Authors of a Book on Brand Manners Say the
Alignment of Internal and External Brand Values is Crucial

William Gordon, Hamish Pringle

William Gordon and Hamish Pringle are of the opinion that quite often organizations are extremely good at presenting an external brand image or external brand values, but pretty poor at supporting those through the companies' own internal culture. Companies that manage to achieve this alignment will probably be in better shape to survive tougher economic times when, they believe, there will be "a flight to quality." So the two British-based business consultants wrote a book titled Brand Manners in which they've outlined way to reach that integration of values.

Gordon is a strategy partner with Accenture. Pringle is the director of Brand Beliefs Ltd. and the IPA consultant director of marketing strategy. In August, he will take up the role of director general at the IPA.

Pringle began his presentation by pointing out how technological advances in communication have brought us back to where we started "a few hundred years ago when people would live and die within eight or 10 miles of where they were born, where they might know 100 people, and where everybody knew everybody and everybody's business." As people moved into towns and cities, that ability to know everybody receded, he said, "and the idea of personal trust - my word is my bond - that thing became very important to us. But what's happened now, of course, is that we're back to a global village, and we're back to the intimacy of information. Everybody can know an awful lot about everybody else again."

In essence, he said, "we're back to village life, really. And we're back to the local market. And that explains why on the Internet you have auctions and markets and corporate buying - and gossip. Gossip is big on the 'Net."

With fundamental changes already in place in the environment and therefore in the way in which companies and brands operate within it, "the question is what's happening to branding, and what's happening to communications in this market?"

Picking up on that question, Gordon observed that "with interactive branding, everybody is talking to everybody, and it's all linked in all kinds of different ways, and it's gotten really quite complex." With Web sites and call centers and the like, there are many different ways that customers can now communicate with companies.

"In the old days," he said, "the organization in a way could hide away from the customer, and management didn't need to actually have any contact with customers. But now that's changing a lot. The customer has much more contact with the organization."

Gordon described two kinds of organizations. One, the "command and control" type organization, features a "top-down" style of management with all authority emanating from top management. The other, the "self-confident" organization is just the opposite. "The person dealing with the customer is the most important person in that organization," he said, "and everybody else in the organization is there to serve them - including the CEO, including the marketing department."

Among examples of "self-confident" companies that have achieved success through their efforts in this regard, the authors cite Tesco, a UK-based supermarket whose executive board members spend every Friday in the stores talking to customers and employees. "And every Monday afternoon in the board meeting, they will discuss what they found on Friday," Gordon said. "They're absolutely in contact with their customer base."

Tesco has $30 billion in revenues and about $1.5 billion in operating profit - "which for mainly a food retailer is pretty good" - and employs about 280,000 in Europe and Asia. It is a company that has gone from "command and control" to "self-confident," Gordon said.

In their brand advertising, the company uses a tagline, "Every Little Helps," he said, adding that the first time he came across it, he thought the tagline was slightly odd. "But I've come to realize that every person in Tesco understands what that means," he said. "It means every single little thing they do - day in, day out - helps their customers and helps them. So this is a terrific example of how you can take corporate image and corporate branding and translate it directly into what the behavior of relatively modest people can be. People filling the shelves, people serving the customers, really understand what 'Every Little Helps' means."

Showing how Tesco has outstripped its competition in Europe, Gordon said that creating a self-confident organization not only made for happy customers and happy employees but demonstrated financial success as well. "Once a company in a sector breaks into this new management space," he said, "the performance is so terrific it will change the whole sector."

Pringle added, "In all of this, there is an absolutely central role for communications...If brands of corporations are living entities, there has to be someone who has kind of editorial control over that. And we think that the corporation has to develop its own dream and create its own drama. It has to think almost in theatrical terms about itself.

"And in a way," he went on, "the chief executive needs to be kind of a scriptwriter, director, designer and set builder, and thinking of all the aspects of the corporate drama in those terms."

There also needs to be an orator, he said, someone to move the narrative along in corporate drama. "As the story unfolds, there's got to be a very conscious development iteration of the script, of the next scene or the next interaction. And if you do that, I think you get to a situation where the chief executive is manager of expectations and experience...both internally and externally. Then you have to have all those skills to conceive, communicate and make concrete those expectations, and that becomes a very, very important thing to be able to do."

The power of a narrative drive can be seen already in certain companies, the two believe. "You get these charismatic individuals who are just leading from the front in a very literal sense. They're making it up as they go along, and that gives incredible momentum to the organization," Pringle said. "Often these people are deliberately and overtly publicity-seeking entrepreneurs. And what these people do is they write this script every day, and that's what creates the momentum, that's what creates the drama."

A company that is led by a charismatic leader, which does have that narrative drive, is a dramatic place to be working - and that is good for an employee's self-esteem and self-confidence, he said.

But what if the company has what Pringle called "a charisma bypass"? Not every company is led by a combination of visionary leader and astute business person. In that case, he said, "the corporation has to develop its common language, common themes, continuity of purpose and astute communications...to create the company's story both inside and outside the organization."

The authors believe that creates "a hugely enhanced role for communications," what Pringle called "the keeper of the corporate vision." They believe "there needs to be someone at the most senior level of the corporation and probably reporting to the board at the same level as the chief executive...someone standing beside the chief executive who is ...in a position to say, 'I wouldn't say that if I were you. I wouldn't do that if I were you. That doesn't fit with our story; that's not part of our narrative drive.'"

Pringle likened the position to the classical fool, someone who has such a position of power in the court that he or she can make fun of the king - or the queen. A fool can bring stories from the outside, truth from the outside, and present it at the court with impunity.

"I think it's a really powerful notion that someone at the very, very top of a corporation has the security of tenure to be able to say to the chief executive and the board, 'I'm telling you from my position as director of communications we are not playing this right. We're not doing this right. We need to be saying and doing something different.'

"I think" he continued, "what would be a very powerful outcome of all of this is if the recognition of the importance of corporate communication really was taken on board and given real teeth in companies."