Over the course of my 20+ years in marketing and product management, I’ve been fortunate enough to have worked for companies that have been among the leaders in their designated market category/space. In this post, I take a quick look at corporate branding and product branding via my time as VP of Marketing at MetaTV. I will follow with later posts around how I have approached the concepts and techniques later on throughout my career.
While I learned alot from my experiences at Synon (1991 to 1998) doing product management and product marketing, I never got the opportunity to define a brand or even be involved in the process. However, the LavaLounge and Club Lava concepts I soon learned later on in my career, were instrumental pieces in helping grow the brand through evangelism and widespread participation of the customer base. It wasn’t until Sterling Software acquired Synon in 1998 that I got to participate in a full on relaunch and product re-branding of a product suite, fully integrated and rolled out to a customer base of over 10,000.
My next learning exercise in company branding came when we rebranded Evolve Software (with new logo, messaging, marketing materials) just prior to our IPO back in 2000. I would later apply some of the concepts to my first complete brand ownership from top to bottom at MetaTV. As VP of Marketing at MetaTV I was able to conceive the branding from the ground up and relentlessly drive it throughout the company so that it actually meant more than just a logo, colors and a tag line. I complemented the brand attributes (and tagline) of Innovate. Adapt. Amaze. with company goals and objectives CAS (customer acquisition and Satisfaction), HQP (high quality products) and P2P (the path to profitability). These objectives were aligned throughout the company as attributes of every MBO for all employees. No stone was left unturned with branding, I even ensured that the conference room naming exercise was one which reflected the brand. From an external perspective, every piece of external collateral, website posting, tagline, messaging, product naming, tradeshow booth design, even tradeshow giveaways had to meet the criteria of Innovate. Adapt and Amaze. This was not an easy task, but we had a great design and image expert Lisa Kolb who worked for me, who previously helped Tivo launch their branding and others including Sara, John, Peter, Ruth, Korey, Jim and Jeff Kirsopp (best events manager on the planet) who all believed in and “lived” the brand themselves. Re-enforcing an adage that “You have to believe it yourself to make it believable.”
Overall, the brand and image of the company was fiercely enforced and it is my belief that it significantly helped MetaTV from an external PR and visibility perspective when we had a major company crisis to deal with (more about that in a later post). Of course nothing ever stays the same, another reason being adaptive is always one of my favorite brand personality traits. We eventually evolved the positioning and messaging of MetaTV and realigned our objectives to accommodate the shifting landscape of iTV while keeping the brand consistent and strong. I never got the opportunity to extend and grow the brand at MetaTV (due to impending acquisition by Comcast) via community which I had done via the LavaLounge at Synon however, I am convinced that as a company grows, so does it’s brand and the use of community wide evangelism is key to a typical next phase in a company’s growth.
To close, I would say these are some of my key learning’s about corporate and product branding:
- Create the brand: If you are lucky enough to be starting a new company from scratch (and you are the VP of Marketing), define the personality of the company. Have it mean something to everyone. Set the tone and direction of the brand. If you are coming into an existing company, survey and find out what they believe the objectives are, what they think of the company’s image, who are the leaders in the company, what is the current state of the perception of the company from customers, partners. Use all of these major factors to develop your brand strategy.
- Live the brand: Get your boss (the CEO) and every other member of the executive team to “live the brand”. Executives need to lead by example and too many times, initiatives fail because individual executives don’t “buy in” or they don’t pay any attention to that “marketing stuff”. The brand of your company is critical to not only the external health and visibility, but also to internal moral and productivity. Each of your executives have their groups which look to them for tone and guidance, if they are not invested and do not exhibit not just understanding, but enthusiasm, their group will behave similarly. So it follows that their MBOs should contain references and incentives to support the internal marketing objectives of promoting the brand.
Once leadership is bought in, you should ABB (Always Be Branding). Make everything reflect the brand, from company collateral, messaging, giveaways, incentives. There will be skeptics, don’t let them detract you from the vision and goal. Branding is not just about advertising, spending money, shirts etc (although that does help re-enforce). In my mind, it is a long term consistent set of behaviors exhibited by your employees who should be the company’s biggest supporters and believers. Without their buy in, you are really just pretending to be a brand that you are not, and sooner or later that will come through. - Grow the brand: The hard part is done if you have gotten everyone internally on board, you should now have major assistance convincing external audiences (customers, partners, analysts, PR) that you are who you say you are. Because they will experience it relentlessly, from contact with the receptionist (an example attribute of MetaTV’s AMAZE brand applied to a receptionist would be not to just forward a call but to go out of the way to take responsibility and track down the person who is being called, simply by understanding and recognizing the name of an important customer or partner) all the way to all external PR, events, sales and partnering activities.
If you have a little time and are interested, you can view the videos of my internal company kickoff presentation which explained to MetaTV employees how we were going to achieve our 2002 objectives and how our brand/strategy had evolved and the alignment with marketing spend etc. It sums up many of these concepts.
Of course, you may be reading this and saying this is all great if you are the VP of Marketing and the company is a new startup. Not so, many of the techniques and a few others I haven’t mentioned yet, can and do apply to existing companies. In later posts I’ll discuss how I used other techniques to influence and increase brand awareness at other companies I worked at even though I did not have the full responsibility for overall marketing direction.