5 Benefits of Branding

Almost every business has a trading name, from the smallest market trader to the largest multi-national corporation. Only a minority of those businesses however, have what could be classed as a brand.

Branding is the process of creating distinctive and durable perceptions in the minds of consumers. A brand is a persistent, unique business identity intertwined with associations of personality, quality, origin, liking and more.

Although most people associate brands with big companies, the smallest of enterprises can use branding techniques with great rewards.

Recognition and Loyalty

The main benefit of branding is that customers are much more likely to remember your business. A strong brand name and logo/image helps to keep your company image in the mind of your potential customers.

If your business sells products that are often bought on impulse, a customer recognising your brand could mean the difference between no-sale and a sale. Even if the customer was not aware that you sell a particular product, if they trust your brand, they are likely to trust you with unfamiliar products. If a customer is happy with your products or services, a brand helps to build customer loyalty across your business.

Image of Size

A strong brand will project an image of a large and established business to your potential customers. People usually associate branding with larger businesses that have the money to spend on advertising and promotion. If you can create effective branding, then it can make your business appear to be much bigger than it really is.

An image of size and establishment can be especially important when a customer wants reassurance that you will still be around in a few years time.

Image of Quality

A strong brand projects an image of quality in your business, many people see the brand as a part of a product or service that helps to show its quality and value.

It is commonly said that if you show a person two identical products, only one of which is branded; they will almost always believe the branded item is higher quality.

If you can create effective branding, then over time the image of quality in your business will usually go up. Of course, branding cannot replace good quality, and bad publicity will damage a brand (and your businesses image), especially if it continues over a long period of time.

Image of Experience and Reliability

A strong brand creates an image of an established business that has been around for long enough to become well known. A branded business is more likely to be seen as experienced in their products or services, and will generally be seen as more reliable and trustworthy than an unbranded business.

Most people will believe that a business would be hesitant to put their brand name on something that was of poor quality.

Multiple Products

If your business has a strong brand, it allows you to link together several different products or ranges. You can put your brand name on every product or service you sell, meaning that customers for one product will be more likely to buy another product from you.

 

Read more on the subject:

 

Kellogg on Branding: The Marketing Faculty of The Kellogg School of Management
Breakthrough Branding: How Smart Entrepreneurs and Intrapreneurs Transform a Small Idea into a Big Brand
Brand Against the Machine: How to Build Your Brand, Cut Through the Marketing Noise, and Stand Out from the Competition

Branding, Online Ad’s Goal

PointRoll Inc., a leader in rich media technology and service, today announced the results of its first annual survey of creative online advertising professionals. Respondents from leading agencies worldwide detailed market trends, challenges and opportunities, illustrating a significant shift in the goals and measurement of online ads.

Key findings of the survey include:

  • Branding is the most important consideration for online ads, with 70 percent of respondents identifying it as the “most important” or “second most important” goal.
  • Interaction rate is the most important measurement of rich media performance. 53 percent of participants indicated that the best way to judge an ad is to measure the percent of users that interact with the unit.
  • Video is gaining ground. 79 percent of those surveyed have included video when creating rich media ads, which PointRoll’s metrics demonstrate boosts time-on-brand +16% versus the overall PointRoll average. 53 percent of participants think video should be 15 seconds or less, and many noted an increase in video created specifically for online use.

Tag: Online Advertising

5 Components of a Brand Promise

Brands are so much a part of our lives that we forget how much we depend on them. We use brands as shorthand to make our trips to the grocery store easier; we use brands to reassure us about our purchasing decisions; we even use brands to define ourselves in society.

A brand is a promise. A kept promise. With a brand, you set customer expectations. When someone buys your product or service, they count on those expectations to be fulfilled.

The components of your brand promise are based on:

Consistency of experience.

This is the absolute critical component in building a brand. Whether I go into a McDonald’s in Boise or Beijing, I expect my french fries to taste the same, and I expect to see those golden arches.

Consistent look-and-feel.

At the most basic level, to build a brand you must develop a strong brand image. You know you are in a Starbucks even if you don’t see the name over the door. Consistent look-and-feel extends to your logo, colors, typefaces, decor, employee clothing, and more.

Consistent quality.

It’s not enough to deliver a consistent experience to your customer. The experience must also be of a certain level of quality. McDonald’s french fries don’t have to be the best french fries in the world, but they have to be good french fries and they have to be fresh every time.

