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10 Questions to Ask to Develop Your Brand Internally

A critical component to developing a business brand strategy is ensuring that your employees understand that brand strategy, buy into that brand strategy and live that brand strategy.  In fact, one of the first steps you should take as you develop your own brand strategy is to look within your own company. 

Ask your employees to confidentially respond to the following questions:

  1. What word (or words) come to mind when you think of our brand?
  2. What does our brand stand for in the minds of consumers?
  3. What should our brand stand for in the minds of consumers?
  4. Do consumers trust our brand?
  5. Do you trust our brand?
  6. Do you purchase our brand?
  7. Do you recommend our brand to friends and family?
  8. Do you like telling friends and family what company you work for?
  9. Do you think our leadership is focused on delivering our brand promise to consumers?
  10. What other brand do you think does a better job than we do?

Asking your employees to answer the above questions will give you an idea of where your brand currently stands in their minds and where you need to make changes in order to have any chance at convincing them to buy into your brand strategy.  In other words, if they don’t think the company lives the brand strategy at the executive level or overall, then it’s highly unlikely they’ll be willing to live the brand strategy that is passed to them from upper management through training sessions, special events, etc.

In other words, your employees need to believe in your brand strategy to live it.  Begin building your brand internally first.

What other questions would you add to this list?  Leave a comment and share your thoughts with Corporate Eye readers.

Viacom – The Mrs. Kravitz of the Internet

Remember Mrs. Kravitz, the nosey neighbor from the 60s television show, Betwitched? If there was anything going on in the Stevens’ household, you can bet Mrs. Kravitz knew about it!

Privacy issues on the Internet have long been a debatable topic for quite a while. Users take great offense to being “Big Brothered” and having their viewing and purchasing habits scrutinized under watchful, bullying eyes.

In a consumer-angering move, Viacom sued Google-owned YouTube to the sum of $1 billion dollars for the right to access their customer’s information regarding their viewing habits and IP addresses. Needless to say, this move got quite a few people upset enough that some are taking action. What’s even scarier is that Viacom feels that they have a right to this information, without having even gotten permission from the users. They want to “see” what the viewers are viewing and from what ISP address they are viewing it from. Consumer’s privacy issues will possibly be compromised and every move we make will be noted by the great Viacom.

Mrs. Kravitz is watching. 

So, how does Viacom feel about being called names like bully, or watchdogs or worse, meanies? In their defense, they noted on their website the details of what they will be extrapolating from the information derived from the YouTube files:

A recent discovery order by the Federal Court hearing the case of Viacom v. YouTube has triggered concern about what information will be disclosed by Google and YouTube and how it will be used. Viacom has not asked for and will not be obtaining any personally identifiable information of any YouTube user. The personally identifiable information that YouTube collects from its users will be stripped from the data before it is transferred to Viacom. Viacom will use the data exclusively for the purpose of proving our case against You Tube and Google.

Viacom has been in discussions with Google to develop a framework to share this data. We are committed to a process that will not only comply with the Court’s confidentiality order, but that will also meet our commitment to the strongest possible internet privacy protections.

It is unfortunate that we have been compelled to go to court to protect Viacom’s rights and the rights of the artists who work with and depend on us. YouTube and Google have put us in this position by continuing to defend their illegal and irresponsible conduct and by profiting from copyright infringement, when they could be implementing the safe and legal user generated content experience they promise.

Viacom states that they will only use the information to prove their case of copyright infringement against YouTube, and for nothing else. It is likely that people are not upset about the idea that they (Viacom) wants to protect their material, but that they are accessing files and then will “dispose” of the private, intrusive information portion. Likely not. Viacom has somehow successfully tainted their name in the communications industry and to the average consumer as being nosey – Mrs. Kravitz’s style.

“By seeking to make carriers and hosting providers liable for Internet communications, Viacom’s complaint threatens the way hundreds of millions of people legitimately exchange information, news, entertainment and political and artistic expression,” Google said in answer to Viacom’s March 13 suit.

This change will drastically affect the way consumers view the entertainment media. They will hesitate before they download or participate in surveys. They will think twice before they upload materials onto certain web portals. Finally, they will always wonder if someone, somewhere is watching their every move, noting their most intimate written thought or images or looking out at you through their stadium-sized computer monitors.

Yes, someone will be watching. And you’ll only wish that it were Mrs. Kravitz.
 

 

Rating The Corporate Governance Raters

Corporate governance attracts much public attention since it purportedly involves the economic-financial health of corporations and society in general. However, corporate governance is poorly defined because it typically is composed of differing mix of policies, procedures, internal practices all surrounded by laws and regulations.

Simply put –

…the overall purpose of corporate governance, which is to align as nearly as possible the interests of individuals, corporations and society.
Theories of Corporate Governance Edited by Thomas Clarke

OK maybe that’s too simple. Here is a definition from Investopidia —

“Good corporate governance is a situation in which a company complies with all of its governance policies and applicable government regulations (such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002) in order to look out for the interests of the company’s investors and other stakeholders.

The corporate need to be in compliance with corporate governance has shaped an industry of advisers, rating firms and other services with an estimated 2008 sales of $52 billion (corp-integrity.com). Perhaps the most influential of these companies are the rating agencies. These firms – which include the Corporate Library and RiskMetrics Group’s ISS Governance Services and S&P – analyze companies against their own criteria and rate whether a company is well governed or not.

