Tony Quinlan
Chief Storyteller, Narrate Consulting

T. Quinlan: ‘Mythology, Leaders and Leadership’, The Journal of the Medinge Group, vol. 2, no. 1, 2008.
Microsoft Word version

Leadership. Three syllables—nice, straightforward concept. Right? Wrong. What I perceive as a good leader will be different to what you perceive as a good leader. And different again for the person sitting across from you, down the hall, in the next building, in the regional office, etc.
   But in recent years, many of us have found ourselves getting involved with communicating around ‘leadership’. It’s an area fraught with difficulties and pitfalls—in part because of the simplistic way it gets talked about. With that in mind, this is a short thought-provoker piece, with some tools to start you off.

Myth-perception
Let’s get some of the misperceptions out of the way first.

‘We all know what a leader looks like.’
   Possibly, but we all have very different ideas about it, and it changes anyway depending on the situation—in a storm, a leader might impose control, dictate actions and cut through waffle and discussion. The same behaviour in calmer moments betrays a dictator, not a leader.
   It also varies tremendously by organizational culture. Hard, argumentative styles work in some organizations, while others need softer, more consensual approaches.¹
   And often there is no common factor or principle—other than the fact that people follow (or obey, depending on the style). There are reams of research and popular books on leadership—and all have different takes to greater or lesser degrees. Some of the leaders depicted in them wouldn’t recognize each other in an empty room.

‘Here’s our leadership model.’
   Less a misperception, more a warning bell. In my experience it’s either one flavour (generally male, English-speaking, western, rational, white and aged 40–50) or, on those rare occasions when the idea of diverse leadership styles have been taken into account, it’s been made so abstract that it encompasses all the different styles and hence is so generic it loses its relevance.
   Most leadership models are useful as starting points for debate or as the output for individuals’ thinking—but as communications tools they stink.²
   Too often, the result—after much careful thought—is a list of principles or values. It’s flawed for two reasons. First, these tend to be abstract ideas (usually nouns) where leadership is about actions (verbs). Simply holding those principles to be important isn’t enough, leaders need to act on them.
   Secondly, it’s impossible to force people to take on certain values and act from them. Even persuading them is only a temporary measure. Values and principles are personal choices—voluntarily taken on. And bear in mind that, even when we wholeheartedly hold a value to be important, as human beings we don’t always act accordingly.

‘We want everyone in the organization to be a leader.’
   No you don’t. There are a fair number of people that you want to do their job as set out in the quality processes and do it without arguing. You don’t want them to be leaders, you want them to be efficient and obedient. (Loyal, enthusiastic, etc would also be good, but efficient and obedient are actually the ones many managers want first and foremost.)

   And just because someone exemplifies the organizational values or behaviours doesn’t make them a leader—they may just be following what they perceive as authority. Exemplars are not necessarily leaders, but leaders are always exemplars.
   You want some of your people to be leaders, but talking about its applying universally just devalues it.
   Please note, I’m all in favour of us all being leaders at the personal level—in fact I think that’s one of the ways we best fulfil ourselves as individuals and change the world we live in. One of my most profound learning experiences was on a course in Leadership back in 2000. But personal leadership and organizational leadership are different things.
   If, within the organization, people are adamant that they do want everyone to be leaders, then too often it’s either just devalued lip service alongside “our people are our greatest assets” or their idea of a leader is not ambitious enough, but the classic ‘manager-plus’.³

Leadership and culture
Leadership is defined in many different ways. For a subject to which so many dead trees have been devoted, there’s still a phenomenal diversity of opinion on what it actually entails. It’s less helpful for communications, change and organizational development professionals to be too specific—with one important exception.
   Leaders and culture are strongly intertwined and critical to our work. Culture expert Edgar Schein talks about leaders being one of the three major levers of organizational culture. (If they’re a founder, that makes them two of the three, but that’s an organization-specific situation.)
   Yet leaders are also shaped or rejected by organizational cultures. Outsiders can find that they miss major assumptions and ultimately fail, while insiders may be so inculcated in a mindset that they are unable to grasp the need—or perceive the leverage points—for successful culture change.
   Which still leaves the fact that leaders are one of the most powerful influences of organizational culture—making them crucial to us.

Why leadership is not Manager-plus
One of the most useful and powerful tools in Narrate’s work is the Cynefin framework, created by Dave Snowden, and the concepts behind it. It’s applicable in many different areas, but helps to distinguish key areas within the organization and the recommended approaches to them.

Figure 1
The Cynefin framework

   In a vastly simplified description, culture falls into the Complex domain—where causality is blurred, where many different elements combine to create overall effects and where results will never repeat exactly. In this domain, control is impossible, influence essential. It also requires different actions—trying elements, waiting to perceive the results and then acting to reinforce the emerging patterns or disrupt them if they are negative. It can be about creating boundaries and attractors, by reinforcing desirable behaviours and disrupting undesirable ones.
   By contrast, the Complicated domain does have repeatable cause-and-effect chains, although these may be extended through various stages. Here, we can analyse or get expert help to identify how results are created and impose processes to repeat them. This is the realm of big thinkers, strategic planning departments and theoreticians.
   Given the vagaries of human behaviour and belief, I believe organizational culture sits squarely in the Complex domain. I suggest therefore that management—based in process, measurement and hierarchy—is more inclined to sit in the Complicated domain.
   Managers aim for efficiency—focusing on process. Leaders aim for effectiveness—focusing on results and people.
   
Collaborating on “leadership” programmes
Recent years have seen an increase of programmes rolled out from Human Resources or training and development departments aimed at increasing leadership skills within the organization.
   One of the critical elements Narrate recently worked on in a large government department was establishing common ground between different ideas of “leadership”. In a questionnaire (after the “leadership model” had been published and promoted as the way forward) one of the critical pieces of feedback was, ‘We need pen pictures of examples of leadership.’ Everyone understood the language but not how it translated into action.
   Using a technique from the Cognitive Edge network, Narrate brought key decision-makers together in a facilitated exercise solely to relate and share examples of tough decision-making, positive changes, mistakes made, etc. For participants, it was a powerful social exercise in sense-making—it left them all with a clear, common understanding of what was (and wasn’t) good leadership.
   Having recorded the sessions, we then had audio and video material to feed into various communications vehicles—all giving the requested ‘pen pictures’ of leadership in real, authentic examples that people could recognize, internalize and then act on themselves.
   Similar exercises at lower levels of an organization and among customers and customer-facing staff produce material that, when replayed to executives, can dramatically shift perceptions and highlight major problems—but in ways that are less threatening to the messenger and more likely to bring about a change in executive mindset.
   
Organizational legends and heroes
In every culture, certain events and individuals stand out—becoming legendary in their retelling. And each story will reinforce some value within the organization—but not always the one that we think it’s telling.
   In particular, organizational narratives coalesce around particular leaders and around times of particular significance—moments of threat and risk, examples of great success or, crucially, the point where the old order changed.
   It’s only possible, however, to understand what might be significant by listening and reviewing what stories are already in common usage. New inductees will be told the most crucial stories for their area within the first few weeks of starting—those that indicate how things are really done around here. Recognizing and collecting those stories about past leaders can give you huge insight into what is expected of a leader in your specific organizational culture.
   
Helping leaders to communicate
A crucial role for many communications professionals is helping a leader to communicate—and thus engage, inspire or transform the workforce. I’ve already talked about different leadership styles, each obviously implies different communications styles to match.⁴ Ergo, not all leaders have to be loud, superconfident, alpha-male communicators. Their communications should be natural and fit their personal style.
   One factor that identifies good leaders is that they know what they are good at (and do that) and know what they are not good at (and find someone else to do that). Some leaders are simply not communicators. As soon as we become aware of this, it’s critical to find colleagues that the leader trusts to fill this role. In cases where there are varied environments reporting to a single leader, multiple communications styles may well be needed—a tougher style for masculine departments, intellectual for research, etc.
   The traditional way of communicating for senior managers has been “problem–analysis–solution–let’s go!” Which rarely convinces, far less inspires or engages. A leader seeking to influencing the organization does so in other, more fuzzy ways, including:

• what they choose to measure and pay attention to;
• how they react to incidents and crises;
• role-modelling, teaching and coaching;
• the rituals and habits they create;
• which metaphors they use in communicating;
• what stories they tell of past events and people;
• what they tolerate;
• formal statements of philosophy, creed and values.

   The last item here is the one where, typically, we put the most attention, thought and energy. Yet it’s one of the lesser levers in influencing a culture. If you’re supporting a leader, encourage them first to understand that the culture is better changed by the higher elements.
   
Role-modelling
A leader should, first and foremost, be role-modelling the behaviours expected elsewhere. The greatest sin of a leader is hypocrisy (not fallibility, as is often assumed) and if (s)he is not visibly trying to exemplify the corporate values, the whole thing is doomed. Stories of hypocrisy circulate faster than any other and have a massive impact on staff morale and management credibility.
   Some of the toughest conversations I’ve had with leaders in organizations have, over an hour, moved from the change needed in the organization to the change needed in the staff in the organization. The tough part comes in bringing those comments closer to home.
   ‘So if that’s the change you need them to make, what change do you need to make?’
   ‘No, you don’t understand, they need to change, not me.’
   ‘I understand you want them to change, but they will watch you—if you change, they will. If you don’t, they won’t. So what change are you going to make?’
   Handled properly (something I didn’t always do in the early days), these conversations also become some of the most productive and helpful to the change effort.
   
Personal stories
As communications professionals, we need to support leaders in being more personal, authentic and fallible than they may have been in the past. One of the keys is to talk about personal experiences.
   As part of a major change programme in a merging organization, Narrate associates coached and challenged senior board members to talk about their personal experiences in the organization when they presented or appeared at internal conferences and events. They talked about their early days and perceptions, the difficult times when reorganizations threatened them and the tough (and on occasion wrong) decisions they’d had to make along the way.
   It wasn’t about generating sympathy for them, but building human connections instead—breaking the false image of the imperious, unemotional manager at the top. Crucially, it also gave people context in which to see decisions and behaviours, allowing them to draw lessons from what they heard without having to make them explicit and risk them being rejected as being “command-and-control”.
   