Distinct competitive position.

A brand must stand for something and differentiate you from the competition. Three strong brands of superstores have very different competitive positions: Wal-Mart, low prices; Target, hip discount. These positions make it easy for a consumer to choose the brand that suits them.

Repeated exposure.

To remember your brand, customers must hear it or see it over and over. Of course, building brand awareness takes money, and that’s a challenge if you are a small company. The key is to clearly and narrowly define your target market. Then, make sure those potential customers see you many times by repeatedly advertising in the same publications and attending the same networking events.

Brand Loyalty vs. Repeated Purchases

Brand loyalty is the ultimate goal a company sets for a branded product. Brand loyalty is a consumer’s preference to buy a particular brand in a product category. It occurs because consumers perceive that the brand offers the right product features, images, or level of quality at the right price. This perception becomes the foundation for a new buying habit. Basically, consumers initially will make a trial purchase of the brand and, after satisfaction, tend to form habits and continue purchasing the same brand because the product is safe and familiar.

Brand loyalty is the strongest measure of a brand’s value, it can be demonstrated not only by repeated buying of a product or servic but also by a good word of mouth and advocation of a product or service. Even with the availability of other alternatives.

There are three main reasons why brand loyalty is important:

Higher Sales Volume – The average US company loses half of its customers every five years, equating to a 13% annual loss of customers. This statistic illustrates the challenges companies face when trying to grow in competitive environments. Achieving even 1% annual growth requires increasing sales to customers, both existing and new, by 14%. Reducing customer loss can dramatically improve business growth and brand loyalty, which leads to consistent and even greater sales since the same brand is purchased repeatedly.

Premium Pricing Ability – Studies show that as brand loyalty increases, consumers are less sensitive to price changes. Generally, they are willing to pay more for their preferred brand because they perceive some unique value in the brand that other alternatives do not provide. Additionally, brand loyalists buy less frequently on cents-off deals – these promotions only subsidize planned purchases.

Retain Rather than Seek – Brand loyalists are willing to search for their favorite brand and are less sensitive to competitive promotions. The result is lower costs for advertising, marketing and distribution. Specifically, it costs four to six times as much to attract a new customer as it does to retain an old one.

Unfortunately, the most commonly used approaches tend to equate loyalty with a frequency of repeat purchases. This type of quantitative tactic does not take into account customer motivations, which should not be overlooked. Without knowing why a customer makes multiple purchases, management is missing the critical key behind the actions and cannot adapt the product or marketing to respond to customer preferences. An opportunity to maximize sales is simply lost. The challenge becomes:

  • How to focus a marketing campaign on existing customers who are most likely to generate repeat business.
  • How to anticipate what goods and services these customers will want.
  • How to communicate with these premium customers cost-effectively.

The first step in maximizing sales and profits from your existing customer base is to identify which are your core brand-loyal customers and which are the price-sensitive, bargain-hunting, convenience customers. The distinction is important because different customer/loyalty types respond better to promotions targeted to their respective purchase motivations: e.g., coupons and discounts are far more effective in stimulating sales to the communication customers than the brand loyals.

In general, it is more cost-effective to focus major marketing efforts on the core brand-loyal customers for whom the products is filling a need or preference, because this group has the highest value and will be a more profitable source of repeat business. The bargain-hunters, in contrast, are more fickle and less likely to be profitable since their major draw is based on low price or convenience.

After identifying your brand loyals, the next step is to develop a long-term, ongoing relationship with them. Profits will naturally follow.

It is easier to reinforce behaviors than to change them and the sale is just the beginning of an opportunity to turn the purchaser into a loyalist.

  • Develop an unbeatable product – if you want to keep customers, make sure they can get what they want from your product.
  • Stand behind your product – if customers don’t trust the product, they won’t purchase it again.
  • Know your trophy customers and treat them best of all – remember the rule that 80% of sales will come from the top 20% of customers.
  • Become a customer service champion – seek to serve the customer and they will repeat-purchase…again and again!

Tag: Brand Loyalty

2005 Breakaway Brands

Landor Associates, the world’s leading branding and design consultancy, in partnership with BrandEconomics, a division of global consulting firm Stern Stewart & Co., today announced the results of its 2005 Breakaway Brands Study. The study’s findings appear exclusively in FORTUNE magazine’s October 31st issue, available now at www.fortune.com and on newsstands October 21st.

