: OKRs help teams do more and aim for something bigger. And because OKRs are not tied to compensation, sandbagging is not as prevalent, allowing the organization to make more significant progress and changes.

THE FRAMEWORK

If I were to write an OKR for this blog post, it would this:

This is a simple framework for crafting OKRs, but as you can see, we can make it clearer and more measurable:

• How many benefits?

• How many common mistakes?

• How long should the post be?

As with any framework, it takes practice to fill it up and make it as useful as possible.

EXAMPLES

In this example, I show how a high-level objective of the CEO can get translated down to each of the department heads. The objective to “Serve as many patients as possible for as long as possible” becomes a rallying cry for the rest of the organization, and the Key Results of the CEOs in turn become the Objective for the management team members.

You can easily imagine how it can go as many levels as it needs to go to penetrate the entire organization. What is your specific objective if you are Brand Strategist working for the CMO who works for the CCO?

Another example is for a Chief Marketing Officer responsible for a rebrand effort.

You can have more than 3 Key Results and you probably guessed that bigger objectives will probably have more of them than very specific objectives.

COMMON MISTAKES

Writing OKRs can take time to develop and every set of OKRs should have some sort of a feedback and iterative process so everyone is absolutely committed.

Here are a few mistakes to avoid

• Too many objectives (aim for no more than five)

• OKRs written in jargon that no one understands (they should all be self-evident when it has or hasn’t been achieved)

• Treating OKRs as KPIs (Key performance indicators, or KPIs are measures of “health”, and not an management framework for change)

• Status quo OKRs (OKRs are meant for boosting the business above what’s commonly done)

I hope you start to use OKRs in your business and in your team. It should help bring clarity and a sense of commitment to something meaningful. And remember that if you/ your team fail to reach certain Key Results, it’s meant as input to refine the next set of OKRs - it should never be seen as a failure. If it is seen as a failure, then the organization will start to “sandbag” and aim lower and lower each time there is an OKR exercise.

Ways I can help you:

1. Subscribe to Healthy Brand Mondays: Leverage brand thinking to accelerate your growth

2. Download free guides and tools: Learn from my years of experience as a brand strategist

3. Work with me: Be a podcast guest or hire my services for your brand

Brand Activation Clock Model

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When people think about brand activation, it is usually restricted to advertising. That’s significantly under-leveraging the power of branding.

One of the most powerful frameworks you can use to fully capture the branding opportunity is using the Clock Model.

Professor Scott Galloway of NYU has taught the Clock Model in his brand strategy classes for years and here I will dissect it in the lens of a health care brand.

The model is simple - three segments of the clock

1. Pre-purchase

2. Purchase

3. Post-purchase

I’ll walk through the model using a fictional health care brand, selling a sleep apnea prevention device that has to be prescribed by a physician called SLEEPZ.

PRE-PURCHASE

In this section of the clock model, it’s all about prospecting and nurturing, getting potential customers (physicians and patients) to learn about the device, consider its use, and make a purchasing decision.

For SLEEPZ, they are thinking of targeting consumers and for this section of the clock, they will be using digital ads on sleep apnea related articles. For paid search, they will focus on key words that allude to potential customers looking for a solution beyond CPAP machines. In addition, they will be working with a handful of micro-influencers who have sleep apnea and will be reviewing the device. Their compelling content will help to spread the word in the social sphere.

Since one of the micro-influencers has a really interesting story, it will be pitched to a local TV station in hopes for potential coverage.

All these activities are usually considered marketing and communications, and the extent of branding typically ends here.

PURCHASE

SLEEPZ however, wasn’t going to stop at pre-purchase. They are a #HealthyBrand! 😎

In order to get more physicians to experience SLEEPZ, they have an onsite hands-on demo program at a sleep apnea center of excellence for any physician that is affiliated with a clinic who has decided to sign a contract with SLEEPZ.

For consumers, there is a quick insurance checker on the website to see if their insurance covers the device and for those who want to skip going to a trained physician at a clinic, they can opt for an e-appointment and get a prescription that way.

Purchasing a medical device has never been this smooth…

POST-PURCHASE

This part of the clock is about creating brand loyalty. After the purchase is complete, most companies forget that they have a captured audience to build true fans.

SLEEPZ understands this. Once a physician has signed the contract, they are immediately signed up to a high-touch training and onboarding program, espousing the values and beliefs of the brand through the way its scheduled, executed, and followed-up. No note-taking required, everything is available through a portal and an app, all feedback recorded and pushed to their dashboards, which also acts as an inventory management system, ordering new products, promotional materials and even a way to customize social posts.

For patients, unboxing the device revels the Apple experience and a smart phone app walks them through how it works with an AR experience. The device is controlled through the app as well, simply designed and delightful to use.

Companies and brands don’t have to invest resources in all of the segments. In fact, most brands don’t.

I hope this clock model serves you well, as you build the healthiest brands on the planet.

Ways I can help you:

1. Subscribe to Healthy Brand Mondays: Leverage brand thinking to accelerate your growth

2. Download free guides and tools: Learn from my years of experience as a brand strategist

3. Work with me: Be a podcast guest or hire my services for your brand

The Only Thing That Matters in a Story

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Storytelling has been making its way through the business world in the past decade.

In marketing, in communications, in every facet of the professional realm, we hear about using story to convey our ideas. While there are many frameworks out there, it doesn’t have to be complicated.

The frameworks for storytelling are plenty:

1. The Rags-to-Riches framework

2. The Big Idea framework

3. The Story Cycle framework

4. The Hero’s Journey framework

5. The Pixar’s Once upon a time framework

6. The Mountain framework

7. The Nested Loops framework

8. The In Medias Res framework

9. The Converging Ideas framework

10. The Petal Structure framework

11. The False Start framework

Wow. That’s a lot of frameworks. Maybe you want to spend the time to learn every one of them and figure out which one to use when, but maybe you don’t.

If you do, just google them and find out more! But if you don’t read on…

Storytelling can be simple

The simplest story can be conveyed in a few words. Six word stories do just that:

For sale: baby shoes, never worn

He got diagnosed, I got married

Together, they whispered, only one jumped

Why do these simple stories work? They make you feel something. You want to find out the meaning behind those words. Your brain almost immediately concocts an entire story to make that statement true.

But how these simple stories do that? It introduces a gap in the mind. How? Why? When? A gap is what’s between an expectation and a result. Your mind can’t help itself even if it tried…

We are meaning making machines

The human mind is made to fill gaps. Its basic function is to make meaning from the data it receives. A simple example of this is how the mind fills the gap of our literal blind spot or the way it tries to make out animals in the clouds or faces on the surface of Mars!

Image courtesy of https://www.smithsonianmag.com/

By introducing gaps in your narrative, you move the audience to engage, to lean forward. This is inevitable because that’s how the human mind works. It wants to see patterns, it wants to make meaning out of data. And that’s how you get your audience to engage, introduce a gap.

The power of the gap

By introducing a gap, your brain just can’t help but want to close it. Why do you think you spend hours everyday consuming reels and videos? Gaps are extremely evident in today’s “viral” videos and social media posts:

After reading 100 books on stories, this is the ONE thing that matters

The three things I changed to go from breaking even to 6 digit profit

The 5 health foods no one is talking about

This is truly the only thing you need in your arsenal when telling a story. Sure, does it help to have a storyline, characters, inciting incidents, showdowns, resolutions? Of course! But when all else is getting complicated, just focus on introducing gaps at every stage.

Our healthcare experience is terrible, and it’s a complicated mess

But we think we’ve cracked the puzzle and it doesn’t take millions of dollars

In fact, it gives back millions. Let us show you how…

I hit the send button and I realized I made a grave mistake

Sweat beaded on my forehead and my hairs stood on ends

Was it too late?

Practice the gap everyday

In your social posts, in your pitch decks, for your kids and your friends, practice introducing gaps in your stories. Make your audience want to lean in and complete that gap.

It doesn’t have to be complicated, it doesn’t have to take a lot of time. It just takes some thoughtful application of the concept.

Good luck story tellers!

Ways I can help you:

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2. Download free guides and tools: Learn from my years of experience as a brand strategist

3. Work with me: Be a podcast guest or hire my services for your brand

Is Branding Really Necessary in the World of Healthcare?

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Branding is not just design and pretty colors. It is aligning, designing, and consistently executing the visual, verbal, and experiential components to create a desired feeling and perception. In other words, branding is how you build a brand.

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED ON BRANDINGMAG

Sure, it applies to consumer-focused industries like apparel, beer, and packaged goods, where decisions to purchase are typically made on a whim, and the consequence of making a wrong decision is small.

But what about healthcare? An industry where there are ample facts and figures, where it’s heavily regulated by government institutions, where clinical evidence is needed for approval, where decisions can have life and death consequences? Surely, branding has no place in healthcare.

Let’s look at healthcare facilities and clinicians. Do they need a brand? Shouldn’t consumers just go to a physician recommended by another physician? Or pick one closest to their home and in their provider network?

It is not just about facts and figures when it comes to consumers choosing where to receive care

In a Press Ganey Research Report on consumer experience trends in healthcare, where they surveyed 1,000+ consumers in September of 2021, they found that most consumers (84% of those surveyed) would be unlikely to see a provider with less than four stars even if another provider had referred them. Reviews are important, but they also found that incomplete listings, outdated websites, and lack of online scheduling options were also reasons consumers cited as discouraging when looking to book appointments.

In a separate consumer survey by McKinsey & Company, respondents were asked about where they learned about the quality of a clinician or facility and 37% said they searched online and 31% visited the hospital or physician’s website. They also found that proximity appears to be more of a “nice-to-have” option. Most respondents would choose lower-cost or high-quality options over options that were higher-cost and more convenient.

Healthcare systems and practices need to show up consistently and put their best self forward for consumers to find them, understand them and schedule with them. And when consumers have many options to choose from, branding becomes even more important. How do you stand out?

