How to unearth a position

We’ve observed that the most successful organisations and brands we’ve worked with have one thing in common: a belief in the importance of position. Whether you want to call it a why, purpose, narrative, vision or big idea, it’s all the same. It’s about finding a simple, powerful expression of everything the brand or organisation is about. And then putting this at the heart of everything. Using it to energise teams, align activity, create fame and fuel innovation.

Helping clients to unearth a position is what we get asked to do more than anything else. Our own belief in its importance has led us to refocus our own business on this approach to brand building. We’re currently repositioning Squad and have developed a whole culture within our business around this. So, it seems only appropriate that in this, our fifth POV* piece, we return to the subject of position. In our first POV* piece we wrote about using a narrative to present a position. This time our focus is on how to find a position. Here are our 15 pieces of advice for how to do this.

1. Answer three simple questions
If you search for “positioning statement”, you’ll get lots of variants on statements like this: for [your target market] who [target market need], [your brand name] provides [main benefit that differentiates your offering from competitors] because [reason why target market should believe your differentiation statement.]

Positioning is essentially about answering the three questions that all these statements are based on:

– Who is the audience?

– Who is the competitive set?

– What is the unique aspect of the organisation or brand to focus on?

The answers to these questions create the basis of a position. For example, when positioning a soap, you could target builders: focus on the cleaning power of the product and try to steal market share from high-performance gels. Or you could target people with sensitive skin: focus on gentleness and try to steal market share from moisturising soaps. These are the strategic decisions to be made.

These questions can be answered poorly or well. Strategy is the art of sacrifice. If no difficult decisions have been made, then the likelihood is that the answers are too broad or generic. For example, defining the audience isn’t just about some general demographics. Who really are these people? What do they think, believe in and hate? The same applies to choosing competitors. Should a pub be competing against the other local down the road, or a six-pack at home? There needs to be total clarity in the answers to these three questions.

2. Find the central idea
The three questions above form the foundation of a position, but do not provide the magic ingredient. What’s also needed is a powerful idea to wrap it all around. This is what will move it from a dry, strategic statement to a powerful concept that inspires action.

In our first POV* piece we talked about communicating this idea as a narrative, which is still a good way to think about it. Particularly because brands today need to undertake a huge volume of activity at a rapid pace. An easy way to see a narrative in action is to look at successful political campaigns. When the politician or party has a strong position, you can see it coming through in every piece of activity, whether the subject is healthcare, the economy or foreign policy. A great example is Barack Obama’s “change you can believe in” idea, which was the basis of his victorious 2008 election campaign.

3. Articulate position as a manifesto
Once the three questions have been answered and the central idea found, the next task is to articulate these in some way, so that they can be shared with others. The best way we’ve found to do this is by writing a manifesto. This will allow you to set out the key points of the position and give a strong sense of the narrative that connects them. It’s also helpful to agree a word, phrase or sentence that encapsulates the narrative of the brand. When we positioned the pub and brewer JW Lees, we coined the phrase “putting the brewery at the heart of the brand”. When positioning Eurocamp we hit on the word “possibilities”.

If time and budget allow, then it’s an excellent idea to turn the manifesto into a short video. The added colour that this brings will aid understanding and the emotion you can introduce will make it more moving. This doesn’t have to be an expensive affair. We often pull together rough-cut manifesto films internally as part of our strategic process, although these are frequently produced properly once the process moves on to communicating with the wider business.

4. Avoid onions, keys and pyramids
This was another of the key points from our first POV* piece, but it’s worth reiterating since the intervening years have not made us any more enthusiastic about onions, keys and pyramids. We always avoid these models as ways to articulate a position. In our experience, no one really understands them, which makes them ineffective as a means to clarify a vision or inspire action. The main issue is that they include sections that don’t need to form a core part of position development. Values development should really be a separate exercise to do with the culture of the organisation. And personality is best handled separately, as it primarily relates to the tone of communications.

5. Unite strategy and creativity from the outset
We’ve explained what a position consists of: the answers to three questions and a central idea, all wrapped up in a manifesto. But how do you do this? It starts with the team. Finding a position is often seen as an exercise to be conducted by strategists. We believe that positions should be developed by strategists and creatives in partnership. Ultimately, a position will only be effective if it translates into action. As Thomas Edison said: “Vision without execution is hallucination.” Creatives are able to see what will and won’t be executable, which ensures that you have a workable position from the outset. They can also add the colour and emotion referred to in the previous point, which is what turns a position from a bland strategic statement into a powerful vision. At Squad, our culture and process are built around strategists and creatives working in partnership throughout the process, as opposed to in sequence.

