Brand: behaviour that drives business results.

The thing with brand is this; at the end of the day most business people overlook this, but its the brand behaviour that really drives your business results. How you transform those intangible values or attributes into real world, tangible, physical ‘moments’ or ‘experiences’ is what delivers those business returns. A focus on the $ won’t deliver long-term results, a focus on delivering service to your customers will. The $ will come only as an indirect result of delivering on your brand values and ‘brand promise’ to your ideal customers.

This is the real ‘acid brand test’ for owners of businesses looking to step up or maximise their marketing dollars. It demands three core and synchronised skill sets: the emotional intelligence, empathy and understanding to help reveal powerful human insights, the strategic foresight to create engaging positive customer experiences that are tied in to the core need or insight, and a desire to ‘serve’ customers through a product or service with a true purpose at the centre of the brand’s intended behaviour.

The ‘best’ brand strategists out there can craft the smartest, most inspired and most insightful brand strategy there is, but cut through the ‘gloss’ – its still really all just strategy. There’s nothing concrete: just pieces of paper with ideas that are filed and stored away just like your business plan. And the best strategists out there also know that the best-laid ‘brand blueprints’ are doomed to fail if they’re not backed up with the power of intention and deliberate action i.e. driven by a defined behaviour that’s true to the brand beliefs.

Many brand strategies fail to resonate or see success because they don’t move beyond identity and communications. That’s not enough. There’s far more to brand than just visuals and comms. Failing to provide the guidelines, tools, and processes required to manifest a brand’s core values through meaningful behaviour and action is a common oversight. Problem of course is it always seems to gets ‘messy’ when people and ‘behaviour’ get involved. Control is often perceived to be ‘lost’. But it doesn’t have to BE that way. If you can add meaning to workplace behaviour, then you add meaning to the brand.

But what is brand behaviour anyway? Yet another fancy marketing term? In its truest sense its all about how your brand engages and resonates with other people and crucially how they respond back to you. It’s a dynamic two-way street often complicated with a community growing around the brand. Its worth noting that customers never truly experience brand strategies – they only experience what we could call ‘brand moments’ at brand touch-points. These brand moments are in essence what really bring the brand strategy alive.

If you want to to drive business results and experience the direct benefits of transforming your business through brand, its important to get focused on these brand moments. The way to do that is through management, review and constant improvement of your ‘brand behaviour‘ at these points.

Analysing and improving how your brand behaves at every touch-point is time well spent. Do this simple exercise and your brand behaviour is what will ultimately take your brand strategy and business to the next level. The goal of brand behaviour is two-fold and often hidden from more results-focused specialists: create more satisfied and loyal customers (lifetime value of your customer), while creating an aligned, enthusiastic, purposeful and meaningful workplace that behaves in line with your brand (the value add being that it also keeps employees engaged and motivated as well as attracting customers who share similarly aligned values).

How does this behaviour help businesses?
Perception is everything! Meaningful workplace behaviour has immense benefits on the way your brand (and business) is perceived both from an internal and external perspective. When ordinary people see those behind the brand behaving in a way that truly reflects your identity; why you matter, what you do and who you are, they FEEL far more connected and ‘in sync’ with what the brand actually stands for. Because (unfortunately in this case) seeing is believing.

Workplace behaviour can help your brand BE the difference your customers are looking for.

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I hope you learned something new, insightful or useful from this blog.

As The Brand Entrepreneur, I believe in helping businesses build a ‘brand blueprint’ for business growth.
I do this through a series of workshops designed to help businesses realise and communicate their ‘Why?’. This helps you to resonate with ideal customers and make a small but significant impact in the world. Successful brands in the future care about customers, not branding. I believe that future is now. I’m passionate about creating brand stories & design assets that help brands get ‘in sync’ and connected to customers they care about.

Tags: behaviour, brand, business