Maybe healthcare facilities and clinicians need to pay attention to their brand and branding strategy because consumers are involved, but when it comes to deciding on a treatment option, isn’t it up to clinicians and doctors?

Consumers are more empowered to make treatment decisions for themselves

It is not entirely up to the doctor when deciding on a treatment. In a Deloitte 2020 survey of US Health Care Consumers, they found that most consumers (80%) are comfortable telling their doctors when they disagree with them. It also reported a general trend that consumers are becoming increasingly active and engaged in their health care. So, even if you may question the Pharma industry for spending billions of dollars on direct-to-consumer marketing and branding, the fact is you cannot forget about the consumer audience. They are only going to be more empowered to make decisions as the onslaught of sensors, at-home diagnostics, and other digital health solutions continue. Branding is only going to help them understand why your product is different and how your product can help them with their health.

What about clinicians and doctors? Surely the decisions they are making are purely evidence-based and squishy feelings have nothing to do with it?

Sentiment and feelings do play a role when doctors are making clinical decisions

Sorry to burst your bubble, but it turns out that emotion and sentiment do come into play when doctors make clinical decisions. In a study by MIT computer scientists, feelings and sentiment scores were correlated with the number of diagnostic imaging tests across a collection of medical records from 60,000 intensive care unit patients over a 10-year period. The researchers found that the doctors’ “gut feelings” had a significant role in how many tests they ordered for the patient.

“Clearly the physicians are using something that is not in the data to drive part of their decision making,” Alhanai (a lead author of the paper) says. “What’s important is that some of those unseen effects are reflected by their sentiment.”

There are probably a thousand other scenarios we can explore about different types of decisions and actions in the world of healthcare, but we should understand the common denominator here.

It’s us. We are humans.

Humans do not experience the world objectively and that is why brands and branding exist

It comes down to the fact that humans rely on mental models and pattern recognition to make decisions and navigate the world. In a Forbes article about the neuroscience of branding, our mental model is explained through a simple example of the blind spot. All of us are partially blind, yes, we all have a blind spot where the optic nerve meets the retina, but none of us notices it. The brain fills it in with visual information using a mental model. Our experience of sight is not an objective fact.

It’s this mental model that explains how branding affects beliefs and how beliefs can translate to real outcomes and how we operate as humans. Some researchers from Penn State were studying how brand perceptions can make a difference in performance in 2016 and had some interesting results. In an experiment, participants wore earplugs to minimize distractions and improve concentration while completing a math test. Half of the participants wore unbranded earplugs and half believed they were wearing 3M earplugs. The branded group answered more questions correctly.

The key takeaway here is that as long as we are humans making decisions, behaving, and performing based on mental models and perceptions, branding and brands have a role to play, regardless of industry vertical.

So, yes, branding is necessary in the world of healthcare, over and beyond the clinical evidence, the facts and figures required to demonstrate safety, efficacy, and proof.

Use branding to create the desired feeling, perception, and mental model in the minds of your audiences

Whether it’s a hospital facility trying to attract clinicians of the future, a life science company battling for top talent, a next-generation treatment trying to gain adoption in the physician community, or a digital health app vying for downloads and engagement, branding is essential.

It’s essential to deliver a consistent promise at every touch point, so the doctor, the nurse, the patient, and the consumer have a mental model of your company, product, or service and decide to become a user, a prescriber, an employee and a fan over everyone else they can choose from.

Ways I can help you:

1. Subscribe to Healthy Brand Mondays: Leverage brand thinking to accelerate your growth

2. Download free guides and tools: Learn from my years of experience as a brand strategist

3. Work with me: Be a podcast guest or hire my services for your brand

Develop and deliver messaging that doesn't suck

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Messaging is a core deliverable for any marketer and communicator, but from what I’ve seen over the past two decades, they typically suck.

The process is terrible and usually involves some kind of aimless brainstorm.

I recently sat down with a friend to help him figure out how to run a messaging workshop and develop the messages needed for a healthcare Startup’s Series A funding announcement. And from there, it spurred me to pull together my best exercises and frameworks.

Download the six exercises and frameworks including examples free of charge!

But also checkout the conversation between Anthony and I below:

Full transcript here:

Anthony:

Basically I'm working with a healthcare investment management firm. A VC firm. And what ends up happening is we end up doing a lot of work sort of off the cuff for some of their like early stage portfolio companies who don't have, you know, any like comms infrastructure. So one of these portfolio companies in particular is we're releasing like their Series A announcement next week.

Howie:

Yeah.

Anthony:

And you know, the client brought up that you know, they'd like to have sort of a messaging brainstorm for them to sort of, you know, get the brand messaging down.

Howie:

I think when you go about messaging, it's almost like one step after you’ve gotten the foundation of the brand down. Right. So I think the, the key question to always ask is, do you have a good handle on their positioning? Which is, you know, how are they different and how are they relevant basically. The key component. So if you think about anybody in their ecosystem from a competitor standpoint or within their category, you know, do they have a good idea of how they're different, right. What's their secret sauce, if you will, that they're different? And then what problem are they solving? So from a relevance perspective, what is that pain that they're taking away? So if, if you feel like, whether it's explicitly written down or intuitively they have a good sense of what that is. Yeah. You can do messaging. But if you don't have, that is very hard to come down to a set of messages, because what you'll find is then you'll just get a collection of stuff.

Anthony:

Right.

Howie:

And they want to say everything. It's very hard to then narrow down and prioritize what's important and what's not.

Anthony:

Yeah.

Howie:

So I would say if you feel like they don't have that, whether it's intuitively or explicitly written down, like what is again, the, the secret sauce, the, the superpower, if you will, that's differentiating. And then what's the pain point that they're really trying to solve for? You might wanna start the messaging brainstorm just to, just to focus on that, because that's really the strategy, right? The positioning, what are you trying to own? And then from there, I would say, when you think about messaging, I always think about it again, you know, this is how I do it, you know, it's, it's not necessarily right. I think about it in two parts. One is the things that you're trying to say. So the what. And then when are you gonna say it? I would focus on the what first.

Howie:

So literally when you think about brainstorming… all the stuff that you wanna say, everything. Put 'em on stickies, you know, a virtual white board, whatever. I dunno how you're doing it, but map them out on a two by two matrix. So again, back to relevance and differentiation, those are the two axes. So high relevance, high differentiation. That's what you want. Those are the drivers. Those are the, all that you wanna say should live there. Yeah. Then there's gonna be high relevance, low differentiation that's table stake stuff. That's like anybody in a category would say, because that's table stake, things that you need to just say, you know, to play. And then there's gonna be ones where, you know, high differentiation, but low relevance that's Koolaid, Koolaid. Right. So they think it's so awesome, but then the customers or whoever, they don't really care about that. I don't really care. They get into the nitty degree stuff. That’s not a benefit that anybody would care about. Then, you know, don't say it, it doesn't matter. Then of course the irrelevant and non-differentiated. Dude, don't even put them on a messaging matrix. That's you know, don't talk about that. Yeah. The idea is once you brain dump all the stickies, all the stuff you wanna say, look at the stuff that's in the highly relevant and highly differentiating category, then you start the cluster, right. What are the themes that start to emerge? I'm sure. You know, for a biotech or a science company, it's always gonna be some sort of technology or research science focus cluster, perhaps there's gonna be a people cluster the type of people, expertise, cluster, and then maybe it's a process.

Howie:

How do they get to the drug or how do they get their treatment cluster? So again, depending on what they put down, you'll find these clusters, right? So that becomes your pillar of messaging. So that's the, what, the one, the, what is done then now comes the, when, when do you say this stuff? So you can think about that as like, you know, look at it from the target audience perspective, right? Who, who are they? Who are they targeting to say this? Sometimes it's a broad audience sometimes specific, but then the key thing is how do we move them from current state to desired state? So they can be a belief that can be what, you know, just like, where are we starting a conversation with these people? Yeah. For some companies that's literally creating a totally new category, like something they haven't even thought about before.

Howie:

So they, they don't even know the problem. So you need to start at here, the problem <laugh> right. Yeah. So that the, when, so, so you start piecing together messages that you found that was relevant and differentiating, and then start to populate this journey from current state to desired state. Right. So if it's the problem, if it's, you know, talk about your offering and then talk about how you can engage with 'em again, just start laying them out in terms of the, when that can give you then, you know, both the architecture for pillars, but also how do you bring them into your world, right? Yeah. A lot of times you can't just start, Hey, this is our platform, da, da, da, what are you talking about? Who are you, what are you talking about? Like, what's the problem? What are we solving here? What's the current state? So those are the three sort of components when I think about messaging. So I hope that was helpful. And we can talk about this more.

Anthony:

Question. Super helpful, super helpful. I think, I guess, you know, one area that I'm struggling with a little bit is, you know, yeah. Obviously, right, like you, you mentioned it earlier, like a biotech company, they're gonna have a lot of this, like really technical jargon and, you know, descriptors of what they're doing. And it's like, how does that sort of fit in to what you were like, you were just saying like the broader brand messaging. Yeah. You know, because I think it's like, we don't, I don't want, I don't want their message architecture to be like super technical. But also there is this piece where it's like, they need to sort of explain to certain stakeholders what it is that they're actually doing, you know? Yeah.

Howie:

What you can do is if you feel like sometimes it comes up organically, sometimes it doesn't. So once you do the two by two matrix, right? Like they put all the stuff they wanna say, and let's say, there's this cluster of, you know, the technical stuff, the science. Right. And if you look at all the sticky, all the stuff that, that has, dude, you would look at it. It's like, it's so deep. There's no benefit. There's nothing that ladders up to something broader. Then you probably need to do a specific exercise on that. So, guys, if you look at this science stuff, nobody will understand what you're saying because it's so deep. So then you go through the exercise of asking the why, so why does this matter? Why does this matter? Why does this matter? You keep asking why does this, why does this matter until you get at a higher enough, you know, messaging that anybody would understand. Oh yeah, I get it. And then this is how you do it. You go down the, I mean, so you, you sort of build it up. And then from a messaging standpoint, you can start at the higher level one. And if you wanna learn more, boom, boom, boom.