Helping staff to mind-read
One of the pieces of feedback we regularly hear from front-line staff is that they ‘want the chief executive to be more visible.’ They do, but visibility of the leader is not enough. What they are looking for are ways to be see the leader’s thought processes—through open questions, through examples of tough decisions made, through what they comment on and through what stories they tell.
   In a geographically spread organization, this is one of the places that blogs and social media can be very powerful. Some leaders find that blogs are their best communication tools—they may not be expert face-to-face communicators—while others are more natural talking on a podcast.
   Regardless of whether a leader feels able to use such communications vehicles, there is one area of thinking that will have a strong effect on the culture and can be communicated relatively simply through standard channels: what the organization will stop doing.
   At least as important as what the leader decides must be done is what will not—what projects to finish, what markets to come out of and what activities to stop. Typically these are announcements that we make quietly and with as little fuss and information as possible, fearing that the implicit message is that it was wrong to be doing these things. But by providing enough context on the environment and the decisions involved—both at the beginning and now at the end—it will instead give people more insight into leaders’ thinking and, where appropriate, the confidence that decisions can be revisited in the light of new information.
   
Battling old heroes and legends
When leaders want to signal a major shift in the organization, it helps to understand what organizational myths are reinforcing the old behaviours. Then, rather than trying to convince or persuade or even tell a counter-story, it’s usually possible to take some authentic action that devalues the stories and begins the process of creating new ones.

   I worked at an IBM manufacturing facility in the 1990s, where site directors for years only descended to the manufacturing lines on rare occasions, usually accompanied by a cadre of senior managers, and only spoke to line managers. Until a new site director in 1996 turned up alone at the ThinkPad line on his third day to be met by the line manager—more than a little nervous at this unscheduled visit.
   ‘Can I help you?’
   ‘Sure. Have you got a white coat I can borrow?’
   ‘Uh-huh. Can I help?’
   ‘Don’t worry—you get back to what you need to do. I’m going to work on the line.’
   Which he did for the entire shift. The story was round the two-mile site within the hour—and suddenly people knew that here was a different kind of site director.
   It’s essential that these are authentic actions and stem from the individual leader’s own convictions, and that they are not accompanied by photographs or standard internal comms tools—instead they’re done visibly and allowed to circulate around the organization on the informal networks.
   In addition to creating new legends in the organization, they need to pick and choose carefully those stories from the past that they retell and emphasize. Frequently reframing a story slightly can demonstrate that values are not new, but have always been part of the culture. However, a leader’s immersion in the culture may make them myopic to what message the story actually conveys.
   One United States IT services company encouraged its employees to emulate the Sooners—people who were determined to get the good plots of land when Oklahoma was opened up to settlers. The Sooners, however, stopped at nothing—illegally grabbing land ahead of the official start date. The risk (reality in some cases) was that a general “get the results, regardless of costs or means” attitude spread through the organization.
   Immersed within the culture, the story of the Sooners was seen as a powerful motivator and the subtler drawbacks to the message weren’t seen. One role of communicators is to remain sensitive to the nuances of communications and stories and provide valuable feedback to leaders.
   
Mountain-climbers or battle strategists?
Another subtlety of leadership communication is the language and metaphors they use. Metaphors permeate our language and have strong influencing effects—talk about capturing new customers, winning market share, beating the competition sets up a win-lose, us-against-them mindset, which may or may not be appropriate.
   In the early 1990s, PC manufacturer Compaq declared that it intended to be the market leader in PCs worldwide. The language surrounding the subsequent changes in the company were heavily based on military metaphors—staff were ‘troops’; strategies included ‘meeting clones head-on’, ‘capturing imagination’, ‘firing the first salvo in a price war’, ‘pre-emptive cost reduction’ (this was in reality 1,000 employee lay-offs). It worked for Compaq in the short term, but long-term created an environment built on the idea of conflict.
   Once the company was market leader (a goal reached in remarkably short time) there was no clear “enemy” for a workforce embedded in the idea that every action was predicated on conflict. One of the results was greater internal conflict between departments and, ultimately, Compaq’s takeover by Hewlett-Packard.
   Equally, some metaphors that come naturally to leaders may actively deter their audiences. Recent examples we’ve seen include describing a change project as like climbing a mountain, complete with guides, base camps, interim peaks as targets. (Overheard at the back of the room was the aside that ‘It’s cold, wet, uphill all the way and what happens when we get to the top? We’ve got to come all the way back down again.’)
   
Supporting leaders

Leaders can feel lonely and isolated. Recent research has shown that a number can be depressed—too many people looking to them for decisions; being surrounded by colleagues who, depending on the culture, tend to fall into two camps: unchallenging followers or conflicting rivals. There is also a strong risk of becoming so strongly set in one way of seeing the world that warning signs or alternatives viewpoints get screened out.
   Depending on our own leadership and influence skills, we may be able to take on the role of adviser and, to a degree, offer challenges to help clarify thinking. If it’s not a role that we can play, respected outside experts can be used. Many leaders have academic colleagues in whom they confide.
   One critical element of this is to help leaders to view situations with different perceptions—either by direct action ourselves or by introducing external influences to do it for us. This can be done by introducing direct feedback from other stakeholders like customers, partners or legislators.
   Alternatively, there are powerful facilitated exercises, such as the chair game, that create unusual perspectives from which to reflect on personal behaviours and organizational issues. These, often revolving around some form of social sense-making, can be both powerful team-building exercises and valuable perception-shifting tools.

   Leadership is also a matter of consistency. Inconsistent behaviour—or tolerating breeches of values in favour of, for instance, high revenue—will undermine months of work in short order. Yet leaders are often so passionate and so driving that they become immune to such things, not doing them deliberately but simply failing to spot them. And, having cultivated an image of a thoughtful, rational approach to issues, a leader will be perceived to have done so deliberately rather than simply made a mistake.
   Finding tactful but effective means of pointing out such inconsistencies is an essential role in the organization. Close associates of leaders are unlikely to do so—being either blind to the problems themselves or too concerned about organization politics to risk commenting. If this is the case, a quiet word with a trusted external adviser can bolster their value to the leader while addressing the issue.
   Finally a critical factor for any leader is where to draw the line. It’s great to talk about what we aspire to as a way of lifting the culture and people upwards, but one of the things about leadership is also visibly changing what we will no longer tolerate. A great recent example was Mark Thompson, Director-General of the BBC, responding to the recent deceptions in interactive quizzes and phone-ins. Talk about what the BBC aspires to is one thing, but emphasizing that anyone who slips below certain standards will be shown the door is critical—and the same goes for leadership.

Notes
   1. An organization, in this context, could be a company, a division, a department or even a team—essentially just a group of people working together. Each may have different cultures.
   2. The McKinsey Quarterly recently talked about leadership ‘orienting strategy around an organizational model that nurtures knowledge and talent’. There’s more meaning there than in many similar pronouncements, but it still could have come from the mouth of Dilbert’s manager—a sure warning sign. N.B.: nothing about numbers, measurement or results.
   3. ‘Manager-plus’ is the version of leadership that some organizations call for—greater effectiveness (and efficiency) and innovation and customer service, but it implicitly rejects greater risk-taking or dissent. It calls for greater results but still within rigorous processes and quality control. It wants more, but without threatening the status quo or the hierarchy. Not leadership in my book.
   4. It also presupposes that leaders want to engage, inspire or transform the workforce—if they don’t then, again, they’re managing, not leading.

References
   E. Schein: Organizational Culture and Leadership. San Francisco: Jossey–Bass 2004.
   H. Gardner: Changing Minds. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard Business School Press 2006.
   C. Kurtz and D. Snowden: ‘The New Dynamics of Strategy: Sense-making in a Complex and Complicated World’, IBM Systems Journal, vol. 42, no. 3, September 2003, www.research.ibm.com/journal/sj/423/kurtz.html, via www.cognitive-edge.com/articlesbydavesnowden.php.
   G. Klein: Sources of Power. Cambridge: MIT Press 1999.
   D. Rock and J. Schwartz: ‘The Neuroscience of Leadership’, Strategy & Business, no. 43, summer 2006, www.strategy-business.com/media/file/sb43_06207.
   D. Fisher, D. Rooke, and B. Torbert: Personal and Organizational Transformations. Boston: Edge/Work Press 2003.
   D. Taylor: The Naked Leader. New York: Bantam 2002.
   S. Farber: The Radical Leap. Chicago: Dearborn Trade Publishing 2004.
   J. Collins: Good to Great. New York: Random House 2001.
   E. Schein: The Corporate Culture Survival Guide. San Francisco: Jossey–Bass 1999.

Appendix
The core Narrate questions for any leader to answer:

1. What will you personally be doing differently?
2. What similar change have you experienced previously? What happened? How did you feel?
3. What tough decisions have you taken as part of this change? Why did you decide what you did?
4. What will the organization stop doing now?
5. What will you personally stop doing?

Tony Quinlan
Chief Storyteller, Narrate Consulting

T. Quinlan: ‘An Introduction to Storytelling in Employee Branding’, The Journal of the Medinge Group, vol. 2, no. 1, 2008.

Introduction
Let’s begin with clearing up a potential misunderstanding. Storytelling is a misnomer. It conjures up the image of a passive audience sitting listening to someone with the charismatic, persuasive power to entrance them. It revolves around a carefully constructed story designed to carry you out of the day-to-day to somewhere else and change your thinking while you’re there.
   To some managers, it sounds like a dream come true. To most of us, however, that would be a nightmare. In an organization, charismatic persuasion and the ability to direct someone’s thinking smacks more of cults and propaganda than modern-day work practices. (And cults are less effective as organizations—they are typically blind and less resilient.) If this was what you were hoping for from this article, please leave those thoughts at the door.
   What is on offer here for proponents of employee branding—or “employee engagement”, its more trendy cousin—is more powerful and more positive than that simplistic view. The real power and opportunity for using stories in organizations is in listening to stories, helping others to create their own authentic stories and making sense of the stories told.

