3 Signs You Need to Reconsider Your Identity


Courtesy Brian Talbot

Courtesy Brian Talbot

We’ve written before about the ways that a strong identity benefits leaders. Identity work can have tremendous positive impact on internal audiences, but it’s more likely that clients will come to us because they’re being misperceived by their external audiences. Here are three of the most common scenarios that signal it’s time to reconsider your identity:

  1. You’re losing business because of how you’re perceived: We’ve seen clients have multimillion dollar deals killed at the last minute because of how the brand was perceived in the marketplace. Other times, misperceptions can slowly erode your relevance with key audiences.
  2. You’re too narrowly defined: We’ve had clients with a great set of services and products, but they’re known for only one thing. If you’ve made your name in one area, great. But it might be time to communicate that you’ve got more to offer.
  3. The market you’re in is changing: Maybe you’re in an industry undergoing significant change. To stay relevant you need to be ahead of that curve when markets shift.

Transforming Into Something New
When you do change your identity, whether the change is evolutionary or revolutionary, it needs to be communicated in a way that is relevant. An identity change signals to both internal and external audiences that something is fundamentally different about your company. You need to make that difference as clear as possible.

One of our clients had acquired several regional cold-chain supply companies to create a cold-chain logistics company with national connectivity. The challenge for this client was that even though they were bringing together multiple smaller companies, they didn’t want to be perceived as a big, impersonal corporate roll-up and lose the family-owned, regional heritage of the acquired companies.

We created the name Lineage Logistics to convey a sense of history and legacy coming together to form a fully connected, forward-looking service business. The new name communicated to employees that the heritage of their companies was important to the new company, and signaled to customers that existing relationships weren’t going to go away. The benefits of the new company–increased efficiency and coast-to-coast continuity–were established without sacrificing regional understanding and local relationships.

Making Change Successful
An effort to change your identity involves more than changing your logo or tagline. To make the shift successful, you must understand how it will affect your people, your culture and your customers. When you communicate a clear a reason for change, you can effectively engage both internal and external audiences. Customers, prospects and clients understand where you’re going, and your internal audience sees that there’s something they can believe in and get behind.


How to Retain the Uniqueness of Acquired Brands

Picture of moving boxes
What happens when a brand that people trust and feel strongly about is acquired? Loyal customers have a strong emotional attachment to it; often they’re watching with trepidation, worried that the small brand is going to get big and “corporate” and lose what made it special. We’ve been thinking about this as we watch what’s happening with Tumblr. Fans are afraid that the Yahoo acquisition is going to ruin what makes Tumblr unique—and after seeing what happened to Flickr, another Yahoo acquisition, they may have good reason. Marissa Mayer, Yahoo’s CEO, went as far as to say, “We’re not going to screw this up.”

Questions for Acquiring Companies
It’s not necessarily a bad thing for smaller companies to be acquired and gain access to the resources of a larger entity. Often the move can provide a jolt of energy for both the acquired and the acquirer. Our enterprise clients face this challenge frequently. How can they retain and foster the spirit of the companies they’ve acquired?

Any acquisition has to be handled carefully from a brand management perspective. As an acquiring company you need to ask yourself:

  1. How does the acquired brand add to, or build upon, our own brand essence?
  2. Which attributes may be at odds with our brand?
  3. How much of that unique character do we want to keep?
  4. How are we going to elevate what we have decided to retain?
  5. How do we ensure that our new people feel valued and part of their new environment?
  6. How do we communicate these decisions in a meaningful way?

When the unique essence of a brand is important to preserve, acquiring companies have some options they ought to consider:

  1. Let the acquired brand stand on its own: In some cases, this makes strategic sense. Zipcar has been acquired by Hertz, but you don’t see any mention of Hertz on the mobile app or the website. Hertz is a largely invisible presence. The Zipcar brand is about independence and sharing: You just need “wheels when you want them.” It is a brand appeal to a very different kind of consumer and circumstance, one that Hertz would have trouble delivering under its existing brand. That independent appeal can be made stronger now that Zipcar enjoys the operational efficiencies and national reach that come with being part of Hertz.
  2. Demonstrate how you are better together: In the technology space, many successful acquisitions have shown how two brands coming together created more value than they could have on their own: Amazon with Zappos, for instance, or Google with YouTube. These companies didn’t try to simply absorb the acquired brand and its customers. Instead the attitude was, “Wow, we bought something incredibly special here, and it makes us all better. Let’s let it develop.” Having this complementary view is important if you want to retain the people, both employees and customers, who love the brand.