Anthony:

Boom. Gotcha.

Howie:

Yeah.

Anthony:

Perfect. And so as far as like, you know, I like what you say about the, the sticky notes and things like that. And that was one thing. And I'm, I'm, again, I'm sort of forgetting exactly how we did it, but I do remember like, you did a really good job at that. Right. Like sort of, having an exercise for everyone that was in the room, which I thought was great because it made sort of more of an interactive environment instead of like people just sitting there staring at us, like talking the whole time. Right. Yeah.

Howie:

Yeah. So, so if you are going be in a room with them, absolutely. So it depends on how many people in a room, what sort of expertise, you know, if it's cross-functional groups, you know, they can just, actually, it doesn't really matter. Like they can just get a packet of stickies and just go. So one idea, one message for each sticky and just put it up there, put it up. So basically what you have is a big poster that has that grid, the two by two and that's it. And then they can just go and put their stuff on. Then when they're done, that's when you, actually, what I do is when they start putting those stuff on, I already start to move things and cluster things. When people start to put things down, I start to move them around. And then that's also sometimes a good time for all of them to take a bio break, you know, five minutes. Whenever they come back, then you walk them through what you’ve found. Like this is all the clusters. And then you start to push like really, is this really differentiating? Is this really relevant? And then you work with them to move things around so that you end up with these clusters, right?

Anthony:

Yeah. That's super helpful. I will definitely try that.

Howie:

Yeah.

Anthony:

Great. Yeah. And I mean, if you have any other like so basically with the sticky notes, the prompt is just to say, like, you're asking them the very simple question of how are you guys different? How are you guys relevant? Yeah. Is that, are there, are there other prompts?

Howie:

Basically all the things that you wanna say, what do you wanna say? Yeah. You can start from like your function. What area do you represent? What do you wanna say? Sometimes it's good to prime them up front to say, all right, these are your target audiences, right? Like this, this is your target audiences. This is their world. If, if you guys have any research or any persona stuff, it is always good to kind of just get grounded in. Alright. You sort of folks that you're trying to influence. Yep. This is what they're thinking about. This is what they care about. These are their pains. These are the gains, right? Like anything to ground them to make that exercise better. Right. Okay. So again, like for, for me, when I, when I, when I worked with clients to build this stuff, I would've really gone through all the all the positioning work. Like again, like, what is your secret sauce? What is differentiating? Yeah. What is positioning and all that before we even get to messaging. But it doesn't mean you can't do this exercise cuz I think, you know, it's just good to even align on that. Anyway, you sometimes going through this exercise, you can find out, oh, this is something that everybody rallies around. That that is the thing that could be, can be that cornerstone for the company, you know? Okay.

Howie:

Yeah. Cause it's always good to ask them. Like if there's only one thing you can say, there's like these five clusters of stuff, what is the one thing, if there's, you can only say one thing, you know, to, to, to your audiences, like what would you say? What

Anthony:

Which would you say? Yeah. Yeah.

Howie:

Doesn't mean that's the only thing that you say forever, but that's the first thing that you would say what's the most important, right? Cause again, messaging is always about hierarchy.

Anthony:

Yeah.

Howie:

Like people can always drill down, but if you start at the bottom, you lose. I mean, nobody's gonna wanna learn

Anthony:

Anything. Exactly. Exactly.

Howie:

<Laugh>

Anthony:

Okay. But yeah, I mean, this is just, it's, it's an art, right? Like it's an art, it's not a science it's so I know like it's just, some people are so good at just, you know, running these type of workshops. So good at taking what's, you know, these like broader concepts and explaining them in a way that like lay people can understand. Right. Like these people, it like one, one issue I have right. Is like a lot of times I'm so deep into the you know, day to day of like working at an agency that like sometimes I forget that like not everyone is doing marketing in comms every day and they're not like, you know, so it's like, you gotta take a step back and say, you know, this is how,

Howie:

Yeah,

Anthony:

This is what it, this is what we do. This is how we do it. You know? So yeah.

Howie:

I mean also if, if, you know, if you have a group of folks that, like you said, very removed from marketing and they are so into the science and technical, it might even be good to open up the entire session with an ad, right? Go find a YouTube video of an ad that's freaking phenomenal. Right. That's you know, even if it's a non healthcare company, like something that just put them in a mood of like, dude we're, we don't have to like double, triple click down to the weeds here, we will get through the weeds, but what's gonna resonate. What's gonna have people emotionally bound to your company. Right. Right. But even if you start off the workshop with with an ad or some like really just inspiring video yeah. That, and then jump into it. I think it will be good. You just set the room in the right mood.

Anthony:

Totally agree. I will definitely look for some of that. Okay. Yeah. This is, this is super helpful. Just to sort of get me to, to start thinking about it. I have a we're we're gonna do the session after the labor day holiday. So I have a little bit of time to sort of brainstorm and, and get myself prepped.

Howie:

How long do you have, how long is the, the session with them?

Anthony:

Two hours. Yeah. Good. Plenty of time, but I, but I wanna also make sure we, you know, we have, we're filling that time. Right. Like we're not after an hour. Yeah. Yeah.

Howie:

I think you'll for sure fill up the time, especially once you, you know, it, it just takes a while, you know, especially if people are like, no, this needs to be there. That needs to be here, you know, depending on the group. And then, and then again, if you wanna fill up the time, if you think about the, the, the story arc, right? Pick like the top three audiences and see how that defers, maybe even break them up into groups. You know, let's say there's the investor group. And then there's the physician group, you know, and then maybe there's an internal group, whatever, pick three top audiences, split them up in groups and then see how they populate, you know, the journey from current state to desired state, you know, from an audience perspective and then come back together and then look at how different or whatever. I mean, you can use it as a way to fill the time and also give you what you need to build, you know, a, a full messaging matrix.  

Anthony:

Thank you very much again, man. I really appreciate it. Super helpful. Absolutely.

Howie:

Absolutely. Well, good luck. Good luck. Let me know how it goes

Anthony:

All right. Will do.

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2. Download free guides and tools: Learn from my years of experience as a brand strategist

3. Work with me: Be a podcast guest or hire my services for your brand

Every Brand Needs an "Oh Sh!t" Story

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I passed out.

And the only times I realized that I passed out was when I woke up.

“Crap, I passed out again, this is dangerous” I thought to myself in a foggy, dreamy state as I carried Concertina wire (razor barbed wire) to a truck.

I was slipping between conscious and unconscious after 4 days and 3 nights digging a foxhole. We were a battalion of soldiers digging on a hill for 4 straight days. Each foxhole was in the shape of a U, it holds two people and it is about five and a half feet deep. I had been awake for 74 hours. I was covered head to toe in mud and dirt, my hands were blistered and bloody, and I was glad it was over.

Exercise SPADE, the first trench/ foxhole digging exercise as part of our officer cadet school training in the Singapore army. We would take position in our foxholes during dusk and dawn, lay communication wires across all the trenches, set-up a Concertina perimeter, patrol our position, and run attack/ defense exercises at various times of the day. When we weren’t doing that, we were digging… all through the day and into the night

This memory and story has stuck with me for the rest of my life.

When I faced physical hardship, I would think “Oh sh!t, if I pushed through SPADE, I can probably push though this”

Every brand faces challenges in it’s quest for glory

You can easily see how a story like this can apply to you and your personal brand. It helps anchor your beliefs and propel you to do other difficult things. But the same is true for company or product brands. Taking the appropriate action can ink a story so compelling, it becomes THE “Oh Sh!t” story that can help overcome doubters, barriers, and anything that’s in the way of the brand.

A great example for this is establishing a company brand. When a company is being launched or relaunched, it communicates its new beliefs, purpose, and values. Sometimes the change is large and when that’s the case, people (both internal and external) might not actually believe in this new direction.

When CVS doubled down on its identity of a healthcare company, it made a dramatic action that shows employees, customers, and investors that they were serious. By taking cigarettes away from all their shelves, they inked a legendary story that displayed their commitment. No amount of messaging and campaigns can take the place of an act that demonstrates who they were as a company. Willing to lose billions was their “Oh Sh!t” story.

A framework to build your “Oh Sh!t” story

STEP ONE

What is THE barrier to your brand being at its best?

Example:

• A company’s new brand is all about customer service, but in the past the company has put profits over service.

• A product’s new brand is all about simplicity and ease, but traditionally the contracting process to get the product onto the customers system has been tedious.

STEP TWO

What is ONE time where your brand was truly at its best?

Example:

• There was one time where a customer service rep spent 8 hours on the phone with a customer and the social media response went viral.

• There was one time when contracting was a breeze for the client, when the company directly worked with the client’s IT team.

STEP THREE

How can you put in place a system so the ONE time becomes ALL the time?

Example:

• A new service metric and incentive was rolled out where it’s not about the number of calls/ hour, it’s about the extent of the THANK YOUs and APPRECIATION the team gets from their customers.

• A new process of working with the IT team was put in place.

STEP FOUR

What is a simple story structure that reminds everyone why we can be our best?

1. What was the challenge?

2. Why was it difficult?

3. How did the brand overcome?

4. What’s the takeaway?

Example:

• Our customer was really upset, but it was not our fault so it was against “procedure” to do anything. But one courageous customer service rep bent the rules and was on the phone for 8 hours to solve the customers problem and in return, our efforts have gone viral on Instagram. We are a customer service company and the new way of working is no longer calls/ hour, it’s about the extent of the THANK YOUs

• Our product works like a charm, but getting it on the client’s system takes weeks, if not months, directly contradicting our brand promise. An ingenious sales rep took it upon herself to warm up the IT team and then seamlessly created a transition and implementation plan. It was painless and we were loved before they even started using the product. Now, it’s a part of our process, our simplicity extends across all we do.

