Brand Equity Management as a Change Management Strategy

When you consider the essential nature of change on the improved efficiency of your operations and productivity of your people, are the brand equity building and protection aspects of the change process part of your considerations? They should. Failed projects affect companies’ strength and stability which then do not meet strategic business requirements and lose the opportunity to develop capabilities to innovate, collaborate and grow. If a change program which didn’t fully deliver caused your business not to be able to comply with regulatory requirements, not only would you incur regulatory and financial risk, dependent on your business, you would undoubtedly face reputational risks.

Brand Reputation, Employee Experience and Customer Experience

Despite this, many projects focus myopically on the cost, time and quality trifecta on very narrow terms. Research shows that many change programs actually damage business’ operations, employee relations and thereby their brand reputation in the market. The brand equity dimensions rely on the latter factors and should for part of the key performance indicators of the change management strategy. /If the impact of the project is that it limits your ability to keep your brand promise by reducing your interactions, compromising your engagements, disempowering or embittering staff or constraining your ability to deliver your full service to your clients in the promised timeframe through lost time, impact on business continuity, then it leads directly to the loss of confidence in your brand. This confidence translates to lost revenue and reputation, and therefore brand equity, and must be avoided at all costs.

Brand and People Focused Lens

The perception of failure and approach to avoiding or reducing the degree of failure on a project when considered from this perspective motivates and marshalls your forces under a slightly different banner. It can ensure better preparation and governance structure of your change project that entails roles and responsibility for aligning your brand principles to your change actions as mapped to business objectives.

Project Dimensions vs Brand Dimension