The study identifies the ten brands in the United States that have made the greatest percentage gains in business value as a result of superb brand strategy and execution over the three-year period, from 2001-2004.

The list includes a wide range of consumer and business-to-business brands, as well as mono- and sub-brands.

Landor’s Breakaway Brands Study represents a significantly different approach from the more traditional published brand rankings which tend to categorize brands by size or popularity. Instead, our study quantitatively values measurable improvement in brand strength over three years,

said Hayes Roth, Vice President, Worldwide Marketing and Business Development for Landor.

While the study includes popular brands, like Google and iPod, it also recognizes newer brands that are still carving a niche for themselves, like LeapFrog and Sierra Mist, as well as old favorites, such as Eggo and Gerber, that have successfully revitalized their franchises through well conceived and executed strategies. The study demonstrates that building strong brands is vital to virtually any organization, regardless of its size or industry.

The study identifies the following ten Breakaway Brands:

  • Google — Internet
  • LeapFrog — Educational Toys
  • Sony Cyber-shot — Digital Cameras
  • Sierra Mist — Soft Drinks
  • Subway — Quick Serve Restaurants
  • BP — Oil & Petroleum
  • DeWalt — Power Tools
  • iPod — Consumer Electronics
  • Eggo — Packaged Foods
  • Gerber — Baby Foods

Brand Positioning Strategies

Your brand positioning is the “space” that your services and solutions occupy in the minds of your target audience. The right positioning incorporates strong values and differentiators that are important to your customers. Brand positioning is important in deciding where you want to position your brand within its category and relative to the competition. Brand Positioning permeates virtually everything we do. It is the foundation to all communications and brand strategy. It is the disciplined thinking that guides the basis for building relationships between brands and customers.

Once you determine the way in which you can reach your market, the next thing to look at is how you are going to lure your customer to try your brand.

Here is a list of nine positioning types you can think of before deciding on which one you will attach to your brand:

1. Quality positioning

Perception of quality is probably one of the most important elements for a brand to have and can be combined with any of the other prompts below.

Quality, or the perception of quality, lies in the mind of the buyer. Build a powerful perception of quality, and you will succeed in creating a powerful brand. Al Reis and Laura Reis, authors of The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding say the best way to increase perception of quality is to narrow the company’s focus. When you narrow a product’s focus, they explain, you become a specialist rather than a generalist, and a specialist is perceived to know more, or be of “higher quality” than a generalist.

Another way to build the perception of high quality is to simply attach a higher price tag to your brand. Most people think that they know a high quality product from another, but in reality, things are not always as they seem.

Believe it or not, high price is a benefit to some customers. It allows the affluent consumer to obtain psychological satisfaction from the public purchase and consumption of a high end product. Of course, the product or service does need to have some perk or difference to justify the higher price.

2. Value positioning

Although at one time, items that were considered to be a good “value” meant that they were inexpensive, that stigma has fallen by the wayside. Today, brands that are considered a value are rising in popularity amongst consumers. Southwest Airlines is probably the best example of how a company has been able to offer discount prices and still keep a strong brand identity. In fact, most of the other major airlines have followed Southwest’s lead by rolling out value-priced flights under new, co-branded names.

3. Feature-driven positioning

More marketers rely on product/service features to differentiate their brands than any other method. The advantage is that the message is clear, and the positioning will be credible if you stick to the facts about the product. Unfortunately, feature-orientated stances are often rendered useless if the competition comes out with a faster or more advanced model.

4. Relational positioning

One of the most effective ways to create interest in a brand is to send out a positioning prompt that resonates well with potential buyers. For instance, Sketchers equates sneakers with cool and that characteristic passes to all who wear them. Apple computer, which was down on its luck in the overall computer marketplace, started asking computer users to liberate themselves from the PC camp and” Think Different.” These brands have achieved positioning based on who buys what they sell, not solely by what they sell.

5. Aspiration positioning

These are positioning prompts that offer prospects a place they might like to go, or a person they might like to be, or a state of mind they might like to achieve.

6. Problem/solution positioning

As the name implies, problem/solution prompts show the consumer how a sticky situation can be relieved quickly and easily with the brand or service. What problem/solution campaigns lack in imagination, they usually make up for in directness and credibility. For example, frozen meals cut meal preparation time to minutes. Detergents and cleansers also make good use of these prompts.