STEP FIVE

Tell your story at every chance you get, particularly if Sh!t is hitting the fan!

For my own story of digging foxholes and surviving the toughest of times, it’s a story I tell myself, particularly now, as I’m training for my half-marathon in September.

Conclusion

Build you stories so your brands can be at their best!

Ways I can help you:

1. Subscribe to Healthy Brand Mondays: Leverage brand thinking to accelerate your growth

2. Download free guides and tools: Learn from my years of experience as a brand strategist

3. Work with me: Be a podcast guest or hire my services for your brand

The right way to SWOT

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The SWOT analysis is a 2x2 matrix superstar, it’s in every strategy textbook and probably taught to millions of students every year. However, as I’ve encountered it in the world of business, it’s often used WRONGLY. In this post, I’ll share with you the right way to use the famous 2x2 matrix, helping you to develop real strategies as an outcome of this analysis.

BASICS

Strengths and weaknesses are analyzed from an internal perspective while opportunities and threats are analyzed from an external perspective. The interplay of internal vs. external is where the magic happens, it’s where strategies are created. Most people stop after they fill in these boxes, they fail to SWOT the right way and it becomes a page in a strategy powerpoint that garners little discussion or worse, NO REAL STRATEGIC DECISIONS. But before this interplay, we need these four boxes to capture critical insights. Notice the word CRITICAL. If we use this 2x2 matrix to capture the “kitchen sink” it’s going to be of no value to anyone. How do we do that? Read on my friends…

GARBAGE IN, GARBAGE OUT

You need to be very critical of what goes into the matrix, and you might discover after going through this exercise that you don’t have enough research or data to fill it out. Then you have to decide how to get the data, which is probably another blog post. The key attributes to filter what’s in and what’s out are:

1. RELEVANCE

2. DIFFERENTIATION

3. SUSTAINABILITY

For each box, i’ll go through what this means.

Strengths

1. Relevance: a relevant strength delivers real value to the customer. Is this something that the customer wants and/or needs? If it doesn’t bring any value, it cannot be considered a strength.

2. Differentiation: Is this strength unique? Meaning, does the competition also have this strength? If it’s something that is commonly held across the industry, it is not a strength.

3. Sustainability: Can competitors easily deliver what you might consider a strength? Is this strength something the company is aligned to for the long term?

Weaknesses

1. Relevance: genuine weaknesses are those that decrease the value of the brand in the eyes of the customer. If the customer doesn’t really care about it, it is not a weakness.

2. Differentiation: Is this weakness unique? Again, if it’s something the entire market suffers from, like the need for high cost raw materials, this is not a weakness.

3. Sustainability: Can this weakness be easily corrected? Can it be counteracted by the organizations strengths or strategy etc.? If so, it’s not a true weakness.

Opportunities

1. Relevance: Opportunities listed in this box needs to be large and accessible by the brand. If it’s something that has unsurmountable constraints, it should not be listed as an opportunity. And if it doesn’t bring a relatively large value to the brand, it should also not be listed.

2. Differentiation: Is this opportunity very different from other opportunities? When an opportunity start to conflict with other opportunities, it should not be included. For example if an opportunity is going after the low cost segment when the brand has been positioned as a premium brand, it’s in conflict.

3. Sustainability: Will this opportunity last? Is it a fleeting trend, or is it something that is durable enough to justify the effort of pursuit?

Threats

1. Relevance: Are these threats gnarly and unmitigated by other factors? For example, a big decline in one market can seem to be really threatening because of the large impact it can have, but if it is compensated by the growth of another accessible market, it’s no longer considered a threat.

2. Differentiation: Is the threat truly new and undefended? Is it not met by current strategies? If it is being addressed in some way today, it’s not a unique and new threat.

3. Sustainability: Will this threat be around for the long term? Or is it going to diminish on its own over time? For example a short-term pricing or blunting campaign is just that, short-term and not considered a real threat.

When you have all three attributes (relevance, differentiation and sustainability) met for each box, WE ARE NOT DONE, but you have a solid 2x2 matrix, ready to work for you.

MATCHMAKING

The next step is to align the internal with the external

• Align a strength or strengths that can be used to capture the market opportunity. For example, a strength of having significant awareness and mindshare in a disease area is coupled with the opportunity of a competitor recall in that market.

• Align a threat or threats that causes a particular weakness to worsen. For example, the threat of new regulations on cybersecurity and patient data compliance is coupled with our weakness in the current business model where digital services is free and not resourced appropriately.

This iterative process may mean new SWOT items be uncovered if there are some unaligned SWOT factors. The process is complete when every factor is matched up.

KEY SUCCESS FACTORS (KSF)

After they are matched and lined up, you will then develop KSFs that addresses each match up.

• WHAT do you need to do to capture those opportunities? Continuing with the previous example, a KSF would be to leverage KOL-relationship to influence the neglected providers in a share gain campaign.

• WHAT do you need to do to avoid weaknesses being made worse? Looking at the previous example here, a KSF would be to shift digital to a paid service and resource accordingly.

CONCLUSION

Once you have a list of KSFs, you can then proceed to the next step of HOW. This is putting together the plan for how the organization can address each KSF. The additional rigor and steps to your SWOT process means you no longer dread the previous useless exercise of putting together this 2x2. Now you can SWOT right, SWOT happy.

Ways I can help you

1. Download free guides (Healthy Brand Blueprint & Branding 101) to help you build healthy brands

2. Work with me as a fractional CMO/CBO or through Healthy Brand Consulting (Schedule a 15 min intro call)

Learn the four traps when branding is mistaken for marketing

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Brand, the feeling and perception anyone has about a company, product, person or service is the result of all touch points and interactions. And so branding, the way to create that feeling and perception, is essentially everything.

But because the idea of brand and branding is born out of the field of marketing, it’s usually seen as the same as marketing. I want to tell you that it is NOT! And it can be detrimental if it is seen as such. Marketing is not everything. There is communications, there is customer service, there is HR, there are many functions that make up the entire experience! From before the purchase to during the purchase and after the purchase.

Four traps when branding is mistaken for marketing:

ONE: Time pressure

Marketing is driven by campaigns and campaigns are time bound. How did it perform? What were the metrics? While campaigns are short term, building a brand takes time. Every campaign that we introduce in the market adds to the brand, it continues to build that feeling and perception. Think about Coca Cola or even J&J, their brand is forever solidified in the minds of their audiences. Each campaign throughout time etches that perception and feeling about the brand ever so deeper into our minds. If we abandon the brand strategy because the campaign did not “perform”, we are missing the opportunity to create a snowball effect.

TWO: Stifled potential

When branding is solely seen as marketing, it’s just infinitely harder to align every touch point to create the perception you want. You are not enrolling every tool in the tool box, instead trying to imprint that perception only through one function. The potential of creating an aligned experience across every function in the organization that drives brand equity is lost. Think about the Zappos brand–an entire ecosystem that communicates and exemplifies their brand of WOW and QUIRKY DELIGHT. It’s their HR, their customer service, their culture, their emails, their shopping experience… it leverages everything the organization can muster.

THREE: ROI rabbit hole

Marketing and ROI has become inseparable. It’s fair, because marketing is business of capturing the increased perceived value through branding! It’s capturing that value by an increase in revenue, either through higher prices or a larger share of the market. A marketing budget needs to be substantiated by ROI. How much return or increased revenue are you going to deliver based on the spend? This kind of thinking would quash branding efforts… as they go beyond revenue generation (at least in the short term). It’s creating that perception, it’s shrinking the consideration set, it’s building fans. If it’s about ROI, Patagonia will not run an ad saying not to buy their jackets. If it’s about ROI, CVS would not have pulled tobacco from their shelves.

FOUR: The “not my problem” problem

Branding requires everyone. It’s not just a marketing “thing”, nor is it a “sales” thing. Successful and powerful brands permeate entire organizations internally and all those they serve externally. When branding is seen only as a marketing “thing”, disaster strikes. Other functions have no skin in the game and hence they don’t need to cooperate, they don’t need to chip-in and fund a branding initiative. When the brand is not owned by everyone, it becomes dismissed and departments/ functions can easily look the other way.

Conclusion

Insist that branding is NOT marketing. Even if marketing is accountable for initiating, organizing and orchestrating branding efforts, branding is EVERYTHING. Organizations can bring together people, processes and incentives to design branding into everything they do.

Ways I can help you

1. Download free guides (Healthy Brand Blueprint & Branding 101) to help you build healthy brands

2. Work with me as a fractional CMO/CBO or through Healthy Brand Consulting (Schedule a 15 min intro call)

How positioning works for multiple stakeholders

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Positioning is a strategic concept that’s been around for decades, but most people get it wrong. In the healthcare industry, it can be even more complicated with very different types of stakeholders: Payers, healthcare providers, patients, caregivers etc. How do you use positioning in the healthcare space? Or in any space where there is a complex web of stakeholders? (I use stakeholders, because not all of them “buy” from you, but all of them influence and have a say in deciding and paying for your product or service) Should you have one positioning or multiple positionings? In this blog post, I’ll break it down for you and at the end of it, you’ll be able to wield this tool to help you in your marketing and communications efforts as you build your brand.

Definition

You know this, but it’s worthwhile to get on the same page about its definition: Positioning is capturing a specific place in the mind of the consumer (in our case, the stakeholders). And since brand is the feeling and perception anyone has about your product, service and company, positioning is THE strategic tool to build that brand, to create that feeling.

Positioning principles

By adhering to these four principles, it gives you the greatest opportunity to capture that position in the minds of your stakeholders.