6. Spend time on the problem not the solution
There’s a story about Einstein that we retell a lot. He said that if he had one hour to save the world, he’d spend 55 minutes understanding the problem and five minutes on the solution. The strategic and creative teams must start by building their understanding, rather than jumping into solutions.

7. Don’t see the world as a market, but a place people live in
In order to develop a full understanding of the problem, there are four worlds you need to inhabit:

– You need to get under the skin of the organisation or brand you’re positioning.

– You need to spend time in the industry.

– You need to observe (and use) the competitors you’re seeking to outperform.

– And you need to know the audience you’re targeting.

The people who inhabit these worlds are not numbers. Nor are they guinea pigs to be observed through social media. They are real people. They are your partner, friends, colleagues and relatives. If you’ve got the budget, then you can commission all kinds of research to help you become familiar with these worlds. However, we have found that one of the best ways to do this is for the team themselves to get out there and spend time with people. In the past, we’ve spent an icy-cold morning out on a Cumbrian hill farm, gone camping around Europe, met with the fruit-and-veg packers of New Covent Garden Market at dawn and spent a day in a maintenance team’s van in one of the most deprived areas of social housing in the country.

8. Search in the space between the inside and outside
You’ll find the central idea in the space that exists between those who are inside and those who are outside the organisation. A position must be something that staff feel passionate about. And it must be desired by customers. Finding the common motivation results in a position that is equally compelling to those who are inside and outside the organisation.

9. Clients have expertise but need naivety
The creative director of one famous London agency would get his team together at the start of any new business pitch. Before he let them look at the brief, he’d get them to write down everything they knew about the brand in question. And he’d say to them: “This is the last time you will be able to think about the brand like a real consumer.”

One of the mistakes we all make is thinking that our audience has anywhere near the level of knowledge or interest in a brand that we do. In reality, they give us a fraction of the attention we think they do. An external partner will never match the knowledge a client has of their brand or industry. A client lives in their world full-time, and often has done for many years. We inhabit it fleetingly. But this enables us to think much more like the people we’re targeting. It gives us a perspective and naivety that are invaluable and which it’s important to keep hold of.

10. Ask why, why, why, why, why?
A fantastic tool for getting under the skin of anything is “the five whys”. When you ask a why question, don’t settle for the first answer you get. Keep asking why. Ask why to every response until you’ve done so five times. At this point, you might be close to a deep understanding, since generally the surface-level issue is not the real issue. We often see this when clients come to us with questions. Often the question they’re asking isn’t the question that needs to be asked. For example, when Westmorland approached us, it was with the question: “What should we call our new motorway service area?” We helped them to understand that the question they should have been be asking was: “What does our brand stand for?” By answering this we were able to work out what to call the new service area.

11. Can the opposition be un-positioned?
Putting aside whatever your position (pardon the pun) is on Brexit, it’s a fascinating case study on positioning. I’d recommend watching Brexit: The Uncivil War – the Channel 4 drama starring Benedict Cumberbatch as Dominic Cummings, the campaign director of Vote Leave. It’s illuminating to see the clarity of thinking that went into the position they developed: “Take Back Control”. This is a great example of a position that frames the choice for people. Given a choice between ceding control and having control, who would opt for the former? And the addition of the word “back” was inspired, since it suggested that the control had been lost. The Remain side never managed to present an equally powerful alternative framing of the debate, which would have worked in their favour. Focusing on the competition isn’t always the answer, but sometimes thinking about framing the choices is a great approach.

12. Remember the point of the exercise
When John F. Kennedy visited the Nasa Space Center at Cape Canaveral, he saw a janitor carrying a broom and asked what he was doing. The janitor replied: “Mr President, I’m helping put a man on the moon.” Giving everyone in an organisation a purpose is powerful. Unfortunately, the idea of purpose has become equated with having a social purpose.

The CEO of Unilever recently said that the company would sell some of its brands, even big revenue drivers, to other businesses if these brands did not “contribute meaningfully to the world or society in a way that will last for decades”. It is vital now to take ethical and environmental responsibilities seriously. But this is a hygiene factor, and not always the central idea that motivates those who are inside and outside the organisation or brand. This issue isn’t exclusive to social purpose. It can also be seen a lot in areas like education. Institutions can end up developing lofty positions on the benefits of education, but these are so removed from why someone would choose the particular institution that they lack any persuasive power. It’s important to remember that we are trying to persuade people to take action.