Why stories?
Why tell stories in the organization at all? After so much research and honing of practice, good communications departments are skilled at producing clear messages, good copy and straightforward values or mission statements. With such clear direction, good data and evidence of what to do next, shouldn’t that be enough?
   Sadly not—because neuroscience shows us that people rarely make decisions on the basis of rational analysis of data at the best of times. And when they are under stress, or being measured against a target, or being asked to change their behaviour, rational argument and values do nothing to persuade them.
   Thinking otherwise, though tempting, is trying to lever human behaviour and organizational culture into a process that can be analysed, planned and repeated. We all know from our own experiences that that is patently not the case.
   Instead we know, from Gary Klein’s Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions, that people make decisions according to the cognitive patterns they have created in their heads. Indeed, they don’t even make decisions according to the most appropriate pattern, but rather to the first pattern that the perceived situation fits.
   These patterns can be viewed as internal, personal stories—and understanding these stories will take us a long way towards understanding patterns of behaviour in the organization. By sharing alternative stories, and helping people see the world through the perspective of a different story, we can open up the possibility for others to shift their worldview and subsequently their behaviour.
   A valuable tool in Narrate’s work is the Cynefin framework (Figure 1), created by Dave Snowden, and the concepts behind it. It’s applicable in many different areas, but can be used to distinguish key themes, areas and projects and the recommended approaches to them.

Figure 1
The Cynefin framework

   In a vastly simplified description, culture falls into the Complex domain (for a fuller explanation of the Cynefin framework, read ‘The New Dynamics of Strategy: Sense-Making in a Complex and Complicated World’, referenced at the end of this chapter). Here causality is blurred, many different elements combine to create overall effects and results will never repeat exactly.
   In this domain, control is impossible, influence essential. Here, patterns of belief and behaviour dominate.
   It also requires different actions—trying out certain elements, waiting to perceive the results and then acting to reinforce the emerging patterns or disrupt them if they are negative. It can be about creating boundaries and attractors, by reinforcing desirable behaviours and disrupting undesirable ones.
   By contrast, the complicated domain does have repeatable cause-and-effect chains, although these may be extended through various stages. Here, we can analyse or bring in expert help to identify how results are created and impose processes to repeat them. Too often, we have tried to cram employee engagement into this domain.
   Given the vagaries of human behaviour and belief, I believe organizational culture sits squarely in the complex domain. I suggest that management—based in process, measurement and hierarchy—is more inclined to sit in the complicated domain.

What is engagement?
Not persuasion, for a start. The desire to see engagement as a one-way communication in which “employees are engaged” is evidence of an old-fashioned mindset—power, decisions and control lie high up the organization. Those further down the hierarchy are tasked mainly to obey. Here, engagement is merely a means of persuading people, while giving an illusion that the choice is theirs.
   This view cannot be effective for much longer. Compared with even 10 years ago, people in organizations have changed. The old days of a willing, compliant workforce were an illusion. The truth was always that organizations have no control over people, only levers of influence.
   No longer willing to take at face value what’s being told to them by the organization, people have far greater access to information than ever before, and more ways of expressing their own opinions. Equally, they are more experienced at deconstructing any organizational communications—making them masters of cynicism when it comes to the usual parade of internal communications tools and messages.
   In the ’80s and ’90s, much of the goal of internal communications (such as it was in those days) was to inspire company loyalty—I still remember being asked why I wasn’t more loyal to the organization. Yet the idea of inspiring loyalty was fundamentally flawed—it’s a two-way thing. Once the organization had proved that it was not loyal to you—as most did repeatedly in those of “downsizing” and “re-engineering”—it became apparent to all but the most hardy company men, that loyalty to the organization was not a long-term secure prospect.
   In the ’00s, we’ve abandoned the concept of organizational loyalty, been through internal branding and are now on to engagement—how do we engage our employees? And yet the same applies: engagement is a two-way contract. And while our organizations are very keen to ensure our people are engaged, how engaged is the organization with our people?
   Until the organization becomes engaged and concerned about the well-being of its people, engagement is going to be a limited concept—and one doomed to fail in the same manner as loyalty did.
   To borrow a truism from knowledge management, ‘Engagement can only be volunteered, not conscripted.” But before that can happen, there must be a level of trust, which itself only arises through a sense of being seen and heard.

Working with stories
Although when I first came to using stories in organizations, it was about crafting stories to communicate particular messages, this is a role that has been almost completely dispensed with as our practice and use of stories has developed.
   The Narrate model (Figure 2) sets out the general approach. It begins with a general sense of what the opportunity is, but the first step is then to gather material to map the current perceptions and culture—collecting real, authentic, naturally-told stories. It’s critical to realize that listening to stories emerge is more useful than crafting stories or telling them in the early stages.   No single story will ever give you an accurate picture of the organization—but the patterns that emerge from multiple stories, the shapes of events and beliefs, the archetypical characters that emerge are what provide the most powerful opportunities to view the world as others see it.
   Similarly, few single stories will engage with employees. Better, instead, to support them with multiple viewpoints and perspectives on a situation, and then facilitate them understanding their own roles and stories ahead.
   Having said that, it’s important to note too that even listening or diagnostic events generate expectations among the audience. Every intervention is a diagnostic and every diagnostic is an intervention.
   With all this material, there is then a need for sense-making exercises for key members of the organization. The patterns that emerge may indicate a gap in material which may lead to more story gathering. The patterns may also have implications for the original impetus for the project—which may need reshaping or rescoping as a result.

Figure 2
Process map for narrative engagements

   With a greater understanding of the culture and the opportunity or need for engagement, it’s then possible to identify leverage points in the organization where relatively minor actions will produce significantly larger results. At the same time patterns will have emerged that are healthy or unhealthy and these can be reinforced or disrupted as required.
   From here, all the range of HR, change and communications’ tools can be brought to bear on the issue—with narrative clearly playing a part within that.

Cognitive patterns
One of the great assumptions of communications is that if we give people clear instructions and data, they will change. That is, we as human beings process information to make decisions. As I mentioned earlier, recent advances in neuroscience show that this is wrong—that instead we make decisions by processing patterns, not information.
   This has important connotations for the standard model of internal communications and employee engagement. It nullifies traditional practice of clear messages, well-written copy, etc.
   Far less the frequent approach of quantities of data to prove a hypothesis. If we already have a belief about how the world works, it takes significant quantitative and qualitative data to shift that.
   Our inclination as human beings is to make the information and data we are given fit our preconceived ideas. It is not until there is significant difference between the data and our model that we open to the possibility of our model being wrong.
   So, in communicating effectively—engaging—with people within the organization, we must look for ways to bring their cognitive patterns to awareness. Not to change them, but to allow for the possibility of greater understanding and common negotiation of a shared viewpoint.
   As Burns put it:

   These cognitive patterns are, from one perspective, simply stories or scripts that predict consequences and inform behaviour and decisions—perspective filters that determine how we see the world.

Data, principles, information are usually context-less
One of the other core reasons for using story is the poverty of traditional value lists and mission statements as communications tools. The following story from Wikipedia about US congressman Lynn Westmoreland demonstrates it beautifully:

Westmoreland appeared on the Better Know a District segment of The Colbert Report on June 14, 2006. Stephen Colbert noted the fact that the congressman has co-sponsored a bill to place the Ten Commandments in the House of Representatives and the Senate. When asked to name all the commandments he was only able to remember three; one, “don’t lie,” was only partially correct (the Ninth Commandment is an injunction against “bearing false witness against your neighbor,” not lying per se). Westmoreland’s press secretary claims Westmoreland actually got up to about seven of the Ten Commandments before petering out, but that part was edited out. Said the secretary, “I challenge anybody outside of the clergy to try to (name them all).”

   This reinforces something critical in most organizational communications. The 10 commandments form a solid base for much of the west’s legal, moral and ethical practices, regardless of your personal religion and belief, yet few people can name them.
   That list of corporate values, principles or beliefs that has been slaved over for so long and encapsulates the organizational ethos. What are the chances of remembering them? And what are the chances of actually acting on them?
   Now, parables and stories on the other hand are memorable, understandable and actionable—because they are more in line with the way our brains and behaviour patterns work. But on the surface, they’re just not as intellectually impressive as ‘Thou shalt make the customer thy God.’
   Stories also carry with them context and causality—allowing audiences to determine when and why actions were taken, something that pure principles cannot do, therefore creating the (usually erroneous) assumption that they apply at all times and in all situations. (The reality, of course, is that they don’t apply universally, and most people adopt workarounds when the principles don’t apply. The difficulty, however, becomes when is it acceptable to ignore organizational principles and when is it not? Not is usually the moment just after the work-around has failed and the manager needs a scapegoat.)

An anatomy of stories

What makes up a story?
People talk about stories in organizations frequently, but the object of the discussion is rarely a real example of an influential, appealing story. Too often, it’s a disparate series of supposedly important events that occurred to a faceless group of people. For the sake of those involved, it usually conforms to the standard organization planning process.
   In school, we’re taught that a story has a beginning, a middle and an end. This originally came from Aristotle’s poetics, so it seems to be a solid basis for thinking about stories. However, a beginning, a middle and an end also describes a snake, so perhaps it’s not going to give us much idea of what an engaging story really consists of.