1. Specific

   Your positioning needs to be concise and sharp. When you are trying to be known for everything, you will become known for nothing. So the key here is to cut things out, not pile things on.

2. Relevant

   Whatever you stand for, it needs to be what your stakeholders care about. It needs to fit into their current context and what they are trying to accomplish. So instead of me, me, me, think them, them, them.

3. Differentiating

   The key point of positioning is to stand apart from your competition. Lean into something your competition is not being perceived as and have the courage to zig when everyone else is zagging.

4. Sustainable

   Long term defendability. Whatever your positioning is, it needs to be continuously defendable. So whether it’s adequately resourcing your positioning or a bullet proof portfolio of patients, base it on something that can withstand the test of time and competition.

Brand level positioning

At the highest level, you need to have a positioning that spans all your stakeholders. Yes, ONE positioning that go across all your stakeholders. By looking across your stakeholders and finding a common, homogenous need, you can position your brand accordingly. In healthcare, while payers, healthcare providers and patients have specific needs, you can start to create one segment by defining the collective issue they all grapple with that your brand uniquely solves. Iterate until you can find the most specific, relevant, differentiating and sustainable positioning.

Example:

1st iteration - an infectious disease test for those in need of a diagnosis

2nd iteration - a quick turnaround infectious disease test for those who are the most vulnerable

3rd iteration - the most direct route to an infectious disease diagnosis for the immunocompromised

Stakeholder level positioning

Once you have positioning at the highest level for the brand, you can then focus on each stakeholder group. In order to make your positioning uber-specific, you will want to target specific segments within each stakeholder group, addressing each specific issue:

• What type of immunocompromised patients? How far along are they in their diagnostic journey?

• What kind of lab directors? What kind of tests do they currently have? How do they make their decisions?

• What kind of infectious disease physicians? What is their approach? What kind of decision making power do they have?

• What type of payers? Are these integrated delivery networks? What about employers? Which types of employers?

By understanding these target segments, you can then operate within the brand level positioning to craft something very specific for each segment. This will then guide messaging and campaigns to communicate your offer distinctly, while still aligning to a higher level brand positioning.

Conclusion

Positioning as a tool and strategy allows us to capture that specific place in the minds of our stakeholders, and by going this process, you can be targeted to each stakeholder group and yet build brand equity at the highest level.

Ways I can help you

1. Download free guides (Healthy Brand Blueprint & Branding 101) to help you build healthy brands

2. Work with me as a fractional CMO/CBO or through Healthy Brand Consulting (Schedule a 15 min intro call)

What is your healthcare company DNA?

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Every company has an intrinsic DNA. And it is imperative that its brand reflects its DNA in order for its expression to be authentic and real. You can try to force a personality on a company, but you will probably fail, such misalignment requires a cultural change, which can take many years to complete. Some DNA changes however, come naturally as the company grows.

During my many years of working with healthcare companies, I’ve come to find a handful of DNA types that show up again and again. By recognizing them, it guides the entire strategy of the brand, making it more likely to be adopted and aligning the outside with the inside.

The four DNA types:

1. The Scientist

   Scientists pride themselves in technical and scientific discovery. These are companies that typically have a scientific platform that they’ve discovered and patented, using it to create multiple treatments and therapies. Scientist companies are usually led by founders who are researchers and have deep technical expertise. Scientist companies stand apart by educating and communicating to stakeholders the potential of their platform.

   OPPORTUNITY:

   Scientist companies have a defendable secret sauce to help them stand apart.

   TRAP:

   Messaging that is so esoteric that only the internal team understands and cares about, resulting in an irrelevant brand expression.

   Examples:

   www.arcellx.com

   www.alector.com

2. The Mother

   Mothers are all about the people. In the case of healthcare companies, it would be patients, members, or the general public. They pride themselves in the best service and experience over everything else. These are companies that tell patient stories and celebrate the impact on their lives. Mother companies are typically commercial stage companies and later in their lifecycle.

   OPPORTUNITY:

   In healthcare, there is plenty of room to innovate on customer service and experience because of the disjointed and complex nature of the industry.

   TRAP:

   In a B2B2C environment, it can be seen as an over-reach, because when companies rely on physicians and healthcare professionals to treat patients, the companies themselves don’t actually deliver the care.

   Examples:

   www.organon.com

   www.abbott.com

3. The Designer

   Designer companies are obsessed about their products and the systems they put together. They appreciate both form and function, taking a user centric approach when developing their solutions. High quality and reliable are typical descriptors of Designers. There is usually a very strong engineering and UX culture in the company and execution is deemed as an essential principle of success.

   OPPORTUNITY:

   Safety is such an important facet of anything healthcare related and Designer companies can build a strong sense of trust in their brand.

   TRAP:

   Too much focus on products and systems can come off as self-centered and cold.

   Examples:

   www.intuitive.com

   www.quantadt.com

4. The Visionary

   Visionaries are on a mission to change the status quo of care. They are typically thought-leaders and have a very strong point of view about what is wrong and what needs to be done in the healthcare space. Their purpose is often very clear and they can attract the biggest names in the industry. True Visionaries in healthcare combine both a strong opinion with the goods to back it up.

   OPPORTUNITY:

   Visionaries are charismatic and is able to tell stories that galvanize an industry, bringing awareness easily.

   TRAP:

   Too much “talking”, not enough “walking”. Touting some kind of a silver bullet without proof can backfire in the complex world of healthcare (ie. Theranos).

   Examples:

   www.sameskyhealth.com

   www.verily.com

Conclusion

The four DNA types are not mutually exclusive, but understanding which is the lead is important for any brand building initiative. Once you’ve identified which is the core DNA for your company, alignment and adoption can be attained more efficiently.

Which DNA is your healthcare company?

Ways I can help you

1. Download free guides (Healthy Brand Blueprint & Branding 101) to help you build healthy brands

2. Work with me as a fractional CMO/CBO or through Healthy Brand Consulting (Schedule a 15 min intro call)

The 5 principles of a healthy brand

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The purpose of a brand is to achieve the highest perceived value possible and a healthy brand is able to sustain this kind of performance amidst external forces. In this blog post, I’ll share the five principles of healthy brands, after helping build brands in healthcare for almost a decade.

A healthy brand may or may not be in the health & wellbeing industry, but the health & wellbeing of a brand is key to be continuously high performing.

Principle 1: Stability

Everything begins with a strong foundation of the brand. From positioning to personality and purpose, the core of the brand needs to be an unwavering north star so decisions can be made consistently in service of building brand equity. The market and the competition is going to fluctuate and change, but without a stable core, your brand is going to go where the wind blows–average, bland, uninspiring… Consider iconic brands you know (the Nikes of the world), they are unwavering, and because they lean into a human truth, they are timeless.

Principle 2: Congruency

Brands are like people. If you are incongruent where your actions don’t match your desires, you feel uneasy, your gut tells you something is off, you are unhappy. Brands are the same way. If its actions don’t match its promise, if its expression doesn’t match its personality, your audience and your customers can sniff it out immediately. Congruency is also where a brands memorability and power comes from. Patagonia is congruent–from its backstory to how it communicates, to its CSR programs, it seeks to match its outside with its inside as much as possible, as often as it can.

Principle 3: Tenacity

For a brand to be healthy, it needs to be comfortable with being uncomfortable. Why? Because standing apart from the competition means you need to zag when others zig. It’s uncomfortable to stand out from the crowd. And if god forbid you need to do something different in order to stay relevant with the prevailing culture, that’s really painful. But no brands can be loved if it doesn’t do something true to their purpose even if it’s uncomfortable, even if it means sticking to your guns. When CVS renamed to CVS Health in 2014, they pulled tobacco products from their shelves, the investor and business community called it suicide, immediately losing billions of dollars in revenue. It was uncomfortable, but guess what? It was on brand and it delivered real impact.

Image from: https://causemarketing.com/case-study/cvs-health-last-pack-case-study/

Principle 4: Adaptability

In order for the brand to stay relevant, it needs to be constantly listening and adapting. The why remains constant, but the how can change. When a brand is so full of itself, drinking its own “Kool-aid” and blaming its customers for not doing what they are “supposed to do”, it’s in trouble, the ego of the brand is taking over. Much like people, when ego drives decisions, disaster awaits. Brands like Toys’R’Us, Blackberry, Kodak… the list goes on where the lack of adaptability dooms the brand. When you are not willing to change with your customers, you will be left behind. It’s that simple.

Principle 5: Grow-ability

Ok, I made this word up, but it doesn’t mean it’s any less important! A healthy brand is constantly seeking improvement, serving more people and serving them better. Tony Robbins says it best “If you are not growing, you are dying” and this applies to brands so well. Even if a brand seeks to maintain its brand equity, it has to grow, because nothing around it stays the same.

Conclusion

By putting together the right people and leaders, the right processes and governance, the right technologies and competencies, these five principles can be used to build a healthy brand that will drive peak performance even in the worst of times.

Ways I can help you

1. Download free guides (Healthy Brand Blueprint & Branding 101) to help you build healthy brands

2. Work with me as a fractional CMO/CBO or through Healthy Brand Consulting (Schedule a 15 min intro call)

How to get your sick brand healthy again

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Your sales numbers are not on target.

Your audience is not engaging or taking action, let alone buying.

Your content have not been working.

Your target segment is bouncing from your website.

Your media pitches are not landing.

What is going on? It can be very frustrating when it seems everything you are doing makes sense, but the metrics tell you that it’s not working. Instead of trying to fix everything, it’s necessary to pinpoint the real issue. Here is a three step framework for you:

The Healthy Brand Diagnostic Framework

STEP 1: COLLECT

Taking the time to look at all the metrics so far sets the stage for us to understand how the brand is performing. Pull together information across all the dimensions of activity:

• Pre-purchase

  Advertising, landing pages, content marketing, PR, anything that comes before a purchase. Is your audience coming into the funnel? Is a healthy percent of them progressing towards purchase? You’ll want to scrutinize the metrics across all the pre-purchase activities.