13. Position and profit have different foundations
The V&A Museum once advertised their restaurant using the line: “An ace caff, with quite a nice museum attached.” It illustrates perfectly that the reason people choose a brand may not be the same as the thing that makes money. JW Lees are another good example of this. The positioning we developed was built around their brewery and beers. But sales of soft drinks and Americanos drive a good amount of their revenue, even though you could never differentiate the brand based on these things.

14. Argue
The collaboration between strategists and creatives is crucial to creating a successful position. Strategists are needed for their clarity, simplicity and vision. And creatives for the colour, emotion and artistry that they add. Thinking about how these two skill sets can work together effectively is vital. We’ve written before about brainstorming and its premise that “every idea is a good idea”. It isn’t. Every idea is a first idea. A thought to be knocked about and developed; handled with care, but also tested to destruction. Studies have shown that healthy debate produces better ideas than the classic brainstorming rules. So keep it respectful and constructive, but do argue.

15. Don’t let logic kill the magic
Last but not least, be careful not to overthink all of this. It all comes down to a good story, well told. If you’ve got one, handle it with care and don’t let it be killed by committees or logic. As Leonardo da Vinci said: “It is by logic we prove, but by intuition we discover.”

— RG

Plugging the boardroom into the frontline

It’s easy to think that cracking a bold vision for an organisation or brand will lead to success. We’ve frequently experienced the euphoria among a leadership team that follows the agreement of such things – often at the end of an awayday following months of deliberations. The problem is that a vision, as the word suggests, is only a concept for the future. The hard part is turning it into reality. This can be overlooked and is often more challenging than agreeing the vision. For the last ten years, Squad has worked with clients to turn boardroom strategy into frontline creativity. This, our fourth POV piece, seeks to distil some of our learnings.

The history of Starbucks illustrates the importance of both vision and execution. Starbucks has achieved global success, but the company’s history can be traced back to 1983 when Howard Schultz visited an espresso bar in Milan. At that time in America most people drank cheap, poor-quality coffee. In Italy, Schultz observed the high prices being charged for a top-quality product. He noticed the rapid turnover of customers. He observed the experience and ambience of the bars. But most of all, he noted that this was not a niche but a mass market. He returned home with a vision to recreate the Italian espresso bar experience in America.

In Good Strategy/Bad Strategy, Richard Rumelt explains how Schultz’s first coffee shop was a direct copy of what he’d seen in Milan. It had a stand-up bar. The shots of espresso were served in small porcelain cups. There were waiters in bow ties and opera music played in the background. It was even called Il Giornale. Once the business was trading, Schultz started to observe the behaviour of his customers. Based on these insights he made changes. Italian was taken off the menu, opera music was dropped, uniforms became more informal and seating areas were introduced. The product too evolved. Takeaway cups were introduced and non-fat milk was offered. And the name was changed to Starbucks. The vision – to bring a high-quality coffee shop experience to America – remained the same, but the execution evolved.

One of the challenges for many organisations is that they’re significantly larger than Starbucks was at that time. Therefore, the leaders are not the ones making the implementation decisions. Vision and execution are separated, often by multiple layers of management. The truth is you need alignment of the two. A vision is important so that the whole organisation is moving in the same direction. But incorporating feedback from the frontline, from the people getting first-hand customer responses, is also vital. Giving them the freedom to make the right implementation decisions, while ensuring they do so in a manner consistent with the vision, is the key to success.

Faced with such challenges, it’s easy for organisations to lose faith in the role of a vision. Sometimes this can lead to organisations neglecting its importance and focusing just on execution. Yet a vision is crucial. Jim Collins, in his study of companies, Good to Great, observed: “That extra dimension [of great companies] is a guiding philosophy or a ‘core ideology’.” The answer is not to neglect vision, but to adopt a process that connects vision with execution. The process of strategy is as important, if not more important, than the strategy itself. In our experience, there are three crucial principles for turning strategy into action.