A sympathetic lead character
First, engaging stories are about people. Ideally, a single person is the main character in any story. Someone with enough in common with the audience to help them empathise with the character.
   Organization stories are too often about groups or divisions or, worse still, the overall organizations themselves. But we don’t engage with these stories because we can’t empathise with how it feels to be a corporation or a group. Where stories are concerned, we need single person protagonists. (There are exceptions—sports supporters being a good example of individuals associating with a national or regional identity.)
   A group of people is less interesting than a single person. Someone like me is more interesting than someone unlike me. So, when listening to a story about change, I’ll be more engaged with a story about someone coming to terms with what the change is about, what it might mean day-to-day, what the chances are of being made redundant, how threatened they are at a personal level by the change, rather than a story about meeting stakeholder expectations, returns and principles for the future.

A clear problem
A story without a problem is just a portrait—and not engaging.
   In Hollywood, they talk about ‘the inciting incident’—something that means that the setting of the story can no longer remain the same. In an organization, it might mean a takeover threat, a fundamental change in the market, but not “efficiencies”.
   The inciting incident must matter to the audience (or at least it must obviously matter to the lead character). Without the impetus of good inciting incident, there is no momentum in the story—and the audience has no reason to care.

Tests and obstacles
One of the greatest flaws in most organizational stories is their sense of being sanitized. A good story proceeds from the problem through challenges and obstacles, making and resolving mistakes along the way. Most corporate stories go straight from problem to resolution in a straight line. The lack of mistakes and real obstacles (as opposed to obstacles that are automatically resolved by a new product we’ve just introduced) is what brands these as propaganda.
   In most engaging stories, the obstacles increase in difficulty or complexity as the story goes on—increasing a sense of tension and risk. Interesting, engaging company stories tend to revolve on the “bet-the-company” decisions.
   Robert McKee, the screenwriting guru, talks about story events as being meaningful chosen moments that illuminate the entire life of a character. The same applies to stories in organizations—they must be chosen moments that illuminate something deeper about the culture. In particular, a story reveals character in those chosen moments through the choices made by the lead protagonist—especially when they’re under stress.
   So finally, a good story will feature a choice made in a moment of pressure—and that is when the reader learns about the real values of the character in the story.

References
   G. Klein: Sources of Power. Cambridge: MIT Press 1999.
   McKee, Robert; “Story”; Methuen 1999
   D. Snowden and C. Kurtz: ‘The New Dynamics of Strategy: Sense-making in a Complex and Complicated World’, IBM Systems Journal, vol. 42, no. 3 (available through www.cognitive-edge.com).
   I. Shah: The Exploits of the Incomparable Mulla Nasruddin. London: Octagon Press 1985
   C. Heath and D. Heath: Made to Stick. New York: Random House 2007.
   H. Gardner: Changing Minds: the Art and Science of Changing Our Own and Other People’s Minds. Harvard, Mass.: Harvard Business School Press 2006.
   E. H. Schein: Organizational Culture and Leadership. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley 2004.

Nicholas Ind
Equilibrium Consulting, pb 5822 Majorstuen, 0308 Oslo, Norway
nind@equilibriumconsulting.com

N. Ind: ‘A Participative Approach to Brand Building’, The Journal of the Medinge Group, vol. 2, no. 1, August 2008.
PDF version

The argument of this paper is a simple one: creating value for customers is an organization-wide responsibility. This is a step removed from most approaches to the subject, which see marketing as an instrumental function and give emphasis to marketing as the primary, if not the sole, driver in building a brand. In this line of thinking, marketing is what marketers do to customers when they take what the company produces and re-present it. Yet marketing is not a department but a process by which the organization connects with the world around it. Also marketing theory and practice should not only be concerned with the external and marketing communications but also with the difficult internal reality of aligning the different parts of the organization.
  When marketing only has limited organizational influence—when it is disconnected from other activities within the organization—the challenge of delivering a coherent offer is that much harder. Functional areas push in different directions and the appearance, functionality and presentation of the products begins to lack clarity. Alternatively, if marketing is connected with the rest of the organization; indeed if the whole organization is involved in delivering the brand, coherence is much easier to attain.
  If this sounds theoretical, this scenario applies to an actual case: the launch of Apple Computer’s strategy based around the metaphor of a ‘digital hub for a digital lifestyle’. This metaphor, announced by Steve Jobs at Macworld 2001 in San Francisco, expressed a new vision for the brand and encompassed several new Apple products: new computers and integrated hardware for recording CDs and DVDs, iTunes and iMovie. Soon afterwards the metaphor heralded the launch of the iPod, Apple’s expansion into audio products and services and the introduction of Apple’s own retail stores.
  At the time, Fortune magazine (November 12, 2001) was moved to compare Apple’s success with Intel’s problems: ‘Why in the world would Apple want to jump from the frying pan of the virtually profitless PC industry into the roaring fire of the hypercompetitive consumer electronics business? After all, just a few days before Apple’s splashy introduction of the iPod, Intel announced that it would close down its own disappointing consumer electronics division, which made, among other things, portable MP3 players, digital still cameras, kiddie videocameras, and a much ballyhooed digital microscope. For starters, the iPod fits right into Jobs’ so-called Digital Hub strategy for the Macintosh.’
  The vision encapsulated in the strategic metaphor was not only was a driver for internal cohesion so that the organization could focus on those areas that best delivered the idea but it also became a widely used phrase by the media, such that each new service and product innovation launched by Apple was integrated into the metaphor. The whole process thus became a self-reinforcing circular movement that has enabled Apple to be consistently interesting and interestingly consistent.
  One of the developments within marketing thinking that has tried to deal with the problem of marketing’s overtly external emphasis which too often leads to disconnected thinking, has been the emergence of the concept of ‘market orientation’. This approach extends the role of marketing by suggesting its role should be not only to sense movement in the environment but also to shape the organizational response by connecting with other business functions and departments. This indicates the role of marketers: to face simultaneously inwards and outwards and connect the organization and its audiences.

The principles of market orientation
Although the underlying ideas of market orientation have been around since the 1960s, it was two pairs of writers in 1990, who began to define and refine the concept: Narver and Slater¹ and Kohli and Jaworski.² Rather than simply focusing on the point of interaction with customers, they turned inward to explore how organizations could use customer knowledge to build organization-wide responses. Kohli and Jaworski saw the concept as referring to ‘the organization-wide generation of market intelligence, dissemination of the intelligence across departments, and organization wide responsiveness to it.’ Narver and Slater (1990) featured some similar elements, seeing market orientation as: (1) customer orientation; (2) competitor orientation; and (3) interfunctional coordination. However, Narver and Slater’s emphasis is on market orientation as organizational culture.
  The virtue of market orientation is that it stresses the importance of connecting the organization together to deliver value to customers. It seeks to overcome the problem of siloization that is prevalent in organizations. Jaworski and Kohli in a 1993 paper addressed three specific questions: (1) why are some organizations more market-oriented than others?; (2) what effect does a market orientation have on employees and business performance?; (3) does the linkage between a market orientation and business performance depend on the environmental context? Based on two national samples the researchers came to the conclusion that market orientation is related to top-management emphasis, the risk aversion of top managers, interdepartmental conflict and connectedness, centralization and the reward system orientation. Moreover, a market orientation is related to overall business performance (but not market share), employees’ organizational commitment, and esprit de corps. And even more important, the connection between market orientation and performance appears to be consistent across environmental contexts that suffer from varying degrees of market turbulence, competitive intensity, and technological change. We might conclude from this that there are no environmental reasons to prevent market orientation and plenty of benefits.
  Yet there is one area of market orientation that has been underplayed: implementation. A market-oriented culture is not only about interfunctional coordination or the type of organizational factors that enhance or impede the implementation of the business philosophy. Rather market orientation is a consequence (although it in turn reinforces) of a supportive organizational culture, HR and leadership. To develop this line of thinking we have developed the concept of participatory market orientation: a fusion of internal and external market orientations with an emphasis on realising the potential of market orientation.

