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Building Powerful Family Brands 
Your brand is nothing more or less than the identity of your enterprise; how you're known, what you're about. Ideally, your brand defines the value proposition you offer to your customers. When consumers use your product or service, it's your identity that becomes linked with their experience, if only subliminally. At the same time, a poorly tended brand can limit the value of an otherwise effective product or service.
For family businesses, the value proposition is more complicated than usual, for it intimately reflects the essence of how the family is seen by the world. There's an emotionally complex situation that emerges from these factors. For most family businesses, brand issues are intimately tied to the "good name" of the family, not just to that of the company. The egos of the family members in key stakeholder positions are usually intimately intertwined with the enterprise. In addition to all the other dynamics associated with tending the corporate identity, family dynamics can further interfere with the actions necessary for building brand equity in the marketplace. As a result, you have family members, professional managers, the company workforce, strategic allies, and other stakeholders all involved in a complicated exercise of decision-making and prioritizing, each from their own perspectives, within the constant motion of the business environment. The better you are at bringing effective, coordinated performance out of this chaos, the more likely you are to experience the success you're pursuing. By adopting a thoughtful, considered and deliberate approach, you can manage your reputation and increase the worth of your brand. Creating a strong corporate brand identity provides a vehicle for family businesses to craft solutions that address the totality of their business challenges, both day-to-day and strategic. That's easier said than done. Often, when we are confronted by a situation that's quite complex, we err in trying to solve it by addressing the parts of the problem with which we are confident, while ignoring or minimizing the elements that we don't want to face, and then trying to make a partial solution be sufficient. While there are many strategies for the family enterprise to compete in today's business environment, there is only one real posture leading to breakthrough results. Some companies minimize the efforts they challenge competitors on a brand basis because they feel they don't have the resources that "big brands" have. The people in these companies simply go to work everyday and conduct business on a one-by-one transactional basis. Many people in theses companies don't think of themselves as having a brand and they end up competing primarily on cost and living on the edge of ever-shrinking margins. The executive teams in these companies, feeling victimized by market forces, often fall to grousing bitterly about customers and competitors alike. Other companies have their marketing strategy embodied entirely in their advertising budget. These companies focus on the promise. They describe themselves to the marketplace in the best image their ad copy can create and then rely on the hype to attract, and then retain customers. Like hopeful singles at the community dance, they get all dressed up and hope others will find them attractive. Still other family businesses rely on extra-business, personal relationships to keep customers. They count on the loyalty, friendship, and shared experiences of the past to guarantee continuing business in the future. For these companies, regardless of what they may say in public, business is primarily a personal matter. This has always been more prevalent in the small towns and less urban areas where competition is never as sharp as that on the fast track. They seek security in a mutual sense of community. These companies rely on personal bonds to compensate for other competitive deficiencies. (It was against those players that the Walton family and their Wal-Mart organization gained the traction that led their company to the top of the Fortune 500 list in 2002.) All of these alternatives eventually play out in a way that leaves these organizations reacting to the initiative of others, hoping to survive what's happening to them, trying to get by or endure in the face of forces that are beyond them. All of these strategies are passive. They predispose the organization to reacting to external events. With any of these strategies, the weaker businesses will die off first, while stronger ones linger, even thrive at times, but the end game has surely begun even for the fittest. The best choice for any business is to take the offense. You can build a strategy allowing you to redefine the game. You can develop initiatives that allow you play to your advantages on your own turf, within your realistic capabilities. What do you have going for you as a family business leader? Several possible factors are a size that lets you be nimble, market and customer intimacy, speed of decision-making and the ability to think together and then act in a focused way on your strategic intent. You are the guardian of your identity. You do control your strategic intent. You can make the brand promises that are the most meaningful to your customers and build an organization capable of delivering what your customers value most of all. Here are the steps:
Getting Your Bearings Organizations, just like human beings, tend to look for patterns and operate from the perspective of past experiences. This creates a challenge if you believe that what worked in the past is not necessarily what will work best moving forward. For example, Michael Dertouzos, in his 1998 book, What Will Be, discusses pending technological breakthroughs and explores their impact on how we will conduct business in the future. We all know that more change is coming. With evolving and even disruptive technologies looming, you'll have to discover many new ways for enacting your strategic intent. Your company will face discontinuous changes as business evolves. ,p> When we talk about discontinuous changes, we are referring to changes that are not just extrapolations of or improvements on the current process. Rather, we are talking about game-changing innovations or variations. The introduction of the CD to compete against audiotape cassettes is an example of such a discontinuous change. Companies must have the skills to adapt and adjust. Working obsolete processes more effectively (or more cheaply) will not lead to success in such a competitive arena. When considering the workforce, Dana Beth Ardi (2002) has captured today's situation nicely. She believes that during the dot-com era, a change occurred. She wrote, "ƒtalent flexed. Knowledge workers wanted to join communities, not companies. They were members of teams, not organizations. They insisted on managing their own careers, in their best interests. They wanted flexibility in when they worked, how they dressed and what benefits they got. `Brand' and `culture' were the battle cries! Cultural imperatives included flat organizations, open and honest communication, development of individual and team capabilities. Building your brand communicated what your company stood for. Brand also represented the individuals, who were seen as the company's real assets. Personal brand stood for your contributions to the team effort. It was about building an emotional connection between people and the community/company. It was about voices at the table, shared dreams and aspirations. It was the moment when the seeds of the Human Capital Movement were planted and cultivated. This has forever changed the way Americans work." Ms. Ardi may be describing the trend in its most robust manifestation, but the evolution she describes is spreading, like a ripple across a pond, to the broad American work force. Significantly, not only are these people becoming an ever greater percentage of the work force, they are also consumers, your new customers. Who are the people/corporations most predisposed to embrace the new, to eschew the traditional? They are the young, those most predisposed to learning, most comfortable with new technologies and the least bound by a loyalty to the past. Who runs the family business? In most cases it is those who have "worked their way up." It is the council of elders, the silverbacks, or those who "run the family." You can see the clash of paradigms. You can feel the tension. All of the wisdom of the past, that which was earned by hard work over time, certainly isn't irrelevant, but it is often a lot less valuable than many of those who have it think it should be. This is an issue that many family businesses, like families in general, fail to resolve successfully. Contrarian perspectives, often built into the councils of publicly held companies striving to be agile and shrewd, often have a difficult time thriving in family business environments. That being the case, the question arises as to how the business can shake itself out of its habitual patterns of thinking about itself, its markets, and customers. How can you re-orient in a rapidly changing environment? Those who think that they can skip this step are probably those who need it the most. Action Steps: The top executive can begin by assembling a cross-functional, multi-level task force of executives, managers, influential thinkers and the informal opinion leaders in the organization, as well as appropriate outside stakeholders. The goal of this group should be an analysis of your company and your markets as if you were a start-up business looking for a game-changing strategy. One key tactic is to use Red Team/ Blue Team techniques and war-gaming simulations to ensure fresh assessments of familiar perspectives. Furthermore, the work of these teams is best facilitated by an outside agent who has no stake in the status quo, who isn't going to fall in line when the CEO speaks, and who can nurture true challenges to old assumptions. The work of this enterprise strategy group is to listen (an often-difficult task for the members of executive teams). Their work involves inviting conversations with customers, market watchers and those who come to the market with a different (non-traditional) point of view. Sales reps and others who work in the field should be interviewed to gather hints, hunches and intuitions about what's being said out there. Their work includes brainstorming within the organization to clearly articulate the corporate identity, as differentiated from the identity of the family. One's identity is demonstrated by what one stands for over time. It can be seen in the choices one makes and in the purposes one pursues. These elements of a business are clearly observable and can be deliberately considered from an internal perspective, as well as by observations in the external world. Just as with people, there often is a gap between how we are seen as an enterprise versus how we see ourselves. When you add the ego of the family invested in their business as an extension of themselves, you begin to appreciate that fact that these assessments can only be done well through a concentrated effort. Other multilevel, cross-functional work groups should gather information on changing customer tastes and preferences. They should be able to highlight game-changing ideas that are within the realm of the company. They should identify key business drivers in the marketplace and identify evolving, emerging or disruptive developments that are on the horizon. They should also be able to articulate how they would do business differently if they were a start up company with your current resources. Their feedback around these and other relevant issues then set the stage for reaffirming your purpose and clarifying your business idea. These steps lay the foundation for the formation of a network of thought partnerships across the company (see Elash and Long, 2002). This network will strengthen collaborative efforts in each of the other recommended steps. Possible action steps summarized:
Once you get your bearings you can use your business idea (your value proposition) as the context for interpreting and absorbing the results of your different look into the marketplace. Have you ever walked by several brands of potato chips or deodorants to find your preferred brand? Why? Why not grab the first one you came to? The answer lies in the brand promise of the item you sought. You expected something different, more suited to your needs, and at the right cost/benefit ratio, from your chosen brand than you expected to get from the others. That something extra is what separated that brand's product from the other, similar products that you walked past. It is this added value that is the brand's promise. The brand's promise, at its best, is an articulation of the company's business idea. Take what you have learned from your foray into the marketplace and interpret it against your fundamental business purpose. In this step, your organization considers what you (as a company) have to offer that you believe will create a favorable value proposition for both you and your customers. This is your business idea, why people should chose to give you money in return for what your company does. Sounds simple enough. It's not. It is particularly difficult for companies that have been in business for a generation or more. It is also difficult for companies that have historically been successful because success often breeds a reluctance to move away from a once successful formula. The purpose of step one was to set the stage for a successful step two. Understanding what promises hold tangible value for customers and appreciating how to deliver on those expectations can lead to significant competitive advantage. The key point here is that the "you" referred o actually refers to the complex, interdependent, networked system that is your enterprise---not the individual sitting in the captain's chair. Action Steps: If your whole organization is expected to embrace your idea, to be resourceful about enacting it, and to be able to innovate in an effort to ensure it, then there has to be an ongoing conversation about the business idea across the enterprise. The executive teams in many companies are caught flatfooted because they insist in viewing the future from their own, self-referent point of view. They plan for tomorrow based on what was. They expect that their reputation and/or their good intentions will mitigate uneven execution. Because they had it, they think they've got it! Then they blame the customers' judgment or competitors' tactics as they lose ground. A highly productive way to start a broad organizational conversation about the business ideas is to engage people in the process of scenario planning. Companies use scenario planning as an aid in anticipating multiple possible futures (See van der Heijden, 1996). In order to articulate possible future scenarios, one has to have a very clear idea as to the organization's fundamental purpose---its reason for being. Collins and Porras (1996) have elegantly considered this issue. They use examples of firms like 3M and Mary Kay to help illustrate their points. The Mary Kay Company is a marvelous example of a firm, which has shaped itself in such a way as to totally dedicate its resources to supporting its fundamental business idea. Well done, scenario planning does more than imagine future possibilities. It writes stories about possible futures that connect people across the enterprise. It identifies intermediate signs, occurrences or manifestations of one of several possible futures that's beginning to emerge. It allows people familiar with the scenarios to anticipate developing events. The scenarios also give people a shared picture of what the meaningful implications in emerging future trends are, and by doing that they also provide a framework for the company to anticipate changing conditions in ways that can be exploited for competitive advantage. Once you and your key people have referenced your business intelligence against your core purpose, you are in a position to translate that into a brand promise and to communicate that promise in stories that capture the imaginations of diverse audiences. Possible action steps summarized:
In the typical company, the chief executive (or the executive team) get excited about the implications of an idea or they develop a strategy. They then roll it out as an initiative, often with drum rolls and fanfare. The chief executive delivers the new perspective. People listen. They pay lip service. They make good faith efforts to get on board. Soon things peter out. Things revert, fundamentally, to the way it had been done. The lesson drawn from these experiences is often that things can't change, or that organizational development initiatives sound good but not in the real world. Here is an alternative explanation. It's not enough for you, as the leader, to know your company's identity, and grasp the key strategic intentions. It's never sufficient for you to know it and then preach it to others. What is required for organizations to change and flex is a network built on shared thinking. People need to understand the implications of key ideas. Being able to recite the manta is not the same as shared thinking. In order to take charge of your company's identity, you have to get your corporate house in order, so to speak, before you go outside with a message. Too often, great mission statements, clever marketing campaigns, and well considered market initiatives are sabotaged when the organization as a whole does not march in step with those messages. When the people who are interfacing directly with the customers continue operating within their usual patterns, the messages get muddled. When customers come with new expectations aroused by your brand promise, and find the people representing the company don't have a clue as to how they have to perform as a part of a network designed to fulfill those new expectations, things go from bad to worse. This is a gap destined to keep you mired in mediocrity, far from optimized, and safe only if your competition is even more inept or your customers have no viable alternatives (two conditions that are becoming increasingly rare). It generates confusion about your company's promises, and it breeds skepticism about your ability to deliver any additional value that you wish to have associated with your brand. There are three broad areas where stakeholders in the brand have to make sure that the brand promise is articulately, compellingly presented:
How do you put your ideas into a story (or stories) that resonate across your target audiences? A compelling story can stir passions and move people to action. When the story is poorly articulated you run the risk of disappointed customers and a loss of credibility. To capture the power of your message, having the people involved in developing the story and relating it to their situations proves to be more effective than having them parrot your story. Collaboration here naturally builds a shared perspective. People claim a share of ownership in the message. It becomes our story. It is a powerful vehicle connecting to your audiences. Action Steps: What do you do when you want to be sure that you and your audience communicate? You talk with them, usually face-to-face. You don't send out a broadcast message. You don't publish an ad. You dialogue---speak and listen, give and take. It is through straightforward, clear conversation that we can ensure that we have achieved a shared understanding of the sense of the message that we want to send. In short, you strive for an authentic conversation. You must invite these conversations and you must start at home first. Again, it is only through cross-functional, multilevel group conversations that the thinking of the group can become aligned. Telling people what to think just doesn't cut it. Why? Because people first interpret the words they hear through their own experiences, understandings and agendas. Even when we sit in good faith, the opportunities for subtle misunderstandings are substantial, and we know that even a small misalignment played out over time or distance can create huge discrepancies. If your people are going to fulfill your promise accurately, they have to comprehend your intent. If, in turn, your people are expected to work resourcefully to troubleshoot problems and overcome hurdles to satisfy customer expectations, they have to grasp the message deeply and thoroughly. One option is to establish a series of work teams, meeting to clarify how they understand the brand promise and what they will need to do to fulfill its requirements for them on a day-to-day basis. This involves conversations about the necessary relationships across internal boundaries, how people need to collaborate to get the job done and what information is needed to for decision making at the workstations. In my mind the brand story has much in common with Tichy's (1993) "teachable point of view." The reader might also check Shaw et al (1998) or Gabriel (2000) for other ideas. The more a common frame of reference has been achieved, the more a company is in a position to develop a strategy for taking its brand promise into the market. A word of caution here; just as the story developed in the company was made robust through conversations, the same implication holds for the broad marketplace as well. Many companies' strategies stagnate because they preach to rather than converse with their markets. They set out to talk customers into wanting what is easy for the company to make rather than keeping abreast of the changing expectations of empowered customers (customers with options). It is insufficient to simply host focus groups. Have you ever left a conversation and later thought of something you wished you had said? A hit and run conversation isn't the vehicle for intimate collaboration and deep understanding. At least, it is not as effective as the connectedness that comes from an on-going conversation. The Internet offers one option for continuing the dialogue, as does listening in on public conversations on relevant Usenet newsgroups or other forums for communities of passion. Companies can also train those who speak to the customer to converse with, rather than speak at, customers from a scripted set of possible responses. There is room for wide variations in form, but the substance for communicating your promise must be a series of on-going conversations about your enterprise. Possible action steps summarized:
Finally, taking control of your destiny involves creating an organization that is capable of enacting your strategic intent. For one thing, this requires that the members of an organization that is smart about the broad marketplace. This savvy must extend beyond executive row. It has to include an organization whose members are skilled at thinking together. The work force, as a whole, must see that a part of its role is to be thoughtful about their work. It's not enough to show up and "do" your job. The workforce needs to have the information to think intelligently about the business environment, if they are to collaborate with you to fulfill the brand's promise. Second, the workers need to have a clear frame of reference against which to balance conflicting demands or changing priorities. A clear compelling purpose is a fundamental element in any high performance organization. Rather than each worker making decisions from their own desktop driven point of view, the business idea, expressed through the brand promise can serve as their guiding star. It is the company's purpose that provides the template necessary for worker to turn data into information and information into knowledge. A third requirement for an empowered workforce is the expectation of on-going conversations