Building a Brand: What to Stand for and What Perception to Create

Building a brand from scratch and developing one within an existing company require different approaches. The difference is that an existing company has a legacy, which is how it is perceived by its customers, employees, and the market. Whether good or bad, the perception is there and is a consequence of the way the company does things. When embarking on any brand building, change or improvement, any brand needs to understand clearly how it is currently perceived. It is important to build based on perceived values and solutions to customer demands and employees' values and behaviours. During Levels I and II, we have discussed techniques and ways to gather such information from customers, and the same processes apply to employees. Information gathered using these techniques form the basis for decisions and actions.

In a discussion of company ideologies – the core belief system that guides an organisation's purpose, values, and long-term vision, shaping its culture, decisions, and brand identity – it is essential to consider how a company operates based on these principles. The company must evaluate the size of the existing market for its approach and way of doing business to determine its potential for growth, longevity, and scale.

Additionally, the brand must evaluate the strength and consistency of its delivery and messaging, translated in marketing efforts focused on brand building and maintenance. This should also be reflected in the hiring, training, and motivation of employees. A well-defined ideology, translated into a strong brand, should not only shape external perceptions but also foster a strong internal culture that aligns with the company's mission and aspirations.

A Trap

Unfortunately, over time, some senior executives lose contact with customers and employees, coming to judge the world based on their own perception and their realities. Decisions are made based on their biased perception of the world, not reflecting the customers' or employees' perceptions or realities.

As the world evolves, so do values, and behaviours that were valid 20 years ago may not be so today. However, if a company has a solid ideology, it can adapt without losing its personality, its power of attraction to customers, employees, and the market. Executives need to be attuned to such changes.

For a brand to be efficient, it cannot be built on executives' perceptions of the world, or how they see the brand based on their own behaviour and experiences. Instead, it must be shaped by an understanding of how the company's ideology, translated into the brand, influences customer perception and attracts profitable, loyal clients. After all, "it is the customer who pays the bill!"

A company's ideology is the personality that ensures its long life and customers' loyalty. If we talk about 3M (the American multinational corporation operating in the fields of industry, worker safety, U.S. health care, and consumer goods), it is clear to customers and employees that it is a company that has innovation at the centre of its actions. It's seen as a company that respects creativity and initiative amongst its employees and therefore accepts honest mistakes. The motto of the company is "Our business is to solve problems". When someone shops with 3M, they are looking for solutions that will help to solve a daily problem. The perception is clear.

Imagine if tomorrow an outsider comes into the company and stops the 'honest mistake tolerance' practice, the innovations will soon dry up, productivity will fall, and employees will leave. The company will stop delivering what is expected, and the brand will lose its identity and what it means to the market.

American Express (Amex) values are "flawless service to the customers, services available around the world and to encourage initiative." Anyone who has an Amex card expects no problems when using it. Many customers have become Amex champions, bragging about how the company supports them. Of course, things can go wrong, but customers can be confident that Amex will support them and find a workable solution because the Amex values are in everything they do, day in and day out.

For any financial services company to be flawless in customer relationships and services, it must be extra vigilant regarding central compliance and legal actions. The challenge is to comply in a smart and customer-friendly way, not exposing employees or customers to risks. Very few companies know how to do this. That brings us to a well-known financial services company, Citibank. The drivers of Citibank are expansionism, success, autonomy for management (decentralisation), meritocracy, and being dynamic and self-confident.

The latest challenges on too big to fail, compliance issues on KYC and AML, as well as unnecessary bureaucratic constraints, are damaging the principles that made Citibank so great. Despite the challenges, the company needs to be smart and go back to its values.

We saw serious service issues such as the mistreatment of very valuable and loyal customers, and the concepts of meritocracy and autonomy being badly hurt, with all the attendant consequences. At a bank that once had a very strong culture, the senior executives must ask themselves a question: "What went wrong?"

To avoid such issues, the senior executives must understand the company values, and what has driven the success of the company, and then ensure that it is applied over and over in every decision. They should ensure that the brand values are present when hiring individuals, training them, and promoting them. The legacy that made the company successful until now is beyond innovative products, and beyond honest mistakes and bad decisions. The values and the ideology must be preserved. This message must be presented in any brand-building effort.

There are companies that, due to circumstances, have lost their ideology and values, but keep their clientele. For such businesses, it is fundamental to interact with the customers to understand what drives them to continue to trade with it, to seek solutions to their customers' problems, and to rebuild the 'soul' of the brand. This will drive the rebuilding of a relevant brand, ensuring the market reacts positively to the message.

New Companies

With new companies, there are no customers, employees, or legacy. It is a blank sheet of paper. The founders must define what kind of company they intend to build for customers and employees, and the company must decide what its most important values will be. That may be adaptability, resilience, creativity, innovation, certainty, growth or reach, a mix of these, or something else – but it must be decided and established.

It is essential to define how the company's proposition, products, and services will be delivered under this ideology. Once that is established and there is a clear understanding of which target market will be attracted by this new approach to solving a problem, it is crucial to test whether there is a true alignment between the brand's unique way of operating and the potential customers' expectations.

Founders may have one perception, while the intended target market may have another. If there a mismatch emerges, this is the moment to make adjustments – whether by redefining the target market or refining the company's differentiation, which will ultimately shape the brand and guide all marketing efforts. Additionally, the understanding of the target market's willingness to embrace and purchase the new proposition, product, or service is important. Again, this drives potential changes in the target market or the new solution design.

Both new and established companies must ensure consistency between their message and the way their offerings are delivered. If inconsistency arises from the beginning, the chances of success for the new business will be significantly reduced.

There are many ways to attract customers and employees to a new company proposition. Businesses in the same industry and market can operate in entirely different ways – just look at Microsoft, Apple, and IBM. Their distinct approaches are reflected in their messaging and the way they deliver their products and services.

Until recently in financial services, it's been mainly consulting firms and new financial services companies that have embraced the new flexible and remote working culture. They recognised that there are employees who will be more productive working remotely, individuals who need the office routine, and others who prefer a mix. Perhaps the type of people that they need to support the brand have different lifestyle needs. Employees will seek companies that are aligned in the way they prefer to work.

Some older banks or financial service companies have ignored the lifestyle needs of their employees. As a result, they have struggled with recruitment for many years while resisting flexible remote work. Then, as the Covid-19 pandemic hit, they were compelled to introduce working from home, despite technology issues with adopting to this style of working. Many only accepted it temporarily because of the pandemic and despite the benefits to their employees and the flexible working demands of the new generation of employees, they are reverting to old ways.

Employees thrive under different working conditions, and if you want them to support your brand and serve your customers effectively, you must support them. A lack of flexibility can make it harder to align the right professionals with specific customer segments or even impact the productivity of certain teams.

Another example is the business dress code. We still have banks that demand a suit and tie, while others allow business casual or a polo shirt. Decisions like this, when creating a company, will reflect on the way the market, employees, and customers perceive the company. The decision on dress code should reflect how the company wants to be perceived and the level of empathy and engagement it seeks to establish with its customers. A new company may decide to be 100% digital with no human interaction. Others will use digital as support; others will have both face-to-face and digital approaches when servicing customers. Again, when deciding what to be, a company must decide its values and way of doing business, and that should be translated and summarised by its brand.

What is important here is that once the company ideology is defined, it has now established a way of doing business and must stick to it. It is not a matter of an idea or product: it is about the company's personality and how consistently the company delivers, building over time a meaningful differentiation that will attract customers and employees.