When done right, acquisitions of beloved companies appear almost seamless, but it’s  rarely easy. But behind the scenes,  parent companies must make careful, considered decisions about what makes the acquisition unique—and how to retain what it is that made the brand worth acquiring in the first place.


What If Your Brand Isn’t “Cool” Enough?

cool sunglasses
A large enterprise software client of ours recently decided to make a big bet on a new business direction. People internally were concerned that the new direction would never be successful unless it had a different brand as well—because the corporate brand just isn’t “cool enough.” Is it true that it’s uncool to be big and established? Does the small, “cool” newcomer win every time? And what makes a brand “cool” anyway?

Our opinion—your “cool factor” is not the point. Instead of worrying about being cool enough, established brands should focus on establishing clarity about who they are. Nobody is going to be enthusiastic about something they don’t understand. Large companies often become too complex to be easily understood or related to. Brands that have been acquired, or new “skunkworks” projects, want to get out from under this complexity, just to have a little breathing room.

In our experience, enterprise software customers are more concerned with effectiveness and responsiveness than they are with “coolness.” Is the product easy to use? Is service easily accessible? Does it save time and resources, and increase profitability? In other words, what matters is fulfilling a meaningful promise to customers.

3 Cures for the Uncool
A large organization can easily begin to feel slow, bureaucratic and hard to do business with. If that’s the case, how can you shift perception of your brand? Three things you need to demonstrate are:

• Responsiveness
• Relevance
• A sense of inspiration

Sometimes a new brand initiative with some link to the parent may be appropriate. But don’t underestimate the value and credibility a brand with longevity can lend.

Lessons From Established Brands
A few years ago, we worked with Boeing, a globally known brand founded nearly 100 years ago, to refocus its internal positioning. A number of internal groups, essentially acquired companies, were clinging to their old brands to try to carve a special niche for themselves within giant Boeing. We succeeded in convincing these brands that they were much better together than they were apart. As Boeing, they were the undisputed global leader in aerospace. Individually, no single brand could claim anything near that stature.

Other large companies have managed to maintain clarity about who they are, and to deliver what their customers want in highly responsive and relevant ways. As a result, they retain a cool factor, not because they are the shiny new object, but because they are relevant, responsive and inspirational. Think about Disney, Apple, Nike and Coca-Cola. The latter was recently awarded the first ever CLIO brand icon award. Not bad for a 100+ year-old (not to mention huge) brand!

The bottom line—if you make your brand relevant, responsive, and inspirational, your customers make it cool. As long as you are fulfilling a meaningful promise in a unique way, you have a great start. Just be sure you communicate that promise as well as you deliver it.


The ROI of Identity

Can thinking strategically about brand identity translate into bottom line results? Our experience is that it can. The benefits of identity projects—such as greater employee satisfaction, increased clarity of purpose and a stronger culture—have been shown to correlate with improved corporate performance. Some authors have suggested that these cultural aspects can account for a difference of 20% to 30% in corporate performance.

The ROI of Branding and Corporate Identity

Brand Identity and the Bottom Line
Corporations consider identity projects for a number of reasons:
• They want to increase awareness
• They want to enhance perceptions of their company
• They want to eliminate malaise and have higher-performing teams
• They want to position themselves in a way that’s more compelling for the times they’re living in

But what’s the real reason underpinning all these efforts? Simple. Companies want to increase sales. They want to increase profits, shareholder value and market capitalization. Our clients understand that by working on identity they are actually addressing their bottom line.

So how should you look at the potential ROI of identity work?

How Identity Increases Value
The long-term ROI of communications efforts are hard to quantify. But by clarifying what the company is and what people can expect from it, identity strategy has the potential to engage and motivate employees as well as capture the attention of customers, shareholders and funders.

For example, we might have a client with $10 billion in sales who is currently suffering from numerous symptoms of identity problems: The company isn’t well understood, people aren’t attracted to it, employees aren’t happy and leaders are spending so much time putting out fires they’re not able to set a course for the future.

We go in and fix that. Now everything’s firing on all cylinders and there’s a new excitement about the company, its products and services and its people. This new energy and shared purpose takes the management burden from executives, freeing them to lead. Employees require less management, because the company’s purpose is clearer and what’s required of them is better understood. From a change like that you might expect anywhere from a 1% to 10% increase in sales. But even a one-tenth percentage point increase in sales will be a return of $10 million in added revenues every year.

I believe there’s nowhere else that you can get return like that. Legendary investor Warren Buffett buys companies with strong identities for a reason: They represent a future stream of revenue he can count on. Identity is an investment that pays multiple dividends.