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Sales Trend 7 of the Barrett 12 Sales Trends Report for 2019 is about how purpose, employee and customer experience, and the promises you make contribute to the brand result.

By guest author, Michel Hogan, Brand Counsel.

While the general thinking about brand remains dominated by marketing tropes of visual identity and high-profile campaigns, among the logo makeovers and high-profile ad campaigns a shift is happening to a broader and more encompassing view.

The evolving nature of brand will continue in 2019, and both organisations and individuals will need to grapple with the move beyond markers of name, logo and marketing messages into a world where everything you do and the promises you make contribute to the brand result.

The lens for how people approach brand has opened with purpose and experience emerging as defining trends leading the shift, confidence following in their wake, and together these ideas frame the new order thinking about brand.

What’s Your Purpose?

People have begun to realise that unless what they say is tethered to a deeper sense of what is most important to the organisation (or individual), the brand risks being little more than a series of “lying promises”[1].

Regardless of any early gains of profile building activities, organisations who pursue brand under the guise of customer-facing hype quickly erode and often fall foul when their actions reveal the message as a sham.

The forced reckoning is frequently painful, often public and profoundly unsustainable. Think Uber, Tesla, and even Facebook who have all struggled when their actions exposed a break with the promises they made.

The importance and role of purpose and values are not new. The hyper-awareness about them is. Previously lodged in the dusty pages of employee handbooks and governance documents, they are now the front page story. Woe-be-tide the organisation or individual who doesn’t have a compelling answer to the question “what is your purpose?”

And while this trend has positive aspects – all organisations can benefit from the unity and focus provided by a purpose to guide them, everything is not on the plus side.

Identity Washing

Sitting alongside purpose awareness is a toxic trend of identity washing. Which emerges from judgement leveraged about what the purpose and values are, usually by people outside (and sometimes inside) the organisation.

A simple definition of purpose and values is the core ideology of what’s most important and how it is put into action. However, the pressure to imbue them with a smear of “good” is almost irresistible, leading to fictional purpose statements and “Pollyanna” values far divorced from the reality of who the organisation or individual is and how they do things.

Organisations have always had a purpose. Just because it doesn’t match one person’s sense of who should benefit or they don’t like what it says, doesn’t make it “bad”. Beware the dark side of this trend, it doesn’t take much for these purpose judgements to transform into an “I’m better than you are” conceit among organisations and critics alike.

Talking about purpose and values in the seminal 1994 book Built to Last, Jim Collins and Jerry Porras observe, “the critical issue is not whether the company has the “right” core ideology or a “likeable” core ideology but rather whether it has a core ideology – likeable or not–that gives guidance and inspiration to people inside that company” (author emphasis).[2]

On the back of the core ideology, an organisation makes many promises. Yet if the highest order promise held in the purpose is a lie, then a cascade of other broken promises is almost inevitable with social media channels waiting to highlight and amplify them for all to read and see.

Customer and company disconnects between purpose, promises made and too often broken regularly result in social media maelstroms. Escalating expectations (often created by organisations over-promising) are coupled with falling attention spans amid a continuous avalanche of information. So while people want organisations to do better, they give them fewer chances to deliver.

Avoiding this trap requires a deliberate and conscious approach to what the organisation will do and how they will do it, which brings us to the continuing juggernaut of experience design.

Experience, People and Promises

Take care of associates, and they’ll take care of your customers.” J.W.Marriott

In 2019 the next experience iteration, connecting customer and employee, will continue to gather steam amid frustration with gaps between expectation and reality on both sides. Across both internal and external landscapes, organisations continue to see a focus on experience as an antidote to dissatisfaction and declining engagement.

And while I applaud the connection, a less welcome accompanying trend is that the people who should sit at the heart of the conversation are easily lost amid stated benefits and indicators of productivity and profit. As a result, the very efforts to humanise how they do things is immediately rendered suspect.

So to truly enjoy the gains organisations will need to find different measures, think more deeply about the different kinds of capital they trade[3], shift people out of the cost column of the balance sheet and do more than just talk about them as assets.

It also remains to be seen if bringing employees into the equation will help realign the runaway desire to delight customers, which to date still often overwhelms the ability to deliver. With ever more grandiose promises of wow far outstripping the baseline capability to perform consistently.

Merely talking about both “sides” of the experience coin is very different from approaching them as an integrated and interrelated loop. And a loop is what they will need to be for the full potential of experience to achieve a brand result organisations say they want – where people genuinely care about it.

Because experience is where all expectations and promises land, and where they are kept or broken.  Organisations will need to make concrete connections between what they are promising and the people delivering it to ensure they sit on the “kept” side of the ledger. When it fails, confidence in the organisation is the casualty.

Confidence As Currency

In his 2007 Ted talk, designer William McDonough observes “commerceis fundamentally honest because we cant exchange value for very long if we dont trust each other.”[4]

This quote neatly underpins a trust disconnect moving into 2019. Amid over-hyped purpose and broken promises, people are going elsewhere to exchange their value. And on the back of high-profile headlines, many feel commerce is anything but fundamentally honest. It has never been easier to find a reason to take your “trust” elsewhere.

However, going elsewhere avoids a fundamental element of what it means to trust. In his book “The Truth About Trust” author David DeSteno[5] observes “At the most basic level, the need to trust implies one fundamental fact: you’re vulnerable. The ability to satisfy your needs or obtain the outcomes you desire is not entirely under your control. . . .Trust, then, is simply a bet, and like all bets, it contains an element of risk.” And it is increasingly a bet people are unwilling to make.

So perhaps, in this context, trust is not the best word to use. As an alternative, I suggest people use confidence, associated with the old Norse root of the word “traust” (first proposed to me by Corporate Law Theorist, Peter Tunjic) as a better fit for what organisations need to cultivate.

Hard-won and easily eroded, organisations and individuals who actively guard people’s confidence in them will thrive. This premise is frequently overlooked in a rush to entice potential customers and employees, a trend contributing to levels of churn on both fronts.

Amid the growing scrutiny of an organisation’s actions by employees, customers and even government regulators, no organisation can afford to be cavalier about confidence. To be worthy of confidence, understand your purpose, connect that to what you intend, make promises you can keep and keep them.

In closing out this review, look at confidence as a currency. Something to be earned, banked and drawn on from time-to-time. Organisations looking to step up their loyalty efforts could benefit from shifting to a “confidence bank” as a way of tracking the internal and external perception of how well their purpose is showing up in the experience, with the brand as a result.

Summary
  • Embrace brand as a result that is bigger than your marketing led by a purpose to guide and inspire people inside the organisation.
  • Avoid the purpose-washing trap and focus on what is meaningful to you
  • Think about employee and customer experience as a loop
  • Focus on making promises you can keep
  • Approach confidence as a currency

[1] Scanlon, What We Owe Each Other, 295

[2] Collins and Porras, Built to Last, 88

[3] Tunjic, On Directorship, https://ondirectorship.com/ondirectorship/2018-2

[4] McDonough, Cradle to Cradle 2007 Ted Talk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IoRjz8iTVoo

[5] DeSteno, The Truth About Trust, Brain Pickings, https://www.brainpickings.org/2014/02/03/david-desteno-truth-about-trust/

 

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