Inspiration Conversation

More and more companies are opening the doors of their boardroom, their executive offices and even their books so that the marketplace can gain an honest perspective on the benefits of engaging with the company (the whole chain from prospective employees through retirees and prospective customers through loyal clients).  I like the trend and I’m convinced it will continue – primarily because of individual access to information and the ease of personal communication.  Effectively, there’s nowhere to hide organizational mistakes/dishonesty/malignancy and, on the other hand, it’s easier to find “cool places and cool stuff” to engage with. The best run companies are places where everyone understands, believes in, and acts on consistent internal intelligence.

As organizations get more comfortable adapting to the growing openness of today’s business culture, they’re faced with the challenge of communicating internal intelligence and organizational goals to all employees.  OK… not so difficult in smaller companies – there’s a short line of sight to where the company is going and what the implications are for individual employees.  If there are questions, people have easy access to leadership.  This is a difficult challenge when the organization is large and more complex. 

There’s an initial issue with the tactics of simply getting the message out in a timely, creative way that will be heard by all employees.  The larger the organization, the more intense this effort must be.  This is a real communication issue and the most obvious one to address, but I think there’s another challenge that may be more significant and is often overlooked.  That challenge is accountability for execution on the delivered internal intelligence.

Execution is a two-way street - the company is accountable to deliver the culture, strategy, structure and tools that produce great work; employees are responsible to use that corporate platform to execute their respective roles.  In today’s fast moving, fast changing business environment, it can be very difficult to ensure that everyone in the organization understands the direction of the organization and is pulling in that direction.  This is where an organizations Recognition and Reward System can help.

If your RRS is aligned with culture and goals, and if everyone in the organization can be reached with the RRS, you’ve now created an accountability system that will regularly reinforce the internal intelligence related to the behaviors, practices and accomplishments that are valued within the organization.  You’ll be in a position to celebrate accomplishments as well as to make timely course corrections when there’s a change in internal intelligence. 

People want to engage with cool places and cool stuff…  Use the power of a well designed RRS to create organizational accountability to deliver results on the internal intelligence that the company works so hard to develop.   

The first car I ever bought was a forest green '96 Toyota Corolla with about 32,000 miles on it. I drove it for another 130,000 miles during which time I had to:

• Replace a seat belt for $80
• Replace the alternator for $200

More people are talking about Toyota than any other brand these days. And they're talking about the recalls, but also the fixes being provided by the dealerships too. And some of the consumers are probably coming to the defense of the brand too. Maybe there is some truth to the adage that there's no such thing as bad publicity after all.

There's truth to the adage especially if you have a brand that your consumers are willing to defend. Companies have been able to deflect a certain threshold of negative press through sophisticated public relations campaigns for a while now. But, in an age where a brand's identity isn't defined by the company, but by increasingly-connected consumers, having an army of satisfied customers is simply a must. Toyota's promise and reputation has always been reliability, and I'm betting there are enough "I drove it for 100,000 miles with no issues" stories to see this through.

As the saying goes, never discuss politics or religion in mixed company, you'll either get upstaged or be left cleaning a mess. Wait, that's the one about sharing a scene with kids and animals.

Either way, I promise this post has nothing to do with the policies of the sitting President; it has only to do with the Obama brand. The brand that for several reasons was regarded as the marketing story of 2008. So, leave your red, blue, purple or green policy preferences aside, and let's take a look at 3 reasons why the President might consider buying an iPad as a symbol of solidarity after its beleaguered launch.

1. Impossible Expectations

Short of being able to perform actual magic, I'm not sure what the iPad could have delivered that would not have left some Apple fans feeling disappointed. For months prior to the announcement, bloggers speculated about what wonders the Apple Tablet might deliver. Even as I write this, there's a stack of mail next to me and the TIME Magazine cover asks, "Will Apple's iPad Save The Media?" As in, the whole Media?! (The conclusion by the way is, uh ... well, it's actually quite compelling.)

Compelling arguments and predictions aside, a single product saving an entire industry is nearly as ludicrous as expecting one man to change decades and decades of entrenched culture within the Federal Government.

But, here is where I think the iPad and the Obama brand are both partly to blame for their own (possibly temporary) misfortunes. Yes, a good amount of the hype is a result of the fan base daring to dream, expecting something absolutely otherworldly and hoisting those dreams upon mere mortals.

But.

It's not as if they weren't asked to.

In Steve Jobs' own words, the iPad is a "truly magical and revolutionary product." Steve, the iPad is really, really cool. It really is and I would love to have one. I would. But, it's basically a giant iPod Touch that reads books.

As for President Obama, we'll all recall that "Change" was a central theme of the campaign. There are certainly some excellent examples of President Obama living up to the brand promises of the Obama campaign. But, when the bar is set incredibly high, by the fans and by the Chief Executives alike, some amount of under-delivery is inevitable.

But these are people who are serious about influencing the world around them, and brands that are serious about growth and influence want fans and lots of them. Not simply repeat customers who return to the product "just 'cause" (though nobody's complaining about that!), but truly enthusiastic advocates.

However, the flip side of having a fan base that will, on occasion, transition from simply being intensely loyal to hysterically rabid is that fairly unreasonable expectations become quite common.

2. Blind Opposition

I think it's a safe bet to say that if President Obama rescued a child drowning in the Potomac, there would be a talk radio host somewhere (and a couple thousand Facebook status updates) ranting about how he should have been in the Oval Office negotiating a jobs bill.

Likewise, if the iPad had managed to deliver actual magic, there'd be some people saying with a scoff, "Sure, but do we really need magic?"