Guide, don’t prescribe
Mark Williams, then of Brunel University, conducted a study of Premier League and academy football coaches. He found that more time was spent on drilling than on game-related activities, and that coaches continuously barked commands. Williams explained: “Traditionally, coaches have tended to provide copious amounts of feedback in the belief that more is better.”¹ Pep Guardiola is one of the top coaches in the world. He takes an entirely different approach. He says: “Once the referee has blown the whistle, I stand there and wave my hands, but it is always down to the players. When Raz [Raheem Sterling] gets the ball, do you think my info is in his head? No, because he only has a split second to decide what to do and a million possibilities. I am here to help, but football belongs to the players.”¹

The key to understanding Guardiola’s success is recognising what he does give to his players. He came through the Barcelona academy before breaking into the first team. Through every level of Barcelona football club runs a strong philosophy with regard to how the game should be played. Their teams are encouraged to play out from the back and press hard when not in possession. Players are taught to find space, make unpredictable runs and improvise. It is this philosophy that he has instilled in his Manchester City team. Setting strategy is inherently about making choices between available options. It’s the art of sacrifice. But this does not necessitate being prescriptive about how a direction is pursued. Guardiola gives his players enough of a framework to ensure he has compatible players playing in a coherent way, but he gives them sufficient space to make the right decisions on the pitch.

One of the common pitfalls with defining the direction is mistaking goals for strategy. It is common to hear organisations talk about “increasing profit margins by X%” or “growing turnover to £Xm” as if these are strategies. These are outcomes. There are numerous ways in which an organisation could achieve these goals. The crux of effective strategy is defining the way in which the organisation will achieve the goals. If specific goals are set – after all, targets are not necessarily a bad thing – then it’s important to be conscious of them not undermining the strategy, as happened in the NHS. The government had set targets that patients must be treated within four hours of them being admitted. Their desire was to speed up treatment for patients. But the impact of this was thousands of 999 patients being left to wait in ambulances in car parks and holding bays, or in hospital corridors. Hospitals were deliberately delaying admitting patients in order to meet their targets, which ironically made the situation worse.²

Mobilise people
In our third POV piece, we referenced the example of Enron. In their reception area, the company had these values displayed: Integrity, Communication, Respect, Excellence. Enron went bankrupt due to fraud and its executives were imprisoned. As Pfeffer and Sutton say in The Knowing-Doing Gap: “The problem is that there are too many organisations where having a mission or values statement written down somewhere is confused with implementing those values. These firms act as if going through the process of developing a statement, perhaps publishing it on little cards that everyone carries or on plaques or posters on the walls, is enough to help the company perform better.”

Turning strategy into action starts with the behaviour of the leadership team. The strategic process often involves multiple stakeholders, each with different views and priorities. But strategy is about sacrifice. A collective way forward needs to be found, which often involves compromises. Yet too often people aren’t committed to these compromises. They agree to something in the boardroom, but tweak the implementation to suit themselves. Or worse, they push for a form of words that gives them wriggle room, but with the result that the strategy doesn’t provide others in the organisation with sufficient clarity. As David Maister says in Strategy and the Fat Smoker: “For an organisation, strategy cannot be what ‘most of us, most of the time’ do. If a number of top people have plainly not signed up for the journey or are clearly not true believers, no number of systems or amount of inspired speechmaking will transport the organisation there.” It is essential that all members of the leadership team commit to getting on the bus.

The strategic process is as much about building this commitment as it is about making decisions. Consultation processes can be mistaken for navel-gazing. And awaydays can be dismissed as jollies. But, done well, these parts of the process are essential tools for building consensus. People will have to make tough choices and sacrifices – if they don’t, then the strategy is likely to be insufficiently clear or focused. Moving people to a place where they are ready to make these choices is crucial, which means people must feel like they have been heard and listened to. Most will be ready to accept not getting their own way, provided that their opinion has been considered. Ultimately, if the process reaches a point where people can’t agree, then it may be necessary for some to get off the bus.

Once there’s commitment among the leadership team, this then needs to be communicated in a way that drives action throughout the rest of the organisation. It’s important here to keep the communication clear and understandable. It sounds obvious, but the nature of the strategic process means it’s easily forgotten. Excessive jargon is a common pitfall. Another problem is the use of models or frameworks that may have formed part of the strategic development process, but which are not easily understood by the wider organisation. The communication of a strategy is no different to any other form of communication where an audience needs to be mobilised. As Antoine de Saint-Exupéry once wrote: “If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.” Using language that inspires and motivates action is important. Another crucial component is consistency and repetition. Media companies talk about reach and frequency when planning advertising campaigns. There is an accepted wisdom that audiences need to be exposed to a message a certain number of times. Similarly, studies of habits have found that on average it takes two months for a new behaviour to become automatic.³ We’ve often witnessed CEOs in turnaround contexts repeating their strategy endlessly in every meeting. People may get bored by it, but at least they know what they should be doing.

