That Big Brand Sound

The Brand Voice Audit (BVA) and other tools of Brand Orchestration.

Many years ago I heard a recording by the "Portsmouth Symphonia Orchestra" in which the pianist played the opening bars of the Grieg piano concerto while the orchestra played the introduction of a no less famous and equally beautiful piano concerto by Robert Schumann. Even though each concerto is a beautiful piece of the classical repertoire, the net result was a horrendous cacophony.

Branding activities can be equally horrendous when they are not in tune with each other. And, because communication consistency is essential to creating a brand, a lack of harmony between the different voices that speak for a brand can be lethal to the brand itself.

Yet many branding plans seem to pay little attention to anything but the branding effects of advertising and packaging. It is as if one tried to create a concerto, and only wrote the part for the soloist, expecting that the rest of the orchestra would follow naturally!

I was reminded of this recently when I called the cellular telephone company that I have had for the past nine years and discovered that I was paying a higher rate than I could have had just for the asking. When I pointed out to their representative that his company had betrayed my trust, the answer was that "the new rates had been published" and that I had "been sent a mailer," etc. In other words, I was blamed for not being an alert customer. The "customer service" person was very pleasant, polite and professional and was undoubtedly following his employer's policy. The result, however, is that a company whose name I had come to trust did betray and insult me, their longtime customer. In the process, all the advertising communication and good service provided by the company -- in short, all its brand equity -- was cancelled by the one dissonant policy of its "customer service."

The same could happen to any brand that hasn't mastered the skill of brand orchestration. Here are a few pointers that may help:

1. You need a backbone to guide your orchestration; that is, you need to know, at the outset of the project, which musical themes you'll develop in your symphony. The development of a brand also needs a series of themes to provide guidance for all of the brand's activities. In other words, you need to start with a branding strategy. At JP Group we help our clients develop a "Brand Character Statement" or BCS, a one-page document which lists the immutable values that dictate what the brand can and cannot do, can and cannot say, and the associations it may or may not have. That is the format we chose for our Branding Strategies. Yours may differ. Whatever format you choose, have a written strategy to guide your efforts from the very beginning.

2. Make sure that you have, or your team has, the authority needed to lead the brand's chorus. The implementation of a Branding Strategy reaches well beyond the marketing department and may involve areas of the company where you have little or no authority. For this reason you must have a mandate from the highest authority in the company. Make sure that you are given access to the top management, that their mandate is known company-wide, and that it is reaffirmed several times during the life of the project. You should also have the authority to assemble a multifunctional team at the outset of the project. Look at team members as "Brand Ambassadors" to their respective departments. They will "seed" the team's recommendations within their departments, improve understanding for the project's goals and methods, and likely improve long term compliance with the brand's strategy.

3. Know which audience you'll be playing for. Define the target for your brand's communication. Often, the target is the current (or potential) buyer of the branded product or service. But, most of the time, branding has effects that go far beyond the mere purchase of your product or service by your immediate customer: bankers, stock brokers, investors and job applicants can all be influenced by your brand. The effect of a strong brand on those secondary targets can significantly affect stock price, personnel recruitment, employee morale and many other aspects of your business. I even know of a businessman who works for a giant fast food company who proudly wears a company pin when going through airport customs because he is convinced that the brand speeds the customs clearance process.

You must know your audience so that you can tailor your orchestration to its hearing habits. Which brand voice are they most likely to hear? Which will influence their perception the most? But please do not change the essence of your branding message to satisfy the desires of any audience: while products and product positioning need to adapt -- that is the essence of marketing -- branding strategy stems from the inner values of a brand and of its management. A brand cannot accommodate the changing desires of a fickle constituency without losing its character.

The sole purpose of knowing your brand's audience is to learn to better communicate your immutable brand message, whatever it is.

4. Inventory the instruments in the orchestra. The most obvious (loudest) player is the advertising campaign. It plays the role of the soloist in your branding orchestration and may have the lion's share of the communication. Do not stop there! Some brands have been established quite successfully without advertising. Not all orchestral pieces are concerti (with a soloist). Symphonies (without a soloist) can also make for very compelling musical communication. In addition, whether you can or cannot afford advertising, you still need to ensure that the rest of the orchestra plays in harmony. Therefore you must inventory as many of the brand's voices as you can identify, determine their capability to contribute to the branding strategy, and write a score for them to follow. This process is what we call a "Brand Voices Audit," or BVA. It is a very simple process whereby, through qualitative research such as focus groups conducted among members of the brand's target audience, we find out when and where there is a contact with the brand, how often the contact occurs, and how it affects the brand.

5. Evaluate each brand voice for its impact and its ability to sing the tune. Conducting a BVA is easy; analyzing its findings can be difficult. The analysis often suggests revisions to the established order of priorities, and demands attention (and investment) in areas where none had been planned before. Customers do not view a brand in the same light as the company does: when they eat cardboard-tasting sandwiches on an airplane, they blame the airline even though, technically, an unrelated company may have provided the food. If the customer has a problem with his credit card's frequent-user program, he'll blame the card, even though that function may have been farmed out to another company. A rude or harried telephone operator or a poorly designed telephone answering system can impact the perception of the entire company and the brand name it carries. The good news is the disproportionately positive impression that a good and friendly telephone operator can have on the brand. Rank order the many voices of the brand based on your inventory and on your assessment of their respective impact. At this point, you'll probably realize that there are too many voices for you to address, so you'll have to work with only the most important ones (the lead voices).

6. Write a separate score for each of the lead voices, if possible, by enrolling the help of those who control each voice to write the script for you. The "shared ownership" that will result from this delegation of responsibility will benefit the implementation of the strategy in the long term.

You are now ready to lead the band and to go for that big Brand sound! (c) 1998 Jacques Chevron

That Big Brand Sound - To learn more about this author, visit Jacques Chevron's Website.

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