about the work. When processes become sclerotic, innovation dries up. When the way it has been becomes the way it must be, people have no need to talk about the work. In a continuously changing environment, workers must be expected to talk about their perceptions and their observations. Decisions need to be made at every level within the framework of the business idea. Finally, people need to operate within a culture of trust (see Ciancutti and Steding, 2000). It has to be safe to think, to talk, and to act in good faith. It is in these ways that true thought partnerships are sustained throughout the enterprise. In turn, as mentioned above, these thought partnerships are the framework for the collaboration necessary for agile, innovative enterprise. Action Steps: There is not one right way to structure each and every organization to enable people to act in a focused fashion. The answer lies in the joint defining of the day-to-day approach for working to fulfill its promises; people talking across boundaries. This creates collaborative patterns that are unique to your enterprise, and referenced against your company's strategic intent. This level of collaboration, or synchronized performance, cannot occur without people stepping up and acting as leaders at every level in the organization. It involves the line leaders in conversations that maintain a focus upon the way the work is delivered. This is not to say that the workforce is constantly sitting in meetings, wrangling about who does what or who is to blame. That is not part of a formula for high performance. Rather, it is a mindset of collaboration and the option for informal conversations that are recommended. People need to connect across the interfaces of the organization if they are going to be flexible. Everywhere where there are handoffs---of work products or intellectual products---from one person or group to another, there must be an openness to discuss their collaboration. Outside facilitation can be helpful in teaching line leaders how to be socially innovative and to lead others in acting to innovate, when gaps are detected between current practice and the strategic intent. Many organizations are fostering informal communities of practice to encourage people with shared purpose or shared passion to communicate across boundaries and silos. They are using their Intranets to facilitate these conversations. Cohen and Prusak (2001), talk about the importance creating and then using social capital---the relationships and connections that enable people to think together---in an effort to create value. The central idea here is that thought partnerships are multidimensional. They don't just operate downward---with the workforce being expected to "get" the boss's idea. People don't work that way. It must also include opportunities for workers to connect with other workers, for workers to connect with customers and even for worker ideas actually exciting and igniting thinking on executive row. Whatever the form that thought partnerships take or the infrastructure designed to nourish and support them, the fact of a thoughtful, focused and coordinated workforce all concentrating upon delivering your brand's promise is a necessary ingredient for tending the value of your brand. Possible action steps summarized:
In Summary Family businesses can perform with more power and influence in the marketplace than many currently do. Building the family brand can serve as a way to improve corporate thinking, forge stronger connections with the marketplace, and to align your organization to better deliver on your strategic intent. There are four basic steps required to create this competitive advantage. These steps include: a reframing of your markets with an eye toward new possibilities, the use of your business idea as the touchstone for organizing collaboration and enabling clear priorities, presenting your brand promise in a story capable of creating a shared vision among your workforce, customers and the greater market environment, and, finally, leading an organization capable of consistently delivering what's promised. Working the steps in a thoughtful, considered way generates a process that allows people throughout the organization to align their efforts in a powerful way. It doesn't require a huge deployment of resources. What it does require is the leadership vision for new ways to involve everyone in the pursuit of shared goals. Bibliography: Ardi, D. B., "Voices: Collective Wisdom," in Forbes ASAP, (www.forbesasap.com) March 25, 2002. Ciancutti, A. and Steding, T. "Trust Fund," Business 2.0, June 2000, p.105-112. Cohen, D. and Prusak, L., In Good Company, Harvard Business School Press, Boston, 2001. Collins, J. C. and Porras, J. I., "Building Your Company's Vision," in Harvard Business Review, September-October, 1996. Dertouzos, M., What Will Be, Harper Business, New York, 1998. Elash, D. and Long, J., "Thought Partnerships: Creating Value Through Generative Thinking," in CEO Refresher, www.refresher.com, April 2002. Gabriel, Y., Storytelling in Organizations, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2000. Shaw, G. et al, "Strategic Stories: How 3M Is Rewriting Business Planning," in Harvard Business Review, May-June 1998, Tichy, N., The Leadership Engine, Harper Business, New York, 1993.
Van der Heijden, K., Scenarios: The Art of Strategic Conversation, John Wiley & Sons, New York, 1966. Daniel D. Elash, PhD. can be reached via email or at http://www.syntient.biz. Dan's Doctoral Degree is in Psychology from the University of Kansas. Dan's consultative expertise includes, leadership development, stratgy, developing organizational thinking skills, enhancing the company's ability to deftly implement its strategic intent. Dan is a speaker and teacher who places strong emphasis on developing social innovation in client organizations. His consulting client base is diverse, including industrial, retail, financial and service companies. << Back to Homepage |