Make strategy continuous
The problem with many strategy processes is that they stop just when they should be starting. Once the desired transformation has been agreed and communicated, people view the process as complete. There’s a tendency to mentally tick the box and then return to the day job. But the strategy can still evolve and be refined as learnings emerge about the challenges faced during frontline implementation. In fact, this is crucial to success.

Kaizen is a continuous-improvement philosophy that emerged from Japanese businesses after the second world war. It was popularised most notably as part of The Toyota Way. A similar example is the marginal gains approach used with great success by Team Sky. The principle is that if you aggregate a large number of very small improvements, they add up to a winning advantage. This led Team Sky to making changes such as replacing mattresses in the riders’ hotels so they could sleep in the same position every night. They once considered shaving 10mm from a rider’s collarbone to make him more aerodynamic, although it was overruled by the team doctor.⁴ A similar philosophy has been adopted by tech businesses. Popularised in The Lean Startup by Eric Ries, this approach is about testing a vision continuously and then adapting and adjusting it along the way.

All of these examples illustrate the importance of refinement. The learnings that come out of the implementation process are crucial. Feedback loops must be incorporated. The team setting the direction must be plugged into the team implementing it and both must be open to modifications along the way. An important part of this is having an accurate interpretation of reality. There’s an old story we often tell about a famous toiletries brand. They commissioned a new agency to create a television advertising campaign. To test it, they ran it in one half of the country first. The results were disappointing. They sacked the agency and started work on another campaign. In the meantime, they decided to run a coupon campaign to maintain some brand presence in the market. This time they ran it nationally. In the half of the country that the advertising had run, the coupon campaign performed significantly better. What transpired was that the original advertising had created a lot of interest, but people needed a little incentive to trial the product. This is why feedback loops are so important. A doctor can only prescribe the correct treatment if they have first diagnosed the right ailment. The original strategic direction will be based on a diagnosis. But the reaction that comes back helps to build a clearer picture, which may suggest a change in the diagnosis and a shift in the direction.

The answer
The question of how to connect boardroom strategy with frontline creativity goes to the heart of why Squad exists. The structure and culture of our business is built entirely around helping clients to connect these two worlds. It’s why we describe ourselves as a business consultancy meets creative agency. We felt it would be an appropriate complement to this POV piece to lift the lid on the unique culture within our business that allows us to connect strategy and creativity. This is why we’ve published five stories that define our philosophy as a business. Hopefully, they demonstrate what inspires and motivates us, and paint a picture of how we work in partnership with leaders to help them solve their most significant questions by plugging the boardroom into the frontline.

— RG

References and reading

• Good Strategy Bad Strategy, Richard Rumelt
• Good to Great, Jim Collins
• Strategy and the Fat Smoker, David Maister
• The Knowing-Doing Gap, Pfeffer & Sutton
• The Lean Startup, Eric Ries
• ¹ The Times, 6 December 2017
• ² https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/health/news/5412191/Patients-forced-to-wait-hours-in-ambulances-parked-outside-AandE-departments.html
• ³ https://jamesclear.com/new-habit
• ⁴ Wired

Using your people to build a great brand

When building brands, it’s common to think externally first and focus on customers to increase revenue. Yet the returns can come as much from inside the organisation as outside, through improved employee performance. Many of the brands we work with are now recognising this. We’ve seen that HR people are playing an increasingly important role in projects.

Research has shown that engaged staff are 44% more productive than satisfied staff.¹ The organisation’s brand is a key means of achieving this. Jim Collins, in his study of companies, Good to Great, observed: “That extra dimension [of great companies] is a guiding philosophy or a ‘core ideology’.” Doshi & McGregor in Primed to Perform find that: “[A strong brand identity] unites your team with a common objective, behavioural code, heritage and traditions. It feeds a total motivation culture.”

Focusing inside the organisation first doesn’t just yield benefits in terms of employee performance. It’s also the right place to start for building the external brand. As Richard Branson said: “Clients do not come first. Employees come first. If you take care of your employees, they will take care of the clients.” This is truer than it has ever been. In the age of social media, what employees are saying about the organisation is more visible than ever.