Participatory Market Orientation (PMO)
A participatory market oriented philosophy aims to help the organization to become more participatory, such that it involves both its employees and customers actively in the process of brand development. This belief in the value of participation should steer the way investments are made in both internal and marketing activities and recognizes their connectivity. It suggests as a principle that rather than an over-reliance on traditional marketing communications to build a brand that funds are allocated to become entrained (synchronized) with customers and to integrate a relevant organizational response encompassing communications and actions.
  An example of this entrainment process at work is the Grathak Katha (consumer’s voice) events held by the Bangladeshi mobile operator, GrameenPhone. GrameenPhone is the leading mobile telecom company in Bangladesh with a 48 per cent share of the market and 16·5 million customers (2007). This is a high growth market, but to take account of low incomes, GrameenPhone’s business model is designed to work with customers whose average spend on mobile telephony is $2 per month.
  To better understand its customers and develop innovative ways of selling its services, the company conducts regular market research studies into the performance of its brand and particularly the delivery of customer service. However, in addition to this research, GrameenPhone has initiated a process for removing the distance between the company and its customers. This participative approach involves regular meetings between employees and customers in an environment that is both social and businesslike. The idea is to obtain direct interaction with customers both as a way of enhancing the reputation of the brand and as a means of learning about and learning with customers.
  At the event itself, GrameenPhone matches the attendees one-to-one with employees so that there is the opportunity for personal dialogue. On these occasions research is conducted and results presented, new products are discussed and customers provide ideas on new opportunities. The idea is to mix the formal and the informal and such has been the momentum behind the process that music performances at the events are by groups that combine employees and customers playing together.
  GrameenPhone has discovered that the quality of the feedback is high and the comments are genuine. Customers are not concerned with trying to either attack or please GrameenPhone, they just try to offer input and to relate their experiences. In one year the company conducted more than 300 events with over 200,000 participants. The key to maintaining the interest in the process both within GrameenPhone and externally with customers is the rapid processing of information, the actions taken as a result of input and the feedback provided.
  Marketing Director, Rubaba Dowla Matin, argues that the success is due to the organizational capability to validate, categorize, analyse the data and to involve the relevant teams in the organization. It is these cross-functional customer management teams that play the vital role in determining the nature of the insight and generating action and communication. This investment into deep and direct insight and the willingness to encourage organization-wide participation have been the catalysts behind the success of the initiative and the company’s burgeoning reputation as an innovator.
  Overall, when such external–internal investments as that made by GrameenPhone are managed effectively it increases its brand equity, which in turn enhances brand value. This final linkage is based on the premise that enhanced awareness and customer loyalty to the brand is the best indicator of the security of future cash flows. This way of thinking goes beyond market orientation because of its explicit link with brand value and because of the emphasis on engaging audiences to ensure that a market orientation leads to effective action. Marketing’s role then shifts subtlety in this scenario. When the overall organizational goal is to enhance customer value there is a requirement for an organization-wide commitment to customers and a supportive culture, style of leadership, governance and human resources policies. Partly marketing must have an internal market orientation to help achieve this organization-wide perspective and partly it must be a key element in building bonds with customers and sharing knowledge about them inside the organization; externally sense-making and internally sense-sharing. This internal–external approach builds the brand.
  The value of this twin perspective is endorsed by a study of Sweden’s 500 largest companies³ that shows organizations with the highest brand orientation index (BOI), where branding is the hub of operations, are characterized by an ability to combine both an internal and external focus. Interestingly, the profile of high brand-orientation companies is found in roughly the same frequency among business to business and business to consumer companies (50–50) and goods to services (57–43). This study reinforces the link between brand orientation and profitability, by demonstrating the correlation between the two with the group of leaders in terms of orientation showing operating profits almost double the lowest brand orientation group: ‘the most important outcome of this study is that we have been able to establish a clear link between brand orientation and profitability: the more brand-oriented a company is, the more profitable it is.’
  In spite of the BOI research, most operationalizations of marketing ideas are developed around products and external markets. Yet it should be clear that a focus on human capital and on enhancing brand delivery capacity is of vital importance in delivering customer value in both products and services.
  In recognizing the importance of human capital and internal market orientation, it is clear that external market orientation must be kept in focus. It may be important to ensure that employees are truly engaged, but it must be remembered that the value of this engagement is in the delivery of value to customers. Thus the marketing department should cooperate with the HR department in developing the brand, while it should also work at being finance-orientated to improve understanding of the connection between investments in marketing activities and financial performance. Equally, responses to events, such as a change in competitor activity, a move in market share or new patterns of customer behaviour all require the organization to work in an integrated way across internal boundaries. The ability to do this effectively requires a participatory market orientation (an outside-in, inside-out way of thinking). This is something that the organizational culture has to encourage and that leadership must demonstrate by its communications and actions. Something the BOI study endorses with its (not surprising) discovery that in the most brand-oriented companies, the executive management group is very active in brand-related activity.

Notes
   1. J. Narver and S. Slater: ‘The Effect of a Market Orientation on Business Profitability’, Journal of Marketing, vol. 54, no. 5, October 1990, pp. 20–35.
   2. A. K. Kohli and B. J. Jaworski: ‘Market Orientation: The Construct, Research Propositions, and Managerial Implications’, Journal of Marketing, vol. 54, no. 2, April 1990, pp. 1–18.
   3. Brand Orientation Index: a research project on brand orientation and profitability in Sweden’s 500 largest companies. Label AB in cooperation with Frans Melin, 2005.

Adapted from N. Ind and R. Bjerke: Branding Governance. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley 2007.

Ian Ryder
British Computer Society

I. Ryder: ‘Issues and Challenges of Developing and Managing Brand Strategy in a Not-for-profit (Chartered) Body’, The Journal of the Medinge Group, vol. 2, no. 1, August 2008.

No brain-food—just a sector anecdote!
The same rules apply: we all know that “rules is rules”, right? Could we try a maybe?!
   I recently (nine months ago) took a new position working in a professional body, one of the largest of its kind in the world, which also happens to be a registered charity and incorporated under a Royal Charter. After a lifetime in the corporate world I can tell you: the rules are different! Not the fundamentals of brand strategy, clearly, but the processes and procedures of development and execution.
   Perhaps a few words of explanation about ‘Royal Charter’ are needed, because this means little or nothing to anyone outside UK shores.
   The only bodies that can award a ‘Chartered’-status professional qualification are those that have been granted a Royal Charter by HM the Queen. Whilst it is a major honour, this has huge implications if you find you want to do anything significant on branding. There are two main issues and several supplementaries.
   First, chartered organizations have a governance structure that requires a Trustee Board (TB) to have oversight and ultimate responsibility for performance. This usually comprises volunteers who are part-time, unpaid, and can come from absolutely any walk of life and any professional background. The TB then delegates authority to a CEO and Executive Board who are responsible for the operational execution of the organization’s strategy (and sometimes they don’t!).
   Secondly, any change to the organization’s range of activities or, critically, name, must be approved by what is called the Privy Council—essentially a sign off by HM the Queen.
   The “supplementaries” include a range of things related to this governance, involving many stake-holders, members included, who feel they can have a say in this and, therefore, not surprisingly there exists the potential for major disagreements between a part-time TB and the full-time team of professionals and EB who, probably rightly, usually believe that they are best qualified to make such key decisions. One of the biggest pains of all, though, are timing and process.
   Often a TB will only sit six times a year and, even then, really substantive issues will have trouble finding agenda time. But it can take a staggering 12–18 months just to get approval for a name change and corporate rebrand, which includes the need for a member-approved motion at an Annual General Meeting followed by a Privy Council seal of approval—not guaranteed, and they only meet twice a year!
   This is not to say that such organizations are not fun to work in and with, or that they don’t share many of the same brand challenges as their arguably more fortunate commercial brethren, with only “normal” governance and market forces to manage. All the issues of needing to generate commercial revenues in a competitive market-place in a service business still apply. This means all our much-loved challenges of positioning, product development and management, customer service management and indeed brand and marketing strategy development and execution, in the broadest sense, still apply.
   The key challenge is that, if you thought your only issue was to convince your CEO and fellow board members who are likely to have both familiarity with marketing principles and have the final decision, then consider the need to first do that, then take it through the process described above. This is where there is a very good chance the majority of your TB–member agreement has to come from people who may never have even heard of the word brand and if they have, it is guaranteed it was in the wrong context and with such limited knowledge that they won’t understand what you are proposing or why.
   Rather than this be just a simple “ramble” about how lucky profit-making commercial organizations are—even those B2B companies that still have far too many “critical but knowledge-challenged” individuals—I thought maybe I’d drop in a brief summary of tips for anyone working in, or agencies considering pitching for, this kind of organization.
   1. Get a really detailed understanding of the fundamental governance constraints, together with a timetable of key Committee, Council and Board meetings.
   2. Understand the background of Trustees so you can see the scale of your challenge, or the extent of your support.
   3. Have a very clear plan and timeline, always important but critical in this case.
   4. Creating a small sub-group of three or four from the TB to take with you on the journey will make the final TB sign-off so much easier—it may even be passed!
   5. Learn to manage uncertainty and develop your proposals and arguments carefully—and make sure you do this a long time ahead!
   6. Exercise enormous quantities of patience.
   7. Whichever god you believe in—ask for help!
   We’re on our journey though, having developed a new marketing strategy alongside the slower development of our brand strategy using a variant of a process model I’ve used before, this time facilitated by one of the really good, smaller brand consultancies, UffindellWest.¹ We will get there, and I look forward to writing up that journey as a case study sometime during 2010.

Note
   1. The CEO and owner of which is one of our own Medinge members.

Patrick Harris
thoughtengine
patrick@thoughtengine.co.uk

P. Harris: ‘We the People’, The Journal of the Medinge Group, vol. 2, no. 1, August 2008.
PDF version

Abstract
This paper considers the importance of employees in the process of building customer experience. The paper states that internal investment is rewarded with consistent, quality customer exchanges. Emphasis is first placed on the positioning of brand management within an organization, and its linkage to strategy. Second, the tools of identity and guiding principles are introduced. These tools are used to activate staff by inviting their engagement and by asking them to review the brand from a personal perspective. Identity encourages employees to interpret corporate identity and apply it to their unique situation and skill set. Guiding principles serve as a platform to nurture desired behaviours in the organization. Together, these two tools better prepare staff to respond to customers. Brand values are presented as the currency to measure the worth of exchanges between organizations and their customers. The paper concludes by presenting a case study of the mobile operator, Orange, during the period 1994–2003.

Introduction
Branding is about people. People build brands. People buy brands. The relationship, at first glance, is a simple one—build a good brand and others will buy it. At the heart of this relationship, however, is another group of people, that of the employees. It is the employees who enact the attributes of the brand and whose actions ultimately foster customer experience—whether good or bad. Staff actions should reinforce the promises a brand makes to its customers. If wisely conducted, this reinforcement breeds more success in terms of sales, awareness and loyalty. Employees have the formidable task of demonstrating the brand by the actions they take. The adage actions speak louder than words is a truth that holds firm in the process of building successful brands.
   However, many organizations fall short of representing the brands they espouse. Sometimes, this disconnection is due to uncommon circumstances. These include sudden market shifts that are external to the organization. Internal changes—like the loss of a key figurehead or an organizational merger—are also examples where a disconnection, between the brand attributes and employee actions, can be present. These examples, and others like them, provide resilience tests for brands. The question is, can effective internal brand management help to overcome these difficult periods? Further, can an ongoing internal brand management process help to preserve a healthy relationship between employee actions and customer experiences?
   This paper discusses the importance of inward facing brand management. Emphasis is given to the positioning of brand management and its relationship to organizational strategy. Separately, the tools of Identity and Guiding Principles are presented as a means of serving the employee effort to enact the brand attributes. Finally, a case study involving the mobile telephone company, Orange, is introduced for illustrative review.

1. An inward perspective
It was in his seminal paper of 1937, that Ronald Coase prescribed the basic reasoning of a firm.¹ He described the importance of building and maintaining relationships as the very essence of a firm:

A firm, therefore, consists of the system of relationships which comes into existence when the direction of resources is dependent on an entrepreneur.