7. Rivalry-based positioning

By definition, positioning deals with how one brand is thought of compared to its obvious competitors. Therefore, the idea of a rivalry-based position might seem redundant but many campaigns take this approach. Laundry detergents, for one, are constantly going head-to-head to prove which one has the most power to lift stains.

8. Warm and fuzzy positioning

Underneath our capitalist driven needs to consume, we are still docile and emotional animals. As such, many marketers play on our feelings. In the book, Building Brand Identity: A Strategy for Success in a Hostile Marketplace, author Lynn Upshaw writes, “How people feel about a brand is oftentimes need- or desire based, which means that emotional or psychological approaches can oftentimes be very effective as positioning prompts.”

9. Benefit-driven positioning

Other brands base their entire positioning on the fact that they give back to the consumer. Discover credit card, for instance tells customers that “It Pays to Discover.” Use the card and get money back. Discover was among the first major credit cards companies to provide its users with a financial incentive for using their card.

Tag: Positioning, Brand Strategy

10 Key Attributes of Brand-Guided Company

Booz Allen Hamilton and the brand consulting firm Wolff Olins carried out research among marketing executives across Europe. It shows that over 90 percent of companies believe their brand is a key element of their success—twice as many as five years ago. Yet less than 20 percent put the management of their brand at the heart of their business systems and capabilities. This appears to be significant in explaining superior brand performance.

The study identified three categories of organizations:

Brand-guided companies

…recognize the importance of brands and sound management of brands for their business success. They have established a common understanding of what the company stands for, and hence have assigned clear brand ownership at top management level. Brand-guided companies occur across all industries.

Emerging brand companies

…have not yet fully recognized the importance of brands for their business success but expect brands to become increasingly important over the next five years. They are working on establishing a common understanding of their brand within their company, but have not yet established clear brand ownership.

Brand-agnostic companies

…do not consider brands to be an important factor to their business success today and do not believe they will be important in the next five years. They do not intend to develop a common understanding of their brands within the company and have no interest in establishing clear brand ownership in their organizations.

Brand-guided companies have clearly-defined brand values that are understood throughout the entire organization. They establish well-defined ownership for management of the brand at top management level. This enables the brand to provide the cohesive force that guides key activities—such as product development, customer service, sales, and operations—and supports the strategic management process.

On average, the research shows that brand-guided companies have profitability margins nearly twice the industry standard.

The study also identified 10 key attributes of brand-guided organizations.

  1. The company recognizes that the brand is a key asset in delivering its strategic targets at a level that is higher than the industry standard
  2. The company doesn’t consider the brand as merely a communications issue—brand is recognized as the key platform to link the company strategy with customers and employees
  3. Brand management processes are integrated seamlessly into the company’s processes—i.e., “branding” is not a separate activity
  4. Success is generated by corporate confidence—the brand delivers that success by providing a catalyst for the company’s products, services and employees
  5. Senior management is accountable for the brand’s continued health—brand responsibility resides at C-level
  6. All employees share a belief in the brand as well as a common understanding of it, the power of the brand acts as an incentive to employees, employees’ activities are aligned with the brand values and contribute to building and strengthening the brand, and employees are measured and rewarded by the success of these brand-guided activities
  7. Marketing department is able to talk in terms of expected return on their investments—marketers can leverage customer insights to make the most effective marketing decisions, they can also analyze what they know about customers to contribute effectively to strategy in the future, and marketing activities are always closely aligned with the core brand values
  8. The company has sufficient IT capability in place to capture data on customers, segment them effectively, respond to their needs, and catalyze marketing techniques to deliver high ROI
  9. The company assesses key performance indicators, such as “share of wallet,” on a regular basis—as a result of these assessments, you take appropriate management action
  10. The company identifies brand equity (the financial value of your brand)— understanding the brand’s value drivers and the levers required to influence these drivers

Via Bnet.

7 Rules for Great Marketing

For marketing executives seeking to build their brand in today’s frenzied, message-cluttered jungle, resting on their laurels seemed to be enough until not long ago — especially if they were meeting their goals, seamlessly executing ambitious programs, and keeping staff members happy enough to ward off corporate raiders. Nowadays, conditions are vastly different. To prove your worth as a marketer and brand builder, you need to tap into your entrepreneurial side.