Despite this, research has shown that 60% of employees don’t know their company’s goals, strategies and tactics.¹ Organisations are starting to recognise this, meaning that many of our brand projects now start with an internal focus. We’ve also observed HR people playing an increasingly important role in projects.

For those wanting to approach their brand in this way, we believe there are four principles that are vital for success.

1. Engage the leadership
Many brand positioning programmes are led by the marketing department. These are often the people who are most customer focused. And they are responsible for much of the marketing communications activity that will build the brand. But the responsibility for leading the organisation falls to the chief executive. To engage the business in the positioning, the champion of it must be the person at the top.

Leaders need to be clear about the behaviours and actions they are to uphold, and need to act as role models for the organisation. They are looked up to, so if they aren’t living the values of the company then the wider team can’t be expected to.

Bo Burlingham in his book, Small Giants, looks at smaller companies who’ve chosen to be great rather than big. Burlingham notes the importance of vision to these companies: “If there’s one thing that every founder and leader in this book has in common with others, it is a passion for what their companies do. They love it, and they have a burning desire to share it with other people.”

When a brand positioning has the buy-in and support of the leader, it becomes something more. It becomes a vision for the organisation. It becomes something that’s embraced by every department – from production and customer service, to marketing and HR. In this way, every aspect of an organisation’s behaviour is driven by the same guiding philosophy and the positioning becomes reality.

2. Align HR and marketing
Since an organisation’s staff are playing an increasingly important part in building the brand, it’s natural that the HR department’s ability to develop culture needs to be a central part of brand building. Work by Econsultancy found that: “As businesses transform to become ‘fit-for-purpose’ for a rapidly changing digital world, the HR function is playing a critical role in supporting change through a heightened focus on culture, learning and employee engagement.”²

One point we often stress to clients is that there is no separation between internal and external reputation. It is not possible to have an employer brand and a customer brand that are positioned differently, managed differently and built differently. Nicola Waring, Director of People at JW Lees, has found that the relationship between marketing and HR is one of the most valuable there is: “From a marketing perspective, you are trying to attract customers. From a HR perspective, you want to attract new recruits. If the key messages are inconsistent then how can you expect your teams to properly engage your customers?”

The Foundation explored this topic at one of their Forum events³, posing the question of whether all this means that the HR and marketing functions should merge: “All of those [internal and external messages] are the same message, and to achieve a true integrity all have to be planted in the same soil and ultimately tended by the same gardener.” This is something that brands are starting to consider, with companies such as Pizza Hut combining the head of marketing and the head of HR roles into one.

Whether a dual role is right for all organisations is debatable. The day-to-day work and skills of a HR director and a marketing director are still very different. It’s entirely possible for the two functions to work closely together, and ultimately the CEO becomes the person responsible for uniting the two – in the same way that they should take ownership of the positioning. Whichever approach an organisation takes, the key point is that marketing and HR activities must be totally aligned behind the same brand vision. As Nicola says: “I would implore all HR teams to make friends with marketing. They are creative in their approach, fun to work with and can provide insight to improve communication and engagement.”

3. Move people
Dan Wieden, co-founder of advertising agency Wieden & Kennedy, talks about the need for advertising to “move me, dude”. This is similarly important internally when it comes to brand positioning and vision. It must inspire employees. The key here is the way the positioning is brought to life – it must be real, human and emotional, not full of brand jargon.

A while ago I saw a post on Facebook from someone who works for a large retailer. One Monday morning he arrived at work to find he had a new screen saver promoting the company’s new brand positioning. He posted a picture of it on Facebook with the caption “Ah great, a new brainwashing screen saver for a Monday morning.” Not only does this show the negative impact that an unengaged employee can have, it also highlights the need to bring the positioning to life in a meaningful way for staff.

Doshi & McGregor make a similar point: “A thoughtful organisation can create authentic purpose for just about any type of work. Yet one of the biggest mistakes a company can make is trumpeting a grandiose purpose that isn’t authentic. If a purpose doesn’t feel credible, it won’t improve your motivation.” As Antoine de Saint-Exupéry once wrote, “If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.”

In an earlier POV piece on brand narratives, we touched on how we’ll often bring a brand positioning to life using a video. We’ve recently created films for the Westmorland Family, JW Lees and Vestey Holdings to turn their visions into moving stories that can be communicated internally and externally.

4. Don't just say it, live it
Enron had these values displayed in their lobby: “Integrity, Communication, Respect, Excellence.” The company went bankrupt due to fraud and its executives were imprisoned. Too many companies spend lots of time and money creating a positioning and values, but then neglect the most important part – embedding them in the organisation.