If consistency of brand experience is sought, this definition suggests the need for a balanced focus of nurturing and serving internal and external relationships. Yet in many brand management efforts, resources are usually dedicated to constructing an outward image of the brand. Advertising, packaging and sponsorship are traditional examples. It is commonly accepted that internal characteristics are transferred to the external environment via the employees of the organization. Further, this transferral may be unintended if left unchecked. This point implies a need to manage, or at least positively influence, the identity that is transferred outwardly—in order to maintain consistency and overall control. Thus, the internal workings of a firm should form an integral part of brand management. Brands today must represent a company’s history, future vision and its outward appearance—as well as the internal representation of the organization. Why then do organizations give little attention to internal brand management?

1.1 The right level
Inward-facing brand management must be considered at the appropriate level if it is to succeed. Brand management when considered as a periphery exercise of a marketing subset, is destined to perform poorly. Brand today is a key element of every transaction the organization engages in and as such should be strategically incorporated into internal activities. Brands do far more than label products or companies. Brands today can:

• change market dynamics;
• span across entire markets and enter new markets; and
• heavily influence industry business models.

Google, Amazon and Napster are examples of brands that have significantly changed the dynamics of entire markets. Virgin, Marlboro and Caterpillar are good illustrations of brands that can span industries or enter new industries. Finally, MySpace and Blackberry are brands of influence that have stimulated enormous changes to business models in their respective markets.
   Despite this shift in the influence of brands, intelligent dialogue between brand mangers and the strategic elements of the firm is often lacking. In reality, management of the brand must feature in all that the company undertakes, internally and externally. Brand must be prevalent in strategy, training, objective-setting, working style, facilities and much more. Ind, when discussing the concept of living the brand, argues that brands come to life when internal and external boundaries are blurred.² Most importantly, brand management must also be well integrated into the activities of the organization if it is to deliver quality customer experiences.
   But the phrase living the brand does not necessarily express the integration of brand at a strategic level of the organization. Organizations that unite strategy and brand possess cohesive workforces that demonstrate sound direction, incorporate a recognizable approach and present a high quality, consistent customer experience. Ind’s phrase can be extended for organizations that provide a strategic and integrated focus of brand management—being the strategy and living the brand.

1.2 What they do, not what they say
Internal branding should concentrate more on context rather than content. It should focus on why an activity occurs, more than the brand compliance of the activity itself.
   A hypothetical example of branding the company canteen is helpful as an illustration. In this circumstance, it is not the branded colour of the crockery or the ability to reinforce company messages on the walls that is critical. Rather, emphasis should be on the behaviours exhibited when serving or receiving food, and on the atmosphere that is conveyed by staff. Behaviours are visible evidence of the brand’s capacity to influence. Too often it is the focus on tangible items that get the bulk of the attention—ensuring that the content meets stringent brand guidelines—while overlooking the contextual settings and behaviours of the people involved.
   The relationship between employees and customers is—or at least should be—genuine, two-way and sincere. What is displayed externally is chiefly a reflection of the activities of he internal organization. For this reason, inward brand management should not be limited to providing training material for customer-facing staff only. Instead it should be the creed by which the whole organization elects to live and breathe. Internal activities should always underpin the customer experience sought. Thus, brand management efforts must be focused inside the organization as much as, and possibly more than, they are externally. The key is to provide staff with appropriate tools, allowing them to be the strategy and live the brand.

2. Identity: building understanding
Corporate identity, the persona of an organization, is widely used by companies and agencies alike. It is normally expressed in a hierarchical set of descriptive terms—from, say, vision to values—and provides guidelines for how the organization expresses itself. Corporate identity is a valuable asset of any brand manager’s toolkit.
   Corporate identity is not necessarily the best tool for employees, however. A workforce is after all, a collection of people and often, a corporate identity does not adequately speak to each as an individual. Further, individuals see organizational change and shifts in corporate identity as uncomfortable and difficult to accept. Employees take these shifts personally and feel lost when another directive arrives, with a new focus, and the CEO asks for their buy-in—once again.

2.1 Activate, not automate
Inside organizations, it is not buy-in that is necessary, but momentum. Buy-in is a flawed concept that suggests 100 per cent effectiveness in the communication of an idea, 100 per cent belief in it by the listener and 100 per cent efficiency in enacting it. Momentum, however, is created by communicating the gist of an idea and afterwards, encouraging individuals to interpret it, apply it to their unique situation and then use their individual skills to address it. Momentum taps into the collective wisdom of the staff and invites their participation. Here identity is still in use, but it is not an induced corporate identity communicated from the upper echelons of the company. Instead, individual identity is developed by regularly encouraging employees to interact with the company position. This allows them to reach a greater appreciation of its meaning to them personally, or as smaller teams of people. This is how it should be. Identity, used as a tool, allows individuals to increase their overall understanding of the organization and to personally ingest its meaning. Workshops, training programmes and promotion of good dialogue are good methods to achieve this aim.
   There are several benefits of the process of engendering identity. First, employees have a stronger personal sense of organizational purpose. They know what to do and why they should do it. Secondly, they are less affected by significant organizational changes that (inevitably) will occur. They take these changes less personally. Thirdly, they are better equipped to see how their role can make a difference to the company as a whole. Fourthly, a company-wide spirit of involvement and responsibility is in action. Overall, their understanding is more consistent through change and this consistency features readily in their work. They can, in effect, be the strategy.
   The next step is to help staff to underpin their understanding with appropriate behaviours.

3. Guiding Principles: nurturing desired behaviour
Consistent behaviour cannot be prescribed, nor can cultures be assigned. Cultures are more amorphous than this. Consistent behaviour can be nurtured, however. By nurturing a few desired behaviours, a sought-after organizational culture is more likely to develop. This focus is served well by the concept of Guiding Principles.
   Guiding Principles are not rules, because rules are typically prescriptive and describe what can and cannot be done. They are not objectives, either, as guiding principles are interpretable. They possess a high degree of flexibility, while objectives should always adhere to the SMART rule of thumb.³ Finally, guiding principles are not habits, as habits are traditionally out-of-date or unchecked actions that are routinely applied.
   Instead, Guiding Principles are a small collection of memorable expressions of behaviour—about three to six in total. They describe behaviour that must be present in order to fulfil strategic and brand aims. Interestingly, guiding principles are useful regardless of changes in circumstances.
   Thus, even in times of instability, guiding principles represent the inherent behaviour that individuals can turn to and depend on. Together, they underpin an organizational identity and are necessary to nurture a desired culture. A good example is the following: Everything in moderation, nothing in excess.
   This phrase, when applied across a number of individuals, can have different interpretations. To some the phrase indicates the need for a steady, even approach. To others, it might mean that an extreme intake or exposure is acceptable—on occasion, but not regularly. In all cases, individuals will be able to respond in a manner that is in keeping with the desired behaviour, but which suits their situation.
   Consider, too, the guiding principle of face to face. To customer-facing staff, its meaning might be very clear: be with the customer whenever possible. To back-room staff, however, it might have usefulness in terms of how they treat email or how feedback is provided to colleagues.
   The power of Guiding Principles is that they can be communicated in a straightforward manner, yet their meaning is always personal to each individual and open to interpretation.
   The combination of identity and guiding principles is a mobilizing force for organizations. Together, they help to form employee behaviour and to channel employee actions and decisions in desired directions. As a result, the organization becomes more adaptable in terms of the changes it faces, yet will be consistent in its response. Meanwhile, employees are made more aware of the aims of the organization and are actively engaged in delivering its success. They are able to live the brand.

3.1 A cautionary tale
Guiding Principles, together with identity, should hold meaning for the individuals who use them. This is best achieved by allowing a significant cross-section of the organization to develop them. It is not always possible that one set of guiding principles will serve the whole organization and some limited regional or team variation should be encouraged. The process should be highly integrated and inclusive.
   However, the commitment to involve staff must be genuine and purposeful. It must be supported by the presence and involvement of senior managers. Employees do notice when they are being served a placebo process. Less-than-genuine attempts to involve staff can result in far fewer committed people than desired—perhaps even an employee revolt. Having a few members of staff involved is a far cry from having an entire workforce mobilized and committed to the cause. Martina Navratilova expressed it fittingly when she described the dedication required to achieve sporting excellence: ‘It’s like ham and eggs. The chicken is involved, the pig is committed.’

4. Where is the customer?
Thus far, this paper has concentrated most of the discussion on the organization itself—not the customer. This is deliberate because it:

• illustrates the yawning gap in internal focus;
• establishes an appropriate sequence of events required; and
• demonstrates the amount of effort that is necessary, in order to deliver desired customer experience.

   This in-depth focus on internal matters provides two key brand management deliverables. First, it builds a robust foundation for stimulating desired internal attitudes. These, in turn, become products and services that deliver a valued customer experience. Secondly, undertaking exercises of understanding and behaviour ensures that downstream activities become easier to address and are implemented with greater consistency.
   As the mantra suggests, the customer is always right. An inward facing brand process, however, better prepares the organization to respond to customers in the right way.

5. Genuineness and transparency—ready to face the world
In today’s market-place, it is important that any presentation made to a customer needs to be wholly genuine. Further, the organization that delivers the product or service needs to be transparent. This need for genuineness and transparency does not stem from brand management manuals. Rather, this is a necessary organizational response to today’s consumers, who are armed with choices, control and the tribal nature of communities.

