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Branding of projects inside your organization…huh?

Friday, February 23rd, 2007

It’s more than just a logo
In an earlier post I have argued that marketing people know more about how to cope with a changing environment than any other people inside an organization. More precicely I stated that the survival of the majority of organizations depends on their marketers’ ability to respond to the “more-better-faster-now” changes in customer environment. Changing is what marketeers are good at, and that is why their insights are valuable when making change happen inside a company.

In this post I would like to treat a second example that underscores this fact: project branding.

What is Branding?

A brand is the image of the project you want to create in the mind of the stakeholders. It is your promise to deliver the outcomes and benefits to thestakeholders. The best brands imply a warranty of quality. A brand can deliver up to four levels of meaning (*). These are examinedbelow:

  • Attributes A brand first brings to mind certain product attributes. For example, your project’s name may suggest such attributes as standardized processes, common data, better customer service, and so on. The project may use one or more of these attributes in its name and catchphrase.
  • Individual Benefits Stakeholders are not interested in individual attributes. They want benefits. Therefore attributes must be translated into functional and emotional benefits. The attribute “standardized” could represent the functional benefit: “It will reduce the complexity, and consequently lead times will be reduced.”
  • Values A brand also says something about the stakeholders’ values. This is the translation into the WIIFM (What’s In It For Me).
  • Personality A brand should project a personality. Motivation researchers sometime ask: “If this brand were a person, what kind of person would it be?” A brand attracts people whose actual or desired self-images match the brand’s image.

How Branding Works
All of the above factors are necessary, but not sufficient. For example, in the context of SAP implementations, your purpose is to create a new culture, and this requires trust and community building.

  • Trust Through branding, the implementation team opens an “emotional bank account” (**) for each stakeholder. The account status displays the value of the relationship between the team and the stakeholder. Trust is the currency of this bank account. As with a financial bank account, deposits and withdrawals are made that affect the value of the relationship. If you stick to your promises, people will make deposits of trust, and the value of your brand will grow. When you make mistakes, the “emotional reserves” will compensate for it, but the value of the brand will decrease.
  • Community Building If the value of the brand is high, more people will want to open an emotional bank account, because depositing trust on your brand gives high returns. That is how you create community: First you provide an image, and then you walk your talk for each individual stakeholder. Pushing an advertising campaign on stakeholders who have a negative balance in their emotional bank accounts will only create cynicism.

Why Branding is Important
There are two reasons why it is important to create an attractive brand that reflects the vision of the project.

  • Psychological Safety If a brand’s trustworthiness reduces anxiety and doubt. Branding creates the emotional link that is necessary for people to experience psychological safety. People need a sense of psychological safety that it is OK to try something new and to give up something old and familiar. However, this building of trust takes time.
  • Reaching the Tipping Point Stakeholders base their ultimate trust about a brand (to support or not to support) on its clarity of purpose. To truly commit, stakeholders try to assess the authenticity with which the project team acts across its entire relationship network. Because that network is largely invisible to them, stakeholders use close relationships (friends, colleagues, opinion leaders, etc.) and symbols (logo, language used, leadership declarations, physical presence, etc) to assess the project (***).

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(*) Kotler, P., Armstrong; G., Wong, V.: Principles of Marketing, Prentice Hall, 2005
(**) Covey, S.: The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Free Press, 1990
(***) Ind, N.: Beyond Branding: How the New Values of Transparency and Integrity Are Changing the World of Brands, Kogan Page, 2003

Posted in Marketing, Nicholas Ind, Philip Kotler, Stephen Covey | View Comments

What’s In It For Me?

Sunday, January 28th, 2007

Selling something that people didn’t ask for

In my opinion, marketers know more about how to cope with a changing environment than any other people inside an organization. In fact, the survival of the majority of organizations depends on their marketers’ ability torespond to the “more-better-faster-now” changes in customer environment.Changing is what marketers are good at, and that is why their insights are valuable when making change happen inside a company.
So – hang on – here comes some marketing stuff applied on the inside of an organization…
I would like to focus on the insight of John Gourville (2006), who says we need to pay attention to the psychological costs when new products force consumers to change their behavior. When we apply this marketing logic in the world of organizational change, we can refine the value proposition for the stakeholders. Stakeholders overvalue the existing benefits of their current way of working by a factor of three, and executives and change project team members overvalue thenew benefits of their innovation by a factor of three. The product of this clash of irrational estimates is a mismatch of nine to one between what the organizational change team thinks stakeholders want and what stakeholders really want.How can you overcome this disconnect? Gourville says the first step is to ask what kind of change we are asking of users. As the chart shows, we need to figure out where the changes for the users fall in a matrix with four categories:
  • Easy Sells
  • Rough Spots
  • Long Hauls
  • Smash Hits
Each has a different ratio of WIIFM (What’s in it for me) versus behavior change required from the user. As a result of the mapping of the chart, you will be able to estimate the resistance for each change. Accordingly, you will know which topics need more time for conversation or in which order you want to communicate them (we recommend communicating the bad news first).To make things a bit more concrete I have added some typical examples one can encounter during SAP implementations.
 
 

 
Rough Spots Limited WIIFM and significant behavior changes. These changes typically refer to transactions that require more clicking and data entry than before with no visible result for the user. An example is the situation of production workers who need to put in production data in a timely fashion. Most often, this is an essential action for the process on the whole, but another burden on top of their workload. If the communication of such a topic is restricted to the know-how and know-what (i. e., the instructions and the procedure), these users (and their supervisors) may quit on data accuracy and timing. If you want users to commit to these rough spots, it is going to require a lot of context (know-why) and a thorough monitoring of the supervisors as agents of change.
 
 
Long Hauls Significant WIIFM and significant behavior changes. These are typically the transactions that require a complete different way of thinking, a considerable number of clicks and screens, and many parameters to look after at the same time. For example, the local procurement of materials that had a paper flow of approvals and signatures is replaced by a paperless procurement workflow with automated approvals linking to a corporate and centralized catalogue. In the beginning, this will be a tremendous change for the users, and only after a while they will start to see the benefits of this automated and centralized approach. We really want people to persist in this long period of learning how to work in a totally different way. This will only succeed when we communicate regularly the know-hows (refreshers course, quick reference cards, coaching on-the-job, etc.), the know-whats (e. g., feedback about the KPIs to all the procurement users) and the know-whys (the context of why we are doing this).
 
 
Easy Sells Limited WIIFM and limited behavior changes. These are the very small changes in very basic actions. Examples include the printing of transport documents and any other transaction that requires no different logic than the one that users had to apply previously. For these changes, sticking to the know-how and the know-what may work out fine, although we recommendthat you take every opportunity you get to reinforce and link back to the know-why.
 
 
Smash Hits Significant WIIFM and limited behavior changes. These are the time savers and visible process improvements compared to the old situation. Examples may include a better overview of stock levels, or better search functionality. Most of the times, these are kind of features that users themselves are keen on telling their colleagues about, although initiating them yourself can do no harm to your relationship with the users and the trust they put in you.
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Source: Gourville, J.: Eager Sellers, Stony Buyers, Harvard Business Review, June 2006.

Posted in John Gourville, Marketing, SAP | View Comments

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