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Corporate
Image: Guides to Success
By Michael Alan Hamlin
October 2002
Subscribing to a select group of
IT discussion groups, I find, is a wonderful way to stay in touch
and in tune with issues that concern the sector, and especially
the many small entrepreneurial firms that have sprung up. Many of
those discussions have to do with growing the firm, revenues, and
profitability. There is a lot of concern with marketing the firm,
and distinguishing it from competitors; i.e. Indian firms.
I was surprised recently to read
in one string about promoting software development services that
"quality" is a given, and that a company's capacity to
pull in work was more dependent on whether it offered the lowest
price and could deliver on time. Reading the message sent shivers
down my spine, because it was saying that software development is
being commoditized, and reduced to competing on margin. I can't
imagine a worse nightmare for any business.
Fighting commoditization is something
all organizations have to do, though, including consultants like
me. There's always someone around who's willing to do the work cheaper
and faster, if not better, or at least that's the promise. Fortunately,
there are ways to effectively deflect or at least delay commoditization.
One is to constantly innovate, offering new products and services
separated by short intervals. This makes it difficult for competitors
to keep up.
Another way is to build a strong
corporate brand. In fact, I believe the ultimate purpose of all
branding is to insulate products and services from withering price
competition. That why brands can be worth so much. The Coke brand,
for instance, is estimated by branding consultancy Interbrand to
be worth about US$70 billion. Although the most valuable brands
belong to companies headquartered in the US, Japanese have always
been expert brand developers. Recently, the rest of Asia has been
catching on. For example, Samsung has one of the fastest growing
brands in the world in terms of value. In the most recent Interbrand
survey, it grew 22 percent over a 12-month period to a very impressive
US$6.37 billion.
Those big numbers don't mean that
brands shouldn't be the concern of smaller firms, too. While small
entrepreneurships obviously don't have the budgets that larger,
established firms do, corporate branding expert and author James
R. Gregory says there are six basic guidelines for creating successful
corporate brands that any firm should rely on. Gregory is the author
of Marketing Corporate Image: The Company as Your Number One Product.
First off is the importance of remembering
that it's not "reality" that matters so much as what a
target market "perceives" to be reality. Executives are
very frequently frustrated when they find - usually by chance -
that the market perceives their firms as something quite different
from what they try to be. But since the market perceives them as
one thing, there is little opportunity generated to provide whatever
it is the company believes it is in the business of providing.
To avoid this trap, it's critical
that companies be very focused in the manner that they communicate
with prospective customers. To do this, it's useful to develop a
positioning statement that will guide the communications effort,
and keep it focused on a limited set of key messages. The positioning
statement may or may not ever find its way into a promotion, but
it should always be there in spirit, so that "self image"
is aligned with "public reputation."
Second, imaging should be driven
at the very top of the organization. In an entrepreneurship, that
shouldn't be hard. But with everything else a harried entrepreneur
must do, it's not unusual for communications to become a low priority.
And then that leaves the organization with a set of fine products
and services and no one to sell them to. Often, we see communications
relegated to a low-level marketing assistant or manager who has
limited knowledge of the organization, or a narrow perspective of
what its products and services are supposed to do. That's a recipe
for misalignment of image and reputation.
The third thing seems like a no brainer,
but it really isn't. "You must know who you are before you
can decide where you're going." It's not unusual for companies
to struggle for years trying to define themselves. Often, that's
because they are evolving. Such well-known, respected companies
as HP and Sony lurched around for years trying to figure out what
they were before discovering themselves. They were lucky, and survived
all the meandering. But most companies don't.
The fourth item on Gregory's Guides
to Success agenda is focus on a specific target audience. This is
important for a couple of reasons: 1) You don't waste money communicating
to people who aren't important to you, and probably wouldn't buy
your products and services anyway; and, 2) You can get to know your
audience better, enabling you to better understand and respond to
the customers' perceived and emerging needs and wants.
Fifth is creativity. How can you
distinguish your company, product, and service from the competition?
Of course, creativity for creativity's sake is not what we're after.
Your communications should be creative, but they must also be relevant
to the prospective client's needs and wants, and they must be truly
meaningful, or of significant impact in order to move the prospect
to act.
Finally, there is consistency. Falling
star campaigns may attract a lot of attention for a very finite
period of time, but they are quickly forgotten. For communications
to be effective, they must be consistently distinct, relevant, and
meaningful.
Communications is style. Products
and services are substance. They are two sides of the same coin,
and you can't have what you want - success - without paying attention
to both.
(Michael Alan Hamlin is the managing
director of consultancy TeamAsia and the author of three books on
Asian economies and companies. His latest book is Marketing Asian
Places, of which he is a co-author (Wiley, 2001). He can be reached
at mahamlin@teamasia.com.ph.).
Copyright © 2002 Michael Alan
Hamlin. All Rights Reserved.
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