Seven rules for marketing and brand building, based on a fundamental for entrepreneurial success, are now essential for compelling customers to embrace your brand.

Embrace 3-D marketing

Entrepreneurs are obsessed with building lasting, face-to-face relationships, a principle that only 3-D marketers can leverage to full advantage. 3-D marketing—encompassing events, exhibits, displays, merchandising, premiums, target market research, prospect follow-up and much more—enables marketers to truly “touch” their customers in ways that traditional mass marketing does not. It’s the most powerful tool in the marketing arsenal for creating customer relationships and building brand image on a face-to-face basis.

Make ROI your mantra

Entrepreneurs are notoriously impatient to maximize the return on every investment they make. Amazingly, in the world of 3D marketing, executives often forgo measuring ROI until called to the carpet — and by then, they have no assurance that they are looking at meaningful indicators of brand participation or brand loyalty.

Dive into your industry

Stellar entrepreneurs study their target industries in minute detail, zero in on the marketplace needs they’re uniquely positioned to fill, and develop brands that showcase their added value. Do you know what your brand is, what it isn’t, and what it needs to be? How should you be promoting your brand so that it resonates with a changing marketplace of prospects and buyers?

Focus resources through end-to-end planning

In the new world of 3-D marketing, you must champion end-to-end planning processes—beginning with market research and message development, graduating to creative conceptualization and implementation, and ending with customer follow-up and results measurement. As part of your marketing effort, you should be spearheading an end-to-end planning approach for each one.

Remember the vision

Entrepreneurs are “big idea” people with a compelling vision and the drive to see it through. Too often, marketing executives lose their dedication to understanding their corporation’s vision and strategy—and advancing them through several integrated tactics with a common set of underlying messages.

Seek new paradigms for achieving teamwork and synergy

The teambuilding spirit typical of entrepreneurs is a requirement for marketers, who should be taking it to the next level. Do you, for instance, organize on-site “pep-rally briefings” of your sales team just before major events—reinforcing the brand messages most likely to draw customers in? While sales would normally lead these meetings, your intimate branding knowledge should be compelling you to initiate this out-of-the-box approach.

Honor the team members

Like entrepreneurs, you depend on your team to help you shine. Learn to nurture and empower the people who work with you every day—encouraging them to take your ideas further, to continually focus on overall returns, and to develop new approaches. As the rules for brand-building success take a dramatic turn, you’ll need their talents to help you capitalize on future opportunities—and to maintain the luster of your brand.

via MarketingProfs.

Brand Extension – 4 Steps Strategy

I mentioned here before the major types of brands extensions as well as basic principles to consider before running into a brand extensions process.

Most companies know how to extend their brands by leveraging organizational competencies and determining unmet customer needs. However, surprisingly few have a strategic approach briefing in place to ensure that potential new product areas are consistent with a brand’s identity. Even an outstanding new product concept, satisfying a significant unmet customer need, will not succeed in the market if it is launched under the wrong brand identity.

Here is a four-step road map to make sure that future new products or services complement, or better, enhance the current equities of the brand.

1. Determine brand and category associations.

The first step in determining brand relevance is to begin with a comprehensive assessment of what your brand and those of key competitors in the category currently stand for in the minds of customers.

Even an outstanding new product concept, satisfying a significant unmet customer need, will not succeed in the market if it is launched under a brand identity for which it is a poor fit. The foundation of this assessment is qualitative customer research (e.g., focus groups and in-depth interviews), which provides the richness and depth of response needed to construct an accurate portrait of your brand and the category. The research should focus on uncovering the key associations customers link to the brand and competitive brands in the categories (e.g., product or service features, functional, emotional, and self-expressive benefits, and personality).

2. Develop brand extendibility proxies.

Once the six to eight key associations have been identified for the brand and category, proxies should be carefully chosen for each one. To accomplish this, turn each association into a continuum of attributes and benefits that range from “close in” to “far out” relative to where customers perceive the brand to be today.

This continuum begins with a proxy that’s relatively close in and ends with one that is a significant stretch from how customers perceive the brand today, with several points in between. It’s important to remember that these proxies were strategically chosen to represent distinct points on a continuum. The proxies chosen may or may not represent good new product opportunities for the brand (i.e., customer unmet needs). What’s more important at this point is that they provide the basis for rich conversations with customers as to how the brand can and cannot be extended in the future (i.e., brand relevance).

