Communicating Leadership Through Corporate Branding

Leadership is defined as the ability of an individual to influence, motivate and enable others to contribute toward the effectiveness and success of their organizations. Notwithstanding that leadership skills can be learned, often, great leaders are innately gifted.

Corporate branding is not only the embedded notion that comprises the company’s purpose, mission and values. And perhaps more importantly, it is how leaders use communications to breathe life into every contact with their employees and their consumers.

Branding is the composite result of layers upon layers of experiences that the public has with the brand across all of its touch-points. It is the total experience of the corporate culture, behavior and communications of the company and the impact it has on that public.

Even though the organization executes branding and is ultimately responsible for its success or failure, the initial responsibility for successful corporate branding lies with the CEO alone.

Without the vision and enthusiasm of the CEO, the management team will not really hear, comprehend or care about the corporate message. Corporate branding will be, in their eyes, but a challenge to one’s personal agenda.

The successful CEO understands their company, its markets, competitors, and investors, and is not afraid of the challenge of creative change. The successful CEO must balance the necessity of immediate profits with the need to invest wisely and aggressively for the future. He or she must champion a continuing improvement of existing operations and, at the same time, continuously improve the way in which the company does business. The CEO must inspire the company team, from senior management to line employees, inspire self-confidence, and have the foresight and the courage necessary to make changes in the team when necessary.

Infusing Brand DNA
The main message senior executives seek to convey is that the brand is the responsibility of the entire organization. When the CEO has a clear and consistent commitment to his or her brand, that commitment will flow through the various echelons of the corporation creating a unified entity. Subordinates must be trained to project, reinforce and to support their brand. It is imperative that they have the resources to get the brand message to all employees and to those key audiences that are critical to the success of the corporation.

Optimally, true direction must come from the top, especially direction for change. The lack of change is just as critical today as is the move to corporate branding. The CEO must communicate, discuss with and listen to their employees. It is the employees who define the corporate image so it is crucial that they have a good understanding of what that image means and how it is to be projected.

We envision chief marketing officers moving into the top leadership positions in tomorrow’s corporations. And why not? One of the attributes of a good CMO is the capacity to understand every phase of the operation, and to be able to communicate his or her knowledge effectively.

Quickly evolving strategies are the hallmark of an ever-changing business landscape. Where the medium is the message, companies have to be nimble, fast moving and continuously re-inventing themselves to ensure their corporate health. The word brand/branding has become more than a buzzword for the 21st century as corporations need that intangible asset, branding, which occupies some of the most expensive real-estate in the world – a niche in the consumer’s brain. That being achieved, those companies with strong branding will secure financial success in the near term and going forward.

A powerful brand is its capability to sell the consumer what he wants to buy rather than having to convince him to buy what you are selling. The consumer expects his patronage to add up to something greater than the sum of his spending. Great leaders know to take their employees and their external consumers somewhere they could not go without them. Leadership becomes a kind of art form flowing out of that inspirational experience, making employees soar with imagination, innovation, and ultimately peak productivity.

The Leadership Advantage
Think Churchill, Jack Welch and Michael Dell. Each of them has a brand that is inextricably bound to what they do and what they have achieved/produced — their own individual powerful personas. Their collective messages resonate with a call to action. When great leaders speak, people listen and follow a strategic vision as articulated through their spoken and unspoken messages. Powerful leaders are clearly a repository of ideas, interestingly, not necessarily always original. But those ideas, which they have conceived, transform consumer wants and desires. Starbucks best manifests this by being more about community than coffee.

Reading their environments accurately, great leaders anticipate what the public wants, much like savvy politicians reading the polls. Business leaders know that in order to show people what you can do for them you first must develop a canny sense of what they want.

Corporations are all about business and, obviously, business is all about profit. With the power of branding, CEOs, on a global basis, are recognizing that their profit margins can be enhanced significantly by including corporate branding as a key element of their business strategy.

Starbucks, which catapulted to a globally recognized brand thanks to Howard Schultz, becomes a formidable example. What appears to be a simple business model actually requires continuous reinvention and attention to brand building to maintain its leadership advantage.

Through exhaustive quantitative research conducted over a sixteen-year period, CoreBrand has identified the tremendous advantage of communicating leadership through the corporate brand.

Leaders who leverage their corporate brands see measurable improvements over time in revenue, cash flow, earnings growth and, ultimately, in stock performance. In the end, the corporate brand is everything you say and do – so this year begin to build it into the strategic underpinnings of your corporate goals.

For more information about the study and ranking of the 1200 companies tracked by CoreBrand visit www.corebrand.com/brandpower-database or contact CoreBrand’s CEO, Jim Gregory, at [email protected]