5.1 Choices, control and community
In recent times, consumers have gained access to new and powerful tools. In the main, these consumer tools refer to new communication technologies such as the internet, mobile telephony and peer-to-peer connectivity. Less hyped, enabling technologies such as increasing digital storage capacities (i.e. the ability to access, store and transfer large volumes of information) are also critical consumer tools.
   While each of these technologies no longer represents stirring news on their own, none of them should be underestimated in terms of the lasting social change that they are introducing. They have the capacity to leapfrog technology generations, connect previously isolated areas, enable the connected portion of the planet to communicate and they provide access to an ever-increasing sea of information.
   In brand management terms, these tools have created a state of caveat venditor, where markets provide near limitless choices and the consumer is able to control the exchange. If the company cannot respond, a raft of alternatives is just a mouse click away.
   Of particular concern for brand managers is that traditional systems of trust and relationship building are changing at alarming rates. The current generation is the first to be exposed to an endless landscape of sources of trust and the ability to bypass middlemen. As recent as the late 1980s, for example, there were only a few widely acceptable sources of news. Now, news is available from numerous providers, aggregators and commentators—whether in the form of traditional institutions, blogs or others. Indeed, many consumers of news have also become commentators and publishers in their own right.

5.2 A gathering storm
In strategic and brand terms, this means that segments of customers can band together—practically overnight—and shift organizational decisions, in a way that has never been possible before. A few activists can cause years of unwelcome press and lasting grief with court cases against organizations like McDonald’s.⁴ Brand reputations can suffer from reported employment practices in manufacturing assembly plants.⁵ During the construction of this paper, vegetarians united to protest a decision by Masterfoods—makers of Mars and Twix chocolate bars—to use animal rennet in some of its products. The result? Masterfoods publicly admitted that it had made a mistake and reversed the decision.⁶ It is now reported that they are reviewing the broader product range with the diets of vegetarians in mind.⁷
   Finally, an illustration involving Apple’s customer base shows the variety of involvement by informal customer tribes over time. From its inception, Apple has attracted an enormously loyal customer base. This was true even during Apple’s lethargic progress in the 1980s.^{8, 9} In those dark days, lore has it that some near fanatical customers even loitered in computer stores to promote Apple products to would-be buyers. Surely this was a welcome if not unexpected asset for Apple at the time.
   However, in recent times, that same loyal base has applied pressure to Apple itself—with expert leadership from Greenpeace—to improve Apple’s eco-friendly practices.¹⁰ The success of this orchestrated campaign makes the clear point that no brand can ignore the mobilized wishes of its customer base; particularly a famously loyal one.
   The need for transparency and genuineness is not a marketing tool or branding fad. It is not a management theory for organizational development. It is an irreversible fact of business life that every organization must learn to address. This need will only increase as consumer tools improve and as more people have access to them.
   Brands can no longer state unrealistic statements of aspiration. The truth is that they never should have done so. Now brands, or at least those that aspire to build valued customer experiences, can only state what the organization can realistically live up to. This requires learning for some, as it is not necessarily the marketing mix that brand managers learned from the era of Madison Avenue thinking.

6. Values—the customer connection
Brand values are one of the more familiar terms used by businesses and brand managers. Brand values are familiar, too, for many customers. This is justifiable, as values are tangible brand management tools to be shared with customers. Organizations should openly state their values and ensure that they are represented in their activities. Simultaneously, customers are able to use the values as benchmarks to evaluate the success of their exchanges with the organization.
   Brand values are more resident in the customer domain than identity and guiding principles, discussed previously. Identity and guiding principles are the strategy in flexible form, and help the employees to be the strategy and live the brand. In contrast, brand values are the currency of customer experiences. Each experience can be considered as positive or negative, in a brand sense. Where the brand values are present in a customer exchange and supported by the actions of staff encountered, the transaction can be considered a positive one. In these positive exchanges, the brand is reinforced and the relationship deepens as a result. In contrast, negative transactions occur when the brand values are not evident in the transaction. Here, the customer completes a transaction (or aborts it) but has a less clear understanding of the brand and its position.
   Brand-based organizations would do well to treat these measures of brand values as importantly as they do other measures of success. This is because the degree to which brand values are communicated is directly related to how much the consumers buy into the actions of the company and its longer-term perspective.

7. Putting it all together—a case study
The mobile telephone company, Orange, provides an excellent case study for review. Orange was a fast growing, brand-based and industry-influencing organization, particularly in the mercurial heyday of 1994–2003. It was the last of four players to launch in the crowded UK market and was heavily dependent on a differentiated position. From this unlikely position, Orange proceeded to excel at providing excellent customer experiences.¹¹
   Like many organizations, however, Orange also faced a number of operational issues, internally and externally. Some examples included dealing with interdepartmental rivalries, supplier inconsistencies, overcoming the communication needs of a large employee base and management and staff mismatches at various levels. Again, these are common issues that many organizations face. Orange, however, was able to regularly overcome these issues, or at least manage them, by demonstrating its strong sense of organizational purpose and by encouraging employee engagement with the brand. The brand values were thoroughly incorporated into the entire organization—product development meetings, personal development, employee achievement citations and much more.
   During the period mentioned above, a strong sense of understanding and awareness existed in the organization. It would not have been out of place for a highly technical meeting on telecommunications platforms and infrastructure to close with a discussion on how to make the chosen concept look and feel Orange. Further, the senior team, and in particular the CEO, regularly and personally conducted visible deeds that reinforced the values. These deeds were visible to the organization and were passionately recounted, until they became symbols of the organizational identity. They developed into rich seams of company lore that were ardently repeated.
   Below are two examples from the period which illustrate:

• one employee’s personal interpretation and application of brand values; and
• how senior management deeds can build lasting, purposeful narrative.

7.1 Doohickey Day
Many technology companies face a challenge in getting the marketing team to understand the technology team and vice versa. Communications between the two groups can become sterile, even where best intentions are present, normally due to a lack of understanding between the two groups. Orange was no exception. A unique solution for Orange was developed, however, by one of its engineers. He created a forum for sharing technical developments in an engaging format, which the marketing team would appreciate. The concept was called Doohickey Day, named for the way that engineers in the Dilbert cartoon strip sometimes convey key technologies to their colleagues.
   The forum consisted of engineers who would present innovative and upcoming technological concepts to a crowd of (largely) marketing people. The attendees all sat at round tables, each with a large red button in the centre. Each button played a unique sound when pressed. When speaking, the technology presenters were not allowed to use acronyms or jargon to describe the concept. If this did occur, the attendees could “buzz” the speaker by pressing the red button. At the end of the day, the speaker who had the most buzzes against him was given a penance. The penance? They were made to work in the marketing department for a day!
   This process tackled an age-old issue of inter-department communication, but did so in a way that was engaging. In fact, the whole exercise was straightforward, refreshing, dynamic, honest and friendly—reinforcing the five espoused Orange values.¹² Most importantly, the concept was created out of an employee’s personal understanding of how the brand values could be applied to solve an internal issue. It is just one of the many ways that an internal brand management focus helped to significantly influence the workings of the organization and ultimately, the services that were developed for customers.

7.2 Customers missing in the boardroom
A second example focuses on just one visible senior management deed that carried particular resonance throughout the organization. It involved two members of the Corporate Strategy team, who were tasked with presenting a concept to the Executive Board. While presenting the early portion of a PowerPoint presentation, the CEO, Hans Snook, thanked the two strategy representatives for their effort and asked them to leave. The presenters quickly pointed out that they were not finished and that they still had more pages to discuss. Mr Snook replied that given that they had already presented a number of pages and that they had not yet mentioned the customer, they were indeed, finished. The embarrassed presenters duly left the now silent boardroom.
   The impact of this brief episode was immediate and far-reaching. First, it concentrated the minds of the strategy team for that particular presentation and for every subsequent piece of work undertaken. Second, the board members too took away additional insight that day into how the CEO was absolutely determined to represent the customer at all costs.¹³ Finally, stories about that day meandered throughout the organization, establishing a firm body of lore about the importance of remembering the customer and it served as a constant reminder to the whole of the company.

7.3 Talent-spotting
Readers might see these two examples and look for the role of the brand manager in both, for neither example is a result of a brand-led, marketing initiative. One example cited the insight of a single employee and the other referenced the strong personality of the CEO. Nevertheless, the role of brand managers is still key in both. The stories show the underlying need for brand managers to recognize when brand values are being enacted and to support and endorse these activities. Eventually, support from brand managers with regard to Doohickey Day, helped it to grow from a small gathering of people to a highly engaging exchange for hundreds of attendees. Separately, brand managers religiously built the CEO’s insistence of putting the customer first in every communication exercise.
   Brand management in these instances did not translate into the clever invention and leadership of a specific project. Actually, it required the wisdom to locate good values-based examples when they occurred and the dedication to support them thereafter.

7.4 Benefit for the customer
The Orange example is also beneficial for seeing how the brand values were reiterated externally, in customer exchanges.
   From the outset, Orange presented an interesting proposition that people wanted to be a part of. At launch, in 1994 for instance, no product-specific materials were used. Instead a broad brand-awareness campaign was built, in an industry that was woefully lacking in powerful consumer brands. It hinged on the phrase the future’s bright, the future’s Orange, a phrase that is still immensely popular today and which is politely modified with wordplay in media coverage. Below are some examples of how Orange reinforced the five brand values, particularly in circumstances of customer experience.

7.4.1 Friendly and straightforward
   The values of friendly and straightforward were in widespread use at all Orange touchpoints. Innovative solutions at that time are now readily recognized as industry standards. These included uncluttered shop environments, a reduced number of simplified talk plans and the absence of technology in all advertising. Customers readily bought into a lifestyle concept instead of making independent, product-based, purchasing decisions. Presentation material relied on brief, but clear phraseology and powerful, supportive images. This approach was in complete contrast to an industry that was technologically oriented and rife with complex explanations. Philosophically, the friendly perspective was internally viewed as a child leading an adult into a safe and rewarding future. Thus, advertising often used children’s concepts such as bicycles and kites, or simple line drawings to explain services.
   But even the name Orange, while highly respected today, was seen as innovative and unusual. Practically every operator name at that time featured some aspect of mobile telephony—words like phone, net or cell—and thus, emphasized technology. A few company names existed outside the technology sphere, but the companies failed to market themselves in a non-technological way. Today this use of a company name to distance the organization from mobile technology is in widespread use—Wind, Blue, O², 3 are some specific examples—but the process began with Orange.