• Purchase

  How is your product or service bought? What is the contracting process? What are all the touch points needed for a customer to buy? Mapping these out and understanding what’s working and whats not will help us make decisions on what to do about them next.

• Post-purchase

  Once the product or service is obtained, are they being utilized? Are you retaining your customers or are they buying more from you? Is the experience of the product and service matching the expectations before the sale? This is where the rubber meets the road.

STEP 2: CONSIDER

Once you have all the qualitative and quantitative data in place, it’s time to consider and figure out what is actually happening. Generating hypotheses is the key activity in this stage.

1. Is there an awareness problem? (meaning we are not getting many people into the funnel, but once they are there, they are progressing nicely)

2. Is there a targeting problem? (meaning the “wrong” segments is receiving your ads and message, so you don’t see any pull through)

3. Is there a messaging and consistency of content problem? (meaning the audience is not clicking through, or when they do, they don’t stick around)

4. Is there a technology problem? (meaning the tech stack you have in place is not working, where the complexity or disjointedness of the system is letting customers fall through the cracks or receiving non-relevant messages)

5. Is there a training problem? (meaning customers buy it but fail to utilize it consistently)

6. Is there a visibility problem? (meaning customers use it and love it, but that experience is invisible to non-customers)

7. Is there a positioning problem? (meaning the product or service is great, but doesn’t meet the expectation of the target segment or it fails to be distinguished from the competition)

8. Is there a brand personality problem? (meaning the tone and the creative expression of the product and service just doesn’t fit with the target audience’s own persona)

9. Is there a product/ service problem? (meaning the experience of the product or service is just poor)

STEP 3: CLASSIFY

This is where we focus on the key problems to solve. By mapping all the problems on a 2x2 matrix (Figure 1 below).

Figure 1: CLASSIFICATION MATRIX

On the Y-axis is IMPACT and the X-axis is RESOURCES. The four quadrants will help you to focus.

1. ACT NOW: these are the problems that have high impact and low resources, where it doesn’t take a relatively heavy lift and solving it would mean making other problems easier to solve or sometimes even a pre-requisite. (For example repositioning a product or service, since all the messaging and creative expression will depend on the new positioning).

2. PLAN: these are the problems that have high impact and may require high resources, where you need to solve them, but it will take relatively high financial and time commitments. (For example retooling a product or improving a service) One consideration is to brainstorm ways to solve the problem in a less resource intensive way, pushing it to the ACT NOW quadrant.

3. OPPORTUNISTIC: since these are problems that have low impact and require low resources, look for ways to solve them as part of the current work. How can we get them resolved through the work we are already doing? (An example is updating digital copy or design).

4. ABANDON: say no more, if it’s relatively resource intensive and doesn’t really do much, don’t worry about it!

By going through the three step framework, you will arrive at a set of key problems to solve and when to solve it. Good luck on building healthy brands!

Ways I can help you

1. Download free guides (Healthy Brand Blueprint & Branding 101) to help you build healthy brands

2. Work with me as a fractional CMO/CBO or through Healthy Brand Consulting (Schedule a 15 min intro call)

Your logo is not supposed to tell the whole brand story

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Logos are extremely important when building a brand. When you think about brands that have achieved iconic status, the mere mention of the brand name will conjure up the logo.

Apple

McDonalds

CocaCola

Nike

But notice that every one of these logos do not tell the entire story of the brand. Logos have a very specific purpose. It needs to be memorable. It’s the symbol that will evoke all the memories, feelings and perceptions accumulated in your mind from every touch point it has with you. From advertising (polar bears sharing a coke at Christmas time), product packaging (lifting a tab and the ipad delightfully falls into your hands), to celebrity endorsements (Lebron James dunking a ball with his new kicks), the logo is meant to capture all of that everytime you see it or think about the need it fills.

The best logos:

1. Scale to difference sizes

Billboards, websites, favicon, social avatars, hoodies, mugs… your logo is/ can be used across different mediums and should scale appropriately without losing resolution. If a logo is too complex, it makes it very challenging to be used, which limits it’s visibility and thus defeats its purpose.

2. Are simple, yet differentiated

The ones most memorable are the ones people can draw. Ask anyone to draw the Nike swoosh and you’ll probably get it them 90% right. Ask people to draw the Puma logo and you’ll probably get more wrongs than rights. The challenge with a simple logo is the ability to be differentiated. This is where you have to think about the category and industry, making sure that it stands out from its competition, not from all the brands in the world.

3. Reflects the essence of the brand

It is in the end THE symbol for the brand. Understanding the essence of the brand and making sure the logo reflects that is fundamental, but it’s not always the case. It requires first of all the uncovering of the brands essence, a strategic process that most brands skip… going straight to design -> FAIL.

4. Surprise and delight

In neuroscience, anything that evokes an emotion or additional senses help the mind to more likely create a long-term memory. Reinforcement of that memory through repeated recall keeps the memory from being erased. When logos have an easter egg, a hidden surprise, it becomes more memorable. Go look at the FedEx logo (find the arrow) and the GM logo (find the electrical plug). Be delighted.

5. Make a point

Instead of telling the whole story, the logo can be designed to make a point. ONE POINT. It could be the legacy of the brand, it could be the personality of the brand, or it could be the value proposition of the brand (look at the Amazon logo -> everything you need from A to Z) is in the logo! If there is a very specific point you want the logo to make, design it into the symbol, but don’t forget the other points!

Your logo is not supposed to tell the whole brand story, it’s job is to remind people of THE BRAND STORY.

Ways I can help you

1. Download free guides (Healthy Brand Blueprint & Branding 101) to help you build healthy brands

2. Work with me as a fractional CMO/CBO or through Healthy Brand Consulting (Schedule a 15 min intro call)

Why branding fails

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A brand is the feeling and perception somebody has about your product, your company, and your service. Branding is an intentional and consistent process of imprinting your brand story into the marketplace. And it's using every single touch point, but branding cannot solve everything. Sometimes branding does fail, and here are the top 10 reasons why.

Full transcript:

#10: NO BRANDING INSIGHTS

Your branding fails because there is no substantial insight to stand on. If you do not understand the audience you're trying to serve, and there's no core insight to make the decisions that you need to make, I can't help you.

#9: SALES, MARKETING AND COMMS ARE MISALIGNED

When these important channels of your company are frankly not connected and going in all different directions. It is very difficult to have the audience come back with one message. It is very tough for you to push a message through that helps everybody understand what you're trying to be known for. So fix the organization, make sure they're all aligned. Processes matter, people matter, organization matters.

#8: BRAND ONLY SEEN AS A LOGO, FONT, OR COLOR

Now, when brand is diminished to that level where it's only just about design, you really take away the potential and the ability of the company, product or service to be loved because brand strategy is the face of business strategy. So when it's pushed down to that level of just design, you're taking away its ability to be steering the company at that highest level.

#7: HR IS NOT SEEN AS A STRATEGIC PART OF THE ORGANIZATION

A large part of your brand strategy is getting your employees to be brand ambassador. They're the first group of people that really needs to love your brand. If they don't love your brand, how are your customers gonna love your brand? And so HR is such a strong component of the branding process and the branding activities, because they're the ones that help attract the best, retain the best, but also, enact your brand strategy internally, so you can turn everyone into a true brand ambassador.

#6: ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE IS NOT ALIGNED WITH CUSTOMERS

This is a huge issue where you're trying to have a persona and personality towards your customers that is absolutely different from what your culture is in the company. That disconnect and that gap can cause your brand to fail. Think about this. If you are a very highly technical scientific company and that's the culture, but you're really trying to help moms or help caregivers care for their children, or you're entering a pediatric space. That disconnect is something that can be very hard to overcome.

#5: FOCUSED ON TACTICS, NOT STRATEGY

Now we all know that we have to execute the strategy, but if all of the focus is on creating tactics, that's really just throwing spaghetti on the wall. When you don't have an insight, when you don't have a strategy, and you're not spending time to decide what you're going to do and what you're not gonna do, it's wasting resources and it's creating spin. That can be a reason why branding can fail

#4: SHORT TERM OVER LONG TERM

Now, if everything that you're trying to do is short term, and you're looking at metrics at the short term, it can cause your branding efforts to fail. It can sabotage it because branding takes a long time. Creating that perception, owning that position in the consumer's mind or in the audience's mind takes time, give it time to win, give it time to be successful.

#3: ROI IS EVERYTHING

When every activity is measured based on the revenue it's supposed to bring in, you're really limiting the channels. You're really limiting that to a marketing function because everything else is trying to improve the reputation, trying to inject that feeling into the marketplace. And frankly it takes the air out of all your branding efforts–knowing that brand is a feeling, and branding is not a rational process.

#2: CEO DOESN’T UNDERSTAND OR CARE ABOUT BRAND

We can help make your brand matter, but if the top of the organization doesn't believe in building brands, it is an absolute uphill battle. Branding requires alignment. Branding requires leadership and branding requires bold moves. If leadership is not all in about zigging while everybody's zagging, taking this strategic directions that can take your brand to a different level to really make it loved. It's difficult.

#1: THE PRODUCT OR SERVICE SUCKS

It's hard to hear, but no matter how good your brand efforts are, no matter how good you're aligning all your channels, you're telling that one story, it, you can't deliver the value. If you can't have people fall in love with using the product, the service, all hope is lost. Your branding will fail.

Now that you understand what the top 10 reasons why branding can fail, you can put a plan together, address them, address them so you can really build the brand that is loved and truly capture the hearts and minds of your audiences.