These ratings may influence a company’s cost of capital, equity share price and shareowner relations. As such, the companies that compile these ratings have achieved a significant presence in world financial markets. But, there are some problems — extensive studies indicate these ratings bear little relation to actual corporate performance. A recent Fortune article summarized a Stanford University study widely different ratings for individual companies.

The Stanford researchers summarized their findings–

We examine these claims for the commercial corporate governance ratings produced
for 2005 by Audit Integrity, RiskMetrics (previously Institutional Shareholder Services),
GovernanceMetrics International, and The Corporate Library. Our results indicate that the level of predictive validity for these ratings are well below the threshold necessary to support the bold claims made for them by these commercial firms.(Emphasis added) Moreover, we find no relation between the governance ratings provided by RiskMetrics with either their voting recommendations or the actual votes by shareholders on proxy proposals.
Rating the Ratings: How Good Are Commercial Governance Ratings? Rock Center for Corporate Governance Stanford University

A summary of this report is available. The Stanford study is one of a number of other similar studies that question the value of these ratings agencies. Some common themes in these studies include —

  • Over reliance on quantitative accounting/financial criteria
  • “You can’t legislate compliance”
  • More emphasis needed on observable qualitative criteria, such as corporate culture, drivers of employee behavior and corporate integrity practices.

This post only touches the surface of this important subject. Future posts will cover additional aspects of Corporate Governance ratings and related topics. In the meantime, here is a Canadian company that just might be a model of effective Corporate Governance practices —

Note the focus on Integrity, the public display of an “Integrity Hotline” and a clear display of compliance documents. Criteria the rating agencies miss.

Twitter: Intel takes on a new recruitment agency

How about this for a great new way of seeking a new hire?

Intel use TwitterIntel

Yesterday Intel put their first job up on their Twitter account JobsatIntel. If you were looking for someone with an interest in the web, whether technical or design, or someone interested in social networking, or even just someone who is likely to be au fait with the latest tools and feeds, you couldn’t do better than to post a mini-ad on Twitter.

Once here, it is likely to be picked up and passed around to people working in, or with an interest in, this area. This job is for a Graphics Validation Engineer. I don’t know what the job entails, but this may be the quickest way of getting the job description under the nose of someone suitable.

That is because it is quick and free, it capitalises on people’s willingness to do a favour for a friend (especially at no cost) and pass this on to them if they think it relevant, and it puts the job ad where the target market is – on the web, and well-connected.

I notice that Intel’s Twitter account has 22 people signed up to receive their Tweets, even though it has only been there a day. That is 22 people already who may act as recruiting agents on Intel’s behalf, at no cost.

You’ve got to love Intel’s ability to use the web to their advantage.

Kissing and Ketchup Don’t Mix

Heinz’s Controversial Ad (video)

At least, that’s what the American Family Association had to say about a Heinz ad that was featured in the UK. It seems that the ad featured a homosexual family with a homosexual couple sharing a kiss as the male part of the union left for work. The AFA Christian group lodged several complaints that had the computer systems bogged down for hours at the Heinz headquarters. They were greatly offended and asked for not only the immediate removal of the ad but also for an apology to customers. Was this a good idea gone bad?

It seems that perhaps Heinz smeared it’s good name with the folks at the American Family Association, but quickly offered an apology with promises to never run the ad again. It’s almost like a little kid who got caught raiding the cookie jar – that unbelievably wide-eyed look as if they didn’t notice that anyone was looking. Is the apology too little too late, or was this a strategic effort to increase their sales? The ad featured a new product line that Heinz is introducing, so perhaps they wanted as much exposure for this new product as they could get. Although the ad has not run in any US outlets, the Christian group’s ties and interests ran deep enough that the UK media for Heinz took note. What were they thinking?

The media has ties to several varied special interest groups who want to get their message out and sensitize certain niche audiences. They use several media outlets to achieve this, including television, radio and print materials. They approach their message from certain angles and usually settle on one that will create buzz and get them lots of attention. While everyone doesn’t always agree or think the same on certain issues, the media has a financial need to cater to what their customers want and what the majority of their customers are seeking. This doesn’t always fare too well with the general population, as is the case in this news story, but being aligned with proper or “right” thinking isn’t always what the media seeks to do. Since right thinking is definitely relative thinking, it would stand to reason that they felt “right” in their choice to make and run this ad in its context.

Heinz will definitely garner attention from this use of advertising. How can they not? Whether they get new customers, lose faithful ones or just get a chuckle from it, they have definitely received attention. If nothing else, folks will want to try this new product just to see if it was really good enough for Heinz to put themselves on the firing line like they did. And, if it was worth it, perhaps other companies will take note and start producing “edgy” ads in an effort to reach customers. All in all, this was definitely a strategic move made by a company who carries a household name with their product alignment. Time will tell whether or not it was worth it.

Ketchup anyone?
 

Watch What You Say: Words Mean Things

The saying. “words mean things” goes beyond the general idea of the simple dictionary meaning of words. Words carry weight, intent, meaning and attitude. The “way” words are spoken are just as important as the words that are chosen. When choosing what words to use, in what context and to what audiences, media outlets should be careful in selecting words that can enlighten, entertain or even harm their readers.

The media has a huge responsibility when reporting the news, although they may often think that they do not. The public and private sectors rely somewhat heavily on what the media has to report, how they report it, what new evidence that they have found regarding products or even what the latest corporate hush-hush gossip is all about. The bottom line is although people are responsible for what they choose to believe, the media is responsible for reporting accurate and genuine facts. [Read more…] about Watch What You Say: Words Mean Things