3. Conduct brand extendibility research.

Once brand and category associations have been determined and representative proxies selected, it is imperative to go back to customers to solicit their input.

A variety of stimuli can be used for the chosen proxies to facilitate brand extendibility research discussions, including white paper concepts, representative images, and actual products or prototypes. During focus group customers are asked for their opinion as to how well each product, service, feature, or benefit fits with the brand in question.

Once again, it’s important to remember that we are mostly interested in understanding customer rationales for why something does or does not fit with the brand.

4. Create brand extendibility guidelines.

The final step of this approach is to take the insights obtained in the previous step’s customer research and develop guidelines detailing how the brand can and cannot be effectively extended. Customer feedback (i.e., which proxies are in, which are out, and the reasons why) needs to be interpreted and translated into guidelines for extendibility.

Once an adequate number of guidelines has been established, it’s helpful to prioritize them because they won’t all be of equal importance. One way to think about this is to establish several guidelines that are imperatives. What this means is that unless a potential new product or service opportunity satisfies these guidelines, it should not be considered for marketplace introduction. Other guidelines would be deemed important but not mandatory. In other words, if a potential new product or service opportunity satisfies this guideline, it should be considered favorable.

Read more on the subject, from Amazon.com:

Brand Extensions: Keys to success in international marketing

Brand Stretch: Why 1 in 2 extensions fail, and how to beat the odds: A brandgym workout

5 Branding Misconceptions

The mass-market, advertising-agency model still influential in brand management, is fast becoming obsolete. Brands are changing in many ways and the traditional role of brand as a proxy for quality has diminished. Branding remains crucially important, yet it increasingly finds its power through a tighter integration with business design. Overcoming five widespread misconceptions and myths about branding can help organisation to win in the brand-building game.

1. Brands are built mainly through advertising.

In today’s increasingly service-oriented economy,something has replaced advertising as the key to brand building: the customer experience. This represents the sum of a customer’s numerous interactions with a company, each of which is a moment of truth that can, to varying degrees, enhance or erode the brand. And a positive customer experience, so crucial to the health of brands in service industries, also plays an increasingly important role in product businesses. The purchase of a product, which used to be the final interaction between company and customer, now is often only the beginning of an ongoing relationship that includes after-market service or the creation of customer “solutions” that incorporate but overshadow the physical product.

2. Brands are used primarily to influence customers.

Although most brand strategies are developed, quite naturally, with the customer front and center, they will fail to generate sustained growth in profitability and shareholder value unless they target not only customers but also investors and current and prospective employees.

Besides the three primary stakeholders—customers,investors,and talent – there is a fourth constituency that,although it plays no direct role in driving profitability or value growth, is crucial to a company’s health. This is the group of regulators, media, and public interest organizations that can affect a company’s real or de facto license to operate.A company that ignores this audience in positioning its brand risks a hostile response when it seeks their support.

3. The key to successful brand management involves understanding the effectiveness of the brand in today’s marketplace

While achieving such an understanding is a worthwhile aim, on its own it risks creating a dangerously complacent view of a brand’s health. More important is being able to anticipate a brand’s relevance to the most valuable customers of tomorrow. One way to look over the horizon and glimpse future brand pitfalls and opportunities is through the discipline of pattern recognition. Analyzing a library of brand patterns that have played out in the past can suggest how and when a brand should evolve.

4. Brands are symbolic and emotive and therefore are managed primarily through creativity rather than analysis.

While brands appeal to the heart as well as to the head, they can be quantified and analyzed with much the same economic rigor as other business assets. One means of doing this involves a detailed assessment of something we call brand equity.

5. Brands are the responsibility of the marketing department

Because brands derive their power from the value that they symbolically represent, there must be real value in the branded products or services.Otherwise,a brand will simply create false promises — a surefire way to erode its strength. It has long been true that a product must deliver on the brand promise. But in an increasingly service-intensive economy, employees, not just the product, determine a company’s success in delivering on the brand promise. Giving employees the tools and leeway to satisfy the customer across the entire customer experience can tremendously protect or enhance a brand’s strength. Delivering on the brand’s promises requires the involvement of virtually every employee in all areas of the organization, even those who have no direct customer