A Brand Equity Conversation For The Workplace
Instructions for introducing the conversation: Tell a cross-functional team of informal leaders Tell a cross-functional team of informal leaders that you want to have a conversation about your brand and how you are going to ensure that it is as valuable as possible to your customers.
In order to do that, your people have to understand the brand and its promises clearly and succinctly. Your people also have to understand how they will make those promises real. They need to know how to perform in order to deliver on those promises on a day-to-day basis.
They can’t simply be told what to think. They have to be lead to a deep understanding of the business idea, its underlying assumptions and how they play out everyday. When this happens, outstanding performance can become routine.
The outline provided below will enable you to have an effective conversation with your people.
“What are we telling people about who we are?” Take each of the following questions, one at a time. Discuss them thoroughly with the goal of arriving at a shared understanding among the group about the company’s stance on each of these issues.
The goal of the conversation is a shared understanding rather than a forced acquiescence. Don’t let the most verbally aggressive person or the ranking executive at the meeting dominate the conversation. It isn’t about imposing a solution or dictating a right answer. Introduce these questions as a series of conversations. These conversations should have four phases.
- Blue sky, brainstorming. Generating ideas without criticism or culling.
- Shifting through the ideas and considering them against the business idea and its fundamental assumptions. How do these ideas mesh with what we are trying to accomplish?
- Evolving our business idea. Making decisions about how to be different in your marketplace in order to create or keep a competitive advantage.
- Evolving the business conversation to fit the evolving idea.