Although the mood at the 2002 Corporate Image Conference (held this month in New York) was upbeat, there was a tacit sense of concern as sessions invariably included those
dreaded words: "budget cuts."
Subtitled "Building and Sustaining Your Image, Brands, and Reputation," the conference provided some top level strategies for dealing with a lean economic climate, in which
marketing and communications may not look necessary to slash-happy CFOs.
Marketing and communications departments must show the CFO hard numbers, according to David Caplan, director of corporate communications at Corning Inc. Caplan quoted a
statistic from the Corporate Branding Partnership: "Reputation can account for 5 percent of a company's stock price."
Holistic Branding
Strategies that work are those that allow the brand to permeate the company and work at the most efficient level possible. The new approach to branding is a holistic one - the
brand shows up not just in contact with a customer, but in internal communications, employee relations, even in the company's mission statement.
But even as branding extends to all levels of a company, the experts warned, marketing professionals must take a critical look at their own departments, dumping initiatives
that don't contribute directly. But don't ever, as Thomas Buckmaster from Honeywell told everyone, ignore the brand; his company did so during a proposed merger that didn't
happen.
A major merger basically creates an entirely new brand, Buckmaster proposed. In fact, a Lippincott & Margulies study from 2001 found that a merger or acquisition averaged
$12.5 million in free publicity that goes unused. From his experience, he came up with several lessons learned: Don't confuse the announcement with the closing - it might not
happen. Continue to manage your assets throughout the process. Define what isn't going to change - no matter how trite it seems - and keep that in the public eye. Continue to
build your brand even during times of upheaval. Basically, a merging company must stay in control and remain in communication until the last "t" is crossed on the deal.
Enduring Hard Times
Conseco and Corning discussed branding during hard times and made a compelling argument that branding keeps them in the public eye, which will create a quicker return to robust
status when the economy rebounds.
Conseco's strategy centers on customer contact. Since the company offers such a broad range of services - life insurance, mutual funds, loans, credit cards - it also has an
equally broad range of representatives coming face-to-face with the public. So it centered its strategy on gathering information on the consumer and getting that information to
all its distributors. From soup to nuts, the message is consistent. "It's our biggest challenge," says Carol Sewell, Conseco's VP of branding and sports marketing, "but the most
rewarding." Even as it suffered some bad PR recently with top-level shuffling of the sort that might make investors nervous, Sewell reports that her distributors were aware that
Conseco was in the news, but weren't sure why. Their branding seems to act as a sort of Teflon to bad press.
Corning's strategy is totally different. It is the company that used to produce cornflower-decorated stock pots, and it's now in a completely different sector of the
marketplace: high-tech telecommunications widgets that only a bioengineer would understand. Yet it kept the same name, because the associations were so positive; execs decided to
build on the goodwill of their old brand even as they changed direction. Most of their branding has happened within the company, bringing the employees together under the Corning
umbrella. So far, so good: Corning climbed in the Fortune 500 index, ranked number one in its industry group on the Fortune Most Admired List.
The most important branding strategy -- and it may be a pipe dream, given the realities of corporations -- is to somehow get companies to live up to the promises of their
branding. As Pamela Knox, Senior V.P. of Marketing at 1-800-Flowers, put it, "Some brands have good name recognition, but there is no there there." We're sure she meant to thank
Dorothy Parker, and her point was well taken: Branding is a promise, and the best way to convince people to believe in that promise is to truly walk the walk. But it is a lucky
marketer indeed who finds a corporation that really lives up to that promise.
Seen & Heard at the Event
Marc Gobé, author of Emotional Branding: The New Paradigm for Connecting Brands to People, delivered a highly inspirational presentation touting emotion and intuition as the
basic building blocks of brand. He told the story of his daughter's understanding of the American brand: When told to curtail her TV watching, she informed him, "Papa, this is
America, and it is a free country." He advised marketers to use her paradigm: "This is [your company], and it is [insert pithy brand statement here].
In an ironic twist, Jessica Rohm, senior marketing manager at IBM, demonstrated - not ten minutes after Gobé's mandate to brand based on emotion - her company's completely
automated sub-brand naming tool, which seemed to suck every drop of spontaneity out of the process. The tool streamlines the approval process - at a cost. Perhaps the truth is
somewhere in the middle?