7.4.2 Honest and dynamic
   These values were reiterated in several specific and unique offerings for the industry. Per-second billing and caller identification represented the initial manifestations of honesty and dynamism. Until the arrival of Orange, mobile users paid for minutes or portions of minutes even when using the mobile to make a call of only seconds. The concept of caller identification was unthinkable. Now, per-second billing and caller identification are world-wide industry standards.
   Other industry-leading examples included the Orange Value Promise, which gave customers the chance to use other operator tariffs on the Orange network if desired and the Orange Network Promise, where credit was given to users who experienced network connectivity issues.
   Orange also influenced the analyst community. Prior to the arrival of Orange, operators were fixated with average revenue per user (ARPU). While ARPU was, and still is, a critical measure, Orange was nevertheless able to introduce the concept of Customer Lifetime Subscriber Value (CLSV). This was a measure of APRU and customer churn, which expressed value over the lifetime of a customer relationship. The analysts of the industry lauded it, as it suited the long-term payback nature of mobile network investment.
   Most importantly, honesty was evident in customer relationships. For example, telephone-based customer service staff would willingly indicate to customers when it was felt that they were paying too much by subscribing to the wrong tariff. Customers, pleasantly surprised, would happily migrate to the lower-priced tariff, but thereafter feel inclined to stay with the network longer, underpinning the CLSV perspective above. This is an example of how an extensive internal focus on being the strategy and living the brand ensured that the customer expectations were not just met, but very often exceeded at each exchange.

7.4.3 Refreshing
   Collectively, the Orange position represented a refreshing perspective for the industry. Technology was relegated, customer needs were emphasized and communications were clear, but concise.
   Moreover, the organization expressed an ability to see beyond its services and even developed the ability to laugh at itself. A good example of this phase was in a run of print advertising which listed activities that could be accomplished with the mobile switched on or switched off. Separately, cinema advertisements of the fictional Orange Film Board reinforced a refreshing perspective. Here the ‘board’ cheekily pitched bogus film scripts with the mobile phone as the star, before stating the core message of Don’t let a mobile phone ruin your movie.

8. Final caution—be careful what you wish for
Striving for excellent customer experiences is what Orange sought and is what most organizations seek. It is difficult to achieve and maintain excellence, as this paper has indicated. Worryingly, however, there are some additional, and perhaps unexpected, pitfalls for successful brands.
   Great brands attract talent. People want to be associated with them. They sense the opportunity to display their abilities. Over time, however, great brands attract idlers, too. Idlers are those people who are good at doing very little, surviving instead on the efforts of the people around them. For them, there is less to do in a successful company. They can be more difficult to locate, and they share in a larger reward than if they worked in a lesser organization.
   Great brands can also suffer from too much of a good thing. Messages which are constantly stated, but are poorly reinforced by actions, can lead to traits of arrogance or complacency in the organization. Soon, the once valuable programme of community building is perceived as nothing more than corporate propaganda. Sadly, an unending diet of statements, without positive reinforcement, can bring about a culture that is at odds with the brand position that is being espoused.
   Finally, great brands can be poor at knowing when the period of success is over. No organization is excellent forever. In fact, the life expectancy of organizations is quite low, according to Arie de Geus.¹⁴ While at Shell as Head of Planning, he searched for benchmarks from other organizations that were, like Shell, at least 100 years old. Interestingly, he and his team found only 40 firms of that age. They concluded that organizations could indeed last longer, but that many of today’s company systems do not nurture this kind of tenure. The result of shorter-term systems is that most organizations will eventually face fundamental change. This could be in their market-place, political system or in the loss of a leader. Each of these examples indicate a need to reevaluate the emphasis in strategy and brand management. The issue here is that while poor and average organizations live in a very real world of knowing that the end could occur at any time, successful organizations are often blind to anything other than business-as-usual expectations.

Conclusion
This paper has discussed brand management and the customer experience. This has been done not by dissecting brand management into its specific components, but by illustrating the robustness of brand management when placed appropriately in an organization. The paper has also highlighted the need to supply employees with tools—identity and guiding principles—to interpret and personally apply organizational attributes. Among other benefits, these employee tools help to breed a consistent and high quality customer experience externally. Both customers and organizations can determine the overall worth of individual customer exchanges by the presence of brand values.
   Finally, it is worth reiterating that people are the key ingredient in any branding effort. It is the actions of people inside an organization that feed the experience of those outside the company. The journey of providing quality customer experience is long and can be arduous. It begins at the heart of an organization. It begins with employees who are being the strategy and living the brand.

Notes
   1. O. E. Williamson and S. G. Winter: The Nature of the Firm: Origins, Evolutions and Development. New York: Oxford University Press 1993.
   2. N. Ind: Living the Brand, 2nd ed. London: Kogan Page 2004.
   3. SMART: a popular mnemonic to recall best practice for constructing Objectives. It states that objectives should always be Strategic, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Time-based.
   4. McDonald’s Restaurants v. Morris & Steel (1999), colloquially known as the ‘McLibel Case’, which, despite the label, McDonald’s successfully argued.
   5. Consider the accusations placed on corporations by corporate critics such as Naomi Klein (No Logo) and Michael Moore (Roger and Me, Fahrenheit 9-11, Bowling for Columbine). Consider, too, the resulting difficulties that can occur when trying to defend against same (e.g. establishing the difference between political speech and corporate speech in Kasky v. Nike, Inc. (2002) 02 C.D.O.S. 3790).
   6. See www.masterfoodsconsumercare.co.uk/veg_status.asp: ‘At Mars UK we recently changed the source of some of the whey which is used in some of our chocolate products. We have received lots of feedback that this decision has made it difficult for some of you, especially those of you who are vegetarians, to continue to enjoy our products. We made a mistake. We apologise. The consumer is our boss. Therefore we listen to you and your feedback. As a company we value openness, honesty and diversity and we believe that anybody should be able to choose freely from our range of chocolate brands. But being sorry isn’t enough. Therefore we commit to you today, that we at Mars UK will ensure that a selection of your favourite brands—Mars bars, Snickers bars, Galaxy and Maltesers, will be suitable for vegetarians in the near future. To this effect we are starting to change our manufacturing process today. We will keep you informed of our progress against this commitment through regular updates on this website. Please accept our apology and keep talking to us.’
   7. See the statement of Dr Annette Pinner, Chief Executive, the Vegetarian Society, at www.vegsoc.org/news/2007/mars.html, May 21, 2007: ‘The Vegetarian Society’s door is always open to companies seeking to better serve vegetarians. A Masterfoods representative has made contact with us and we are very pleased that they now recognise the importance of integrity to all their customers, especially vegetarians. We cannot endorse any planned actions by the company until we receive detailed assurances about the ingredients and processes involved in production but we are delighted that Mars UK has been honest enough to mark the beginning of National Vegetarian Week by admitting that it made a mistake. The best thing they could do now is, of course, to take up our accreditation scheme and earn the right to brand their products as Vegetarian Society Approved.’
   8. L. Kahney: ‘Mac Loyalists: Don’t Tread on Us’, Wired, December 2, 2002.
   9. S. Captain: ‘Fans Storm Apple’s 5th Avenue Store’, Wired, May 19, 2006.
   10. The successful and award winning Green My Apple web-based campaign organized by Greenpeace is now archived. This weblink tells the story of how Greenpeace enticed the Apple customer base to influence the organization’s green policy: www.greenpeace.org/international/news/greening-of-apple-310507.
   11. Orange gained the top ranking for customer satisfaction among mobile phone contract customers in the annual J. D. Power and Associates 2005 UK Mobile Telephone Customers’ Satisfaction Study, seven times in the period 1998–2005. In October 2005, Orange won the Mobile Choice Consumer Awards—voted for by readers of Mobile Choice magazine—for Best Network Operator for the fifth consecutive year. In the same month, Orange also won Best International Mobile Operator at the World Communications Awards.
   12. Today the Orange.com website cites these five behavioural values alongside three additional values that describe the reputation it seeks: trusted, innovative and responsible.
   13. A brief synopsis on Hans Snook, his business philosophy and his time at Orange is in C. Langdon and D. Manners: Digerati Glitterati: High-tech Heroes. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley 2001.
   14. Arie de Geus worked for Royal Dutch–Shell for nearly 40 years. His book introduces the concept of treating companies like living work communities. It is regularly short-listed as one of the best management books of all time. A. de Geus: The Living Company. London: Nicholas Brealey Publishing 1996.

Note: This is a post-peer-review, pre-copy-edit version of an article published in Journal of Brand Management, vol. 15, 2007, pp. 102–14; published online October 9, 2007. The definitive publisher-authenticated version, ‘We the People: the Importance of Employees in the Process of Building Customer Experience’, is available online at: www.palgrave-journals.com/bm/journal/v15/n2/abs/2550123a.html.

Ian Ryder
CEO, UffindellWest
ian@uffindellwest.com

I. Ryder: ‘Linking Vision and Values with Brand (Specifically Reputation) Management’, The Journal of the Medinge Group, vol. 1, no. 1, August 2007.
Accepted June 2007
Microsoft Word version

If you were offered an almost cast-iron guarantee of the route to sustained competitive advantage and a wonderful reputation would you want to know about it? Well let me try to show you what I truly believe is a very simple and easy mantra that makes it possible—but only if your organization truly embraces it as an operating (brand management) practice. Let me begin by explaining something that is really important to understand first, and the reason why the title looks the way it does.
   I am very lucky to be able to see quite a lot of academic work and current “think” pieces and for some reason the marketing world, or at least that part of it which purports to write and comment on “branding”, too often makes a misleading distinction between “brand” and “reputation”. The distinction most often indicating that they are independent or can be managed independently—I must address this first so that this article makes sense!
   Reputation management is brand management. The only difference is that brand management covers a broader spectrum. I have searched for some ti