Ways I can help you

1. Download free guides (Healthy Brand Blueprint & Branding 101) to help you build healthy brands

2. Work with me as a fractional CMO/CBO or through Healthy Brand Consulting (Schedule a 15 min intro call)

How to avoid typical traps in healthcare branding

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Building brands in healthcare has its own set of nuances and challenges to overcome. It can be very easy to fall prey to seemingly positionable territories–in other industries it may be so, but in healthcare, brands have to dig deeper.

Full transcript:

In today's video, I'll share with you six common traps that healthcare brands fall into. As they're trying to build a relevant, sustainable and differentiating brand. Hey everyone, this is Howard Chan and I help build he brands.

The first trap is we are patient focused. If you actually tell me that you're not patient focused, Hey, maybe there's a territory that actually makes sense. We're gonna Zig while you Zag, but every healthcare company is patient focused. The problem is not whether you are patient focused. It's about how are you patient focused. Are we able to talk about what is actually differentiating in the way that you're focused on patients? Well, if you think about all the things that you do, is it how you help patients access care? That’s table stakes. Is it about how you provide support programs for your patients? Table stakes. What about the way in which you educate patients on disease or educate patients on your therapy? Again, table stakes. What are things that you are actually doing with the patient that makes you differentiated? Actually puts you in a whole different category of healthcare companies that's actually focused on patients.

The second trap is we follow the science. Now, if you are a company in healthcare that's providing some sort of therapy, some sort of treatment, you’d better be following the science. Now what about following the science? Are you differentiated? Are you different? And if you have a particular mode of action, a particular technology, that's so different by all means dive deep into the specifics of what that is and use that as a way to position yourself from the rest of the competitors. But if that's not really something that the company can stand behind, don't use this as a territory. Don't use science as your key positioning element because everyone in your category is following the science.

A third trap here is we are innovative. It's a funny thing. This is kind of like a comedian telling you. I'm really funny, trust me. If you are funny, you don't need to tell people about that. Just like if you're innovative, you don't tell, you show. Companies that are truly innovative don't have to tell you they're innovative. They merely put out products. They put out solutions that help you understand how innovative they are. So that's a trap that particularly ensnares healthcare brands. When they say hey, we are all about innovation, we are very innovative. Let your actions tell people, and don't put it as a part of the way that you message. It's all about what are you gonna actually show in terms of value? What are you gonna actually show in terms of solutions so people understand that you are innovative. Like Dyson, for example, they don't tell you “we are super innovative”. No, they put out products that are just a tier above the rest. Just like in a healthcare space, how do you manifest that idea into the products, into everything that you deliver so that people can see and feel your “innovativeness” as opposed to that being a thing that you tell people.

The fourth trap here is we don't have competitors. Sorry to burst your bubble, but everything and everyone has competitors. If it's not a direct competitor, it's an indirect competitor. If it is not an indirect competitor, it's an alternative competitor. People are doing something as opposed to using your product. It might be not taking any decision at all. So if you are a completely new drug in a rare disease, what could be your competitor? Sure. There's no direct competitors because there's no treatment for that patient population, but a competitor or alternative competitor could be opting out totally from the health system or traditional sort of healthcare realm, because there have been no treatment. So what do you need to actually pull them back into the system? You need to reach them in a totally different way. Again, when you think about competition in a broader sense, it allows you to think about the solutions. But once you say we have no competitors, it makes you be in this space of complacency and customers will just flock to you. Well, if you build it, sadly, they might not come.

The fifth trap is we want to be a household name. Well who doesn't want to be a household name? It's cool. Who doesn't wanna be a brand that's known by everybody, but going broad, direct to consumer costs a lot of money. And if you can actually get the awareness and transform that awareness into tangible value, by all means become a household name. But think about, do you need to have a prescription for your product? Do you need to have insurance pay for it? Do you need to have adequate supply? Does the product or treatment apply to every household? So it's actually more tangible to focus on the specific stakeholders and parties that you want to be known for and go from there. Instead of doing something large scale, we wanna be known by everybody program. It's gonna cost a ton of money and you're not gonna be able to recoup or translate that into tangible value for your company and brand.

We have a disruptive technology. This is a trap where healthcare brands want to be known for bringing disruption, but it's not really about, we have a disruptive technology. This is a trap where healthcare brands wanna show up as being innovative and they talk about disruptive technology. It’s really more played out in a tech world where these technologies are disruptive and a leap forward. I think in healthcare, we have to be very mindful of that because the last thing anybody wants is disruption, especially in today's world where healthcare providers are stretched so thin. Their workflows, everything that they're doing, they're already putting so much work and effort into caring for patients. Anything disruptive will be deemed as a negative. I think what is more important is to take a look at how that technology actually delivers on the experience, the improved outcomes, but also the improved experience of how these products are being used or how patients are being treated or how even the provider's lives are made easier.

Now you know the key traps in healthcare branding, you can hopefully better avoid them!

Ways I can help you

1. Download free guides (Healthy Brand Blueprint & Branding 101) to help you build healthy brands

2. Work with me as a fractional CMO/CBO or through Healthy Brand Consulting (Schedule a 15 min intro call)

Badass Brand Books #1: Culture built my brand

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The first in a series of book summaries where I cover the key points of brand books I think are pretty badass. Welcome to Badass Brand Books! The BBBs! This book by Mark Miller and Ted Vaughn gives us a great insight into how do we infuse brand into the culture of an organization. A fantastic book filled with numerous stories and great tips on how to really bring a brand aligned culture to life. There are six layers of culture that I go through from this book:

1. Principles

2. Architecture

3. Rituals

4. Lore

5. Vocabulary

6. Artifacts

Full transcript

The central thesis for this book is that culture is really powerful and it's invisible. And so it can either help drive performance in the organization, building your brand, or it could totally derail all your brand efforts, eat your brand. They define culture as an organization's internal environment. And one of the quotes I found in the book by Edgard Schein is that culture is to a group, what personality or character is to a person. I find this conversation very similar and congruent with the experiences I've had helping to build brands. When talking about culture, it was typically either the last to be mentioned or really confined to developing a set of values and behaviors. It never really pulled through to the rest of what we could do for the organization, really infuse brand into every aspect of their culture. So what I really love about this book is that Ted and Mark give us very cool stories that help illustrate the six different layers of how brand can be infused into culture. And I'll go through every one of them.

ONE: PRINCIPLES

Principles are behavior based values to guide people on how to act, behave and make decisions. An interesting statistic from the book was that only about 27% of employees strongly believe in their organization's values. And I would say most of them don't even remember it. And when you scour the internet and look at websites of values that companies put out and they're typically pretty, blah, they're the same old words like integrity, accountability, maybe teamwork. I think this section could help us really dive into how do we create principles that resonate and how do you actually use them to communicate both internally and externally so that all the employees understand what they need to do to act and to behave in, in congruency to the culture of the company in this chapter, there are four main ideas that I think are really important when we talk about principles.

So the first one is modeling and they bring up the story of how you can actually show your values, not just tell it and put it up on a wall, but how do you show it. A story about Patagonia, since 1983, their principle was to really put people front and center and they actually subsidize and have onsite childcare at every one of their locations. And so because of that, all the parents, or at least close to a hundred percent of parents that take their maternity or opportunity leave, return. And so that's really an example of, of modeling and showing your values and principles, instead of just writing it down and putting up a poster.

The second thing here that Ted and mark mentioned is this idea of accountability. And so to have principle means something you have to use it to hire, but also to fire, you gotta to hold people accountable to the principles that you set out.

The third is to really externalize it. And so one of the really good examples here, which I love even before Mark and Ted mentioned in their book is REI’s Opt-out campaign. That's when they close all their stores on Black Friday to really demonstrate a core piece of their principles, which is to enjoy the outdoors.

The last but not least idea I think is important here, is to reward your employees, to demonstrate these principles day in and day out. It doesn't have to be something big. It doesn't have to be something expensive, but the mere gesture of continuing to reward and help people understand what are the principles they really need to adhere to can build a very strong culture.

TWO: ARCHITECTURE

It is defined as the organizational systems and structures designed to reflect your brand and support your employees to deliver on its promise. Now, this really goes deep into what are some of the things that the company and organization can do to help its employees you their best and really reflect all the things that the brand wants to reflect. There are, again, four different ideas here.

And the first one is about the performance of your employees. How do you develop systems and structures so that they can perform? And a great story that Ted and Mark tells is of their own agency, where they develop a system whereby every time somebody uses their company card to buy something, they get a SMS text that immediately prompts them to send a photo of the receipt. And then it's done think about that as a system to help remove mundane activities that doesn't add value or use your employee's time to the best in the best way.

The second idea here is people operations. So think about from a people from an HR perspective, whether it's from a recruitment standpoint, whether it's from an interviewing standpoint, onboarding performance management, if you can infuse the brand into every step of the people operations process, that really helps people to not just come to the company or come to the organization, but also stay and feel that they belong.

The third piece is budgeting. So this is really about tracking and understanding where the organization spends time on, not just money, resources, but also time. Where are you spending your money? And time can give you big clues about what the organization stands for and what they really focus on.

Last, but not least is decision making. It's a really important part of the company. As we know, it really determines where the future is and where the company goes. And so a story day tell is about Kodak. Its ultimate demise was really decision making about innovations or ideas. They want nothing to do with film. Even though they were pioneers and, and very innovative, well, they actually in the 1980s developed a digital camera. So one of the first companies to do so, but along the way, they lost that edge. And really the decision making process was not used for being an innovative company.

THREE: RITUALS

Rituals are repeated experiential activities that reinforce what's most important in your organization and create a sense of joy and renewed energy around your brand. One of the marquee stories in this section is one that I really love, and it talks about jet propulsion labs. A NASA entity. It's a 2.5 billion federally funded organization. And let me read quickly to you what they do at this annual pumpkin carving contest. So at the annual pumpkin carving contest one year, a team of rocket scientists created an Apollo Lunar Jack’o, Lander. It emitted faux smoke as audio voiceover from the actual Apollo lunar landing play played in perfect timing with the pumpkin’s careful descent, and another team entered a pumpkin that faked the moon landing in front of a green screen, in a mock film studio. Wow. I mean, it, they go all out and this is, this is a ritual that they hold very dear to their hearts, and everybody talks about it.