What do you do with blind opponents? As viscerally satisfying as it would be to just completely ignore them, it literally pays to swallow your medicine and take steps to nullify their complaints. I think the $499 model of the iPad with built-in Wi-Fi and USB sync (meaning access to downloads without an AT&T contract) is Apple speaking reasonably to the people in the "middle of the aisle".

Blind opponents of Apple want something like a $189 model that doesn't have to go through iBooks or iTunes for content and can connect to any carrier's 3G network. Basically, they want something totally "other" than what Apple has set out to build. That's just not going to happen.

The similarities for the Obama brand are a bit more combustible, so rather than my bringing up specific policies that are examples of compromise and those that are examples of what I believe to be standing firm for what he and his team have set out to build, let's just pretend that we agree completely! So, think of a few examples of the President speaking reasonably to the middle and a few examples of his administration ignoring the blind opponents. Ok, got a few? ... Yes! I agree completely! Wow, how remarkable that we are on the exact same page with regard to those examples.

Ahem.

3. January 27th Was a Really Big Day

And finally, yes, while the Obama team rescheduled the State of the Union to avoid upsetting Losties, they did manage to schedule it on the same day that Apple would introduce the iPad to the world. Maybe they were hoping that the good vibes from Jobs would carry over in to a SotU focused on, um, jobs. Sorry, had to do it.

Regardless, January 27th was a very important date in iCal at both 1 Infinite Loop and 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

An epic launch for the one and something of a relaunch for the other; in both cases, there was a lot riding on those two speeches. For those keeping score at home, Obama was interrupted by more standing ovations, while Jobs got a comfy chair. Advantage: Jobs.

As to the aftermath of their pitches, Apple cannot have been too thrilled that parodies of the product's name were trending topics on Twitter far longer than #iPad itself. The device's generally icy reception in the mainstream is pretty well documented, but Apple's advocates are already rising to its defense (HT @michaelewitt). Truly, it's hard to imagine that the letdown will last and it's easy to image that by the 3rd Generation, the iPad will be every bit the cultural touchstone that the iPod has come to be. Easy to imagine, but not inevitable. 

And while the President's remarks were not without some controversy, the relaunch seems to have had the positive affect of bumping his approval rating above 50% after a sour stretch.

So, while Apple will get to see how consumers vote with their dollars when the iPad is available in late March and the Obama team will wait for actual votes; both are hoping to cash in on the upside of brand enthusiasm.

"When people know us, they love us. And they love us as much as they can."

Matt Ryan, SVP Corporate Brand Management, The Walt Disney Company

You remember how awkward dating was back in middle and high school? And college. And your 20's. And...

Kidding.

But remember what our moms and teachers always told us?

"Just be yourself."

The idea is what Matt Ryan is getting at. If you're yourself, then the girl or boy will know you, and if they know you, they'll love you. Then, they'll love you as much as they can, you'll live happily ever after and one day you'll get all teary-eyed as you take a family photo in front of Cinderella's Castle.

Here's the thing. Being yourself only works if the real you is cool. Or likeable. Or encouraging. Or funny.

Remember Biff Tannen from Back to the Future? Biff's mom could not have given him the "be yourself" advice and realistically expected exciting results.

Lucky for you, you're not Biff. You've got something going for you; you're either likeable, smart, resourceful or a combination of a lot of great things.

But that's just you. What about the company you work for? What's your corporate culture like? What's your brand's reputation? Can your company be its collective self and expect exciting results?

This post would need to go in several different directions in order to contine to be relevant to you, depending on the role you play. Are you a recruiter? Marketing manager? Compensation specialist?

The question that we ask ourself and the question you've got to ask yourself as it relates to the responsibilities you have within your organization is this, "If people know us, will they love us?"

If the answer is no, there's some serious work to be done because nobody wants to work for or do business with Biff.

I had the opportunity to attend "Disney's Approach to Brand Loyalty" at the Disney Institute in Orlando last week, and this is the first of what will be a series of posts relating to the many interesting topics we covered.

The image to the left is branding. Imagine the emotion in the cow's eye ... that's your Brand.

It goes without saying that ideally you'd love for the consumer's experience to be something a little more comfortable than being imprinted with a glowing iron rod, right? Although, couldn't we all provide a list of companies who seem to be perfectly fine with that option?

In general, we're all becoming more and more aware that a Brand is not a logo, it's not an advertisement, it's not a mascot; it is the intangible collection of your customers' experiences. Every experience at every single touch point. It might even be worth arguing that the apostrophe should go before the s. Your Brand is not your customers' experiences, it's your customer's experiences. Might just be semantics, but in an age where consumers use Social Media to research products it's certainly worth considering that you have as many Brands as you have customers.

I used to work in graphic design and we'd get calls all the time about "rebranding" projects. Most of the time it was that the aesthetic truly needed an update, but sometimes the company wanted to distance itself from a negative reputation they'd developed. In those cases, what the client was asking for (rebranding) and what they needed (to rebrand) were two different things. As a designer, I was only able help them with the first (and less important) part.

Hopefully, you're not in that difficult situation that requires you to strategically remove a scarred imprint and replace it with something that reflects a character your organization can be proud of.

Hopefully, you're in a better place. A place where you have time to wonder, "Ok, we've got a good reputation. But do we have a great one? What more can we do for our customers and do we treat them like valued guests?"

To bring it back to Disney and to bookend the post with another image that says it all, I'll leave you with a picture that represents the Disney Brand more accurately than a logo ever could.