Jim Collins found that: “The point is not what your core values are, but that you have core values at all, that you know what they are, that you build them explicitly into the organisation, and that you preserve them over time.”

A brilliant book for anyone interested in embedding a vision is Yvon Chouinard’s Let My People Go Surfing, which tells the story of how he built Patagonia, a business with an incredible vision that is rooted in sustainability and environmental awareness. His book details at length how they embedded the vision through a series of philosophies: product design, production, distribution, marketing, finance, human resources, management and environment.

When values and their corresponding behaviours are embedded in the organisation, they guide everyone’s behaviour and provide a solid foundation for action. They demonstrate to employees what’s acceptable and what isn’t. This requires a much more robust approach than simply communicating the values in reception. Organisations that do this well use a variety of techniques:

Stories
Nike employs several senior executives who serve as corporate storytellers. They tell the story of how Nike’s co-founder, Bill Bowerman, decided that his team needed better running shoes, so poured rubber into the family waffle iron and created Nike’s famous waffle sole. Dennis Reeder, a Nike storyteller, says: “Every company has a history. But we have a little bit more than a history. We have a heritage, something that’s still relevant today. If we connect people to that, chances are that they won’t view Nike as just another place to work.”⁴ Thinking about what the brand stories are, and how to share them within the organisation, is crucial.

Gatherings
Two of our clients have particularly strong cultures and both of them use events. William Lees-Jones, Managing Director of JW Lees, hosts a meal each month for everyone in the business whose birthday it is that month. Symbolically, this is held at the heart of the business, in a pub attached to their brewery. Boutinot are a wine business that think of themselves as a people business. They hold a wide range of events to symbolise the importance of people – from choir clubs and fitness sessions, to evening meals in their office kitchen. Bringing people together is always a valuable activity, but, if these occasions can be used to reinforce the vision and values of the organisation, they become much more powerful.

Policies
Recognition that is tied to core values gives 79% of employees a stronger sense of company goals and objectives.⁵ Embedding the core values in recognition programmes is vital for ensuring that employees who exhibit the values are rewarded, and that the culture is reinforced. The same is true of the entire employee journey. The values need to be embedded in recruitment processes, appraisals and inductions. L’Oreal recently highlighted the importance of this last point by creating their own app for use as part of their cultural “onboarding” process for new hires. It reaches up to 10,000 new hires a year, and is available in 11 languages.

Symbols
Patrick Hanlon in Primal Branding tells the story of Lego’s headquarters in Denmark. Visitors are greeted by a doorway into a fantasy world. Over the next hundred steps, visitors are led through the birth and growth of a child, and to a fork in the road as males and females head toward their adolescent destinies. Lego is a company that is all about imagination and recreating the world. Their reception area is a reminder to visitors to put aside their middle-aged perspectives and return to the age of a typical Lego customer. Using symbols within the fabric of the business is a powerful way to remind people of what the brand is all about.

There’s no doubt that brand positioning is now about the employees inside the organisation as much as the customers outside. This approach builds a more engaged and productive workforce. And it enhances the brand’s reputation among customers. It’s a win-win situation. But bringing it about requires an alignment between HR and marketing. And it requires a combination of strategy and creativity. Having a vision is not enough; it needs to be embedded in the fabric of the organisation in a way that moves people.

— RG

What’s your question?

If this article has struck a chord then we’d be delighted to talk more. If you’re asking a question like those below, then we can help.

What’s our vision, purpose or why?

How can we bring our positioning to life in a way that moves people?

What are our values?

How can we align behaviour with our vision and values?

References and further reading

• Baked In, Bogusky & Winsor
• Good to Great, Jim Collins
• Let My People Go Surfing, Yvon Chouinard
• Primal Branding, Patrick Hanlon
• Primed to Perform, Doshi & McGregor
• Small Giants, Bo Burlingham
• ¹ The Times, 29 June 2017
• ² https://econsultancy.com/reports/the-future-of-hr-in-the-digital-age/
• ³ http://the-foundation.com/2015/09/01/the-two-headed-people-challenge/
• ⁴ https://www.fastcompany.com/38979/nike-story-just-tell-it
• ⁵ http://www.recognizethisblog.com/2012/12/fall-2012-workforce-mood-tracker-recognition-linked-to-core-values-delivers-increased-roi/