It's much anticipated, but I think the secret here is that they're not forced to do it. It's not mandatory. So when you think about rituals, Ted and Mark really talk about two distinct types of rituals. One is top down, which the leadership sort of think about what would be a ritual for the organization or bottoms up much like the JPL pumpkin carving contest ritual, where it's really formed by the employees themselves. Ted and Mark gave us a few ideas about what types of rituals can be a part of the company's culture. It could be internal, it could be culture, building events, team, building events, much like the pumpkin carving contest, or it could be onboarding experiences. So in Google, they mentioned that new hires are often called Nooglers. And so they're brought through their own experiences of, of what it means to live out the Google brand.

But one of the key things for us to remember as they talk about in this chapter is that rituals can't be mandatory. It can't be routine. It can't be something that people have to do. So when an executive or a leader says, Hey, at the beginning of every meeting we're gonna share a story about why change is important or why, why our personal values line up with the company values that becomes a routine. And much often when that happens, it's not really a ritual. It doesn't really give energy and joy to the employees. It becomes a checkbox you have to tick. So that's something really important to remember.

FOUR: LORE

Lore is defined as the canon of stories that circulate within your organization and reflect the most positive, negative, and even mundane ways your people experience your culture. It's important to understand that every organization has its lore and a question might be, how do stories become lore? Now, Ted and mark helps us understand this by saying stories can't turn into lore simply because the executives repeat it again and again and again, it doesn't work that way. Only when these anecdotes reflect their experiences of the brand and the culture they get repeated. And so it doesn't make sense for an organization to come up with these anecdotes and come up with these stories and simply just repeat them over time. It's really about gathering the experiences of these employees and turn them into stories to be repeated. The authors gave us a few examples of the types of lore that can circulate within an organization.

And the first one is brand elevating lore. And this one, they talked about a story of Pixar, where at Pixar, there was an employee in the early days where he found this small passage way. And with the company's principles of exploration and discovery, well, he crept on in, he crept through this passageway on his hands and knees. And at the end of it came into a secret room, a small room that housed the central air conditioning units and valves. And what he did was he gathered a bunch of colleagues and turned it into a speakeasy. So that lore really became this idea of exploration and discovery. And not only was it circulated internally, it was also circulated externally. So Steve jobs, and some other people like Buzz Aldrin because of hearing that story, came and had a look and found the speak easy themselves.

The next type of lore is origin stories. And so we all know origin stories can be very strong talks about where the company comes from. And especially if it's in the importance with the, the, the principles that in which the company was built.

A third is corporate and operational lore. And sometimes these stories get circulated, not because it's very emotional or visionary. It's really about very specific operational mundane tasks or even failures that get circulated.

The last one is prophetic lore, and this is really about the vision where you're trying to go, right? A story that circulates, because it is a very impactful vision about the future that employees will on to continue to talk about.

FIVE: VOCABULARY

It’s the lexicon of clearly defined words and phrases, helping your employees understand what's important in your brand and how to drive it forward. A story that the authors mentioned here to bring to light of how to use vocabulary as part of the culture and brand is at Netflix. Now, when Netflix moved from a business model of DVDs to streaming, they kept a separate brand called Qwickster, and it was a failure and they recognized that. But one of the most important things that they learned from that was they really had to instill a principle in the company whereby it's not just about failing, it's about learning from it, but it's also about gathering input at the beginning of any venture that might be contrary. So they introduce vocabulary of sun shining failure and farming for descent. And these specific words, help employees to understand that that's a very crucial part of their culture and their mode of operation, and built into their way of working.

The next story that the authors used was from Ray Dalio. He's the CEO of Bridgewater investment management company. For, for those of you who don't know, he wrote a book called principles and their organization is really all about continuing to learn. Learning is such an important principle in the company. They really pride themselves in gathering data, lots of data, and really learning from it. And so the vocabulary that they use is pain plus reflection equals progress, pain, plus reflection equals progress. So again, this idea of really going through pain, which is failing, which is being in, in uncomfortable situations, but when you reflect you move forward and you can be better. So these are specific examples of how vocabulary in an organization can really help to pin down and put a final point on the types of principles and the type of culture that you want built at the organization.

SIX: ARTIFACTS

It is defined as tangible objects at the surface level of your culture, helping your people engage and feel a sense of ownership in the brand. Artifacts are cool. Artifacts are physical manifestations of the culture. And so when, when culture is something that's invisible, it's something that's implicit. Having artifacts can really bring a sense of realness to something that's already there. The authors gave us some examples of artifacts that we could use to really help exemplify the culture.

And first one is spatial art artifacts and spatial artifacts are really any sort of physical manifestations in the office. It could be installations, it could be sculptures really anything kind of bring that to life. I remember for me back in the day when I worked at a company, there was a big patent sculpture. So it illustrated the number of patents that a company had over the years, but it also helped exemplify the innovation and the engineering culture that the company really hung his hat on.

The second is operational artifacts. And, and an example here they gave was the IBM design thinking guide a really a pocket guide that's given to the employees to help them think about how to use design in their daily activities.

The third one here are inclusive artifacts. So think of it as anniversary pins or things that you can give out to help people feel included into the group.

The fourth here is high engagement artifacts. And the example they gave here was for REI, they have a big board of all the different employees with their favorite outdoor activities. It doesn't have to be super expensive or very elaborate. I think the authors really wanted to push the point here where anything simple works, anything simple is actually more organic, but then the key of it is to make it real, make it tangible.

There you have it, the six layers of culture infused with your brand.

Ways I can help you

1. Download free guides (Healthy Brand Blueprint & Branding 101) to help you build healthy brands

2. Work with me as a fractional CMO/CBO or through Healthy Brand Consulting (Schedule a 15 min intro call)

Branding vs. Marketing vs. Communications

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It can be confusing out there, where branding is confused with marketing and communications don’t even get mentioned.

Full transcript:

Is branding a part of marketing? Is communications helping with your branding? There's a lot of confusion out there about what is branding, marketing, and communications. When you think about how a business makes it money, there is the cost of its products and service. There is a price that's sold at and between those is the profit. Now the ultimate goal of branding is to increase perceived value. And you can capture that value, whether it's increasing the price. So you have new profit or more profit, or you can get more share of the market. In order for us to define and clarify what is branding, marketing communications. We have to start from the beginning.

What is a brand? What is branding? Brand is a perception and feeling anybody has about your product service or even a person. In other words, everything has a brand. Now branding, that's the intentional process of creating and making that feeling across every single touchpoint. In other words, branding is everything. In fact, when you consider the process of branding, there's six different pieces and components to it.

1. The first one is research, that's really diving in understanding what your audience needs are and coming out with truths.

2. The second piece of it it's strategy. Once you understand your audiences, you can create a brand strategy to really hone in on the truths and the positioning, the personality of your brand.

3. The third piece is design. It's getting into the, the artwork, the verbals, the voice, and, and all that to kind of bring that to life.

4. The fourth piece is to activate, put it out in the marketplace or launch it within your company for your employees.

5. The fifth piece is measurement. Making sure that you measure, you understand what's working, what's not working well, lending you to tweak or change some of the activations.

So now that we understand brand and branding, let's see how marketing communication plays its role. So you might see out there Venn diagrams of marketing and branding. Most of the time, communications are left out. But when you really look at it, marketing and communications, they are a part of branding because if branding is every single touch point, marketing and communications sit within that. We've gone through what the goal of branding overall is. But the goal of marketing as to drive sales, it's conversions, it's funnels. It's doing what it takes to get the word out to your potential customers, get them into their system, get them into the funnel, convert them into customers and through loyalty programs continue to engage them. So they become lifelong customers. Now that's marketing. Now for communications, the goal is to increase reputation. The tactics and channels might blend and blur with marketing as they get into paid ads, whether it's social or sponsored content. But the goal of communications is to really increase that reputation

In a recent survey on LinkedIn, I asked who owns branding and 78% of respondents said, it's all employees. It's true, every employee needs to own branding because they need to be advocates for the brand. But 12% of respondents said it is the CMO or CCO. And 10% says it's the CEO, which then lies to a conundrum. If everyone owns it, nobody owns it. And so when you think about the confusion in branding, marketing communications, it's really about how organizations are structured. Typically organizations are not structured in a way to pull through the definition of branding, where branding is everything. So who really owns branding? Who does sales and marketing and communications and all those different functions report up to? It's the CEO. And so the CEO needs to be a strong proponent of this idea. That branding is everything. Even though everyone needs to be a steward, who really pushes and makes sure that the brand permeates throughout organization, sometimes it is the CEO, but sometimes there can be an interim or different layer. Maybe it's the chief operating officer. But regardless of that, what is important to note is that marketing and communications both contribute to branding because branding is every interaction and touchpoint. Now you might ask, what about customer service? What about sales? Yes. They are a part of branding. Anything that interacts with the audiences you're trying to influence, whether it's a customer as a prospect or a potential recruit for the company is part of branding.

Before we conclude, the sixth thing, you thought I forgot that didn't you, it's governance. Besides research, strategy, design, activation, measurement, governance is the last but really important piece to hold it all together. It's the people, it's the process to make sure this is a well-oiled machine. You never want your delights and your wows to be accidental. You want them to be intentional, build it into a system and govern it so that you can deliver the promise again and again and again, that's brand building. And so this is where the brand council comes in. Every company needs to have a brand council, and this includes all the different heads of functions, of all those that touches the audiences in terms of brand, but also think about a crucial component of this, which is your HR. You need all leaders to be infused into the brand so that they can bring it to life across all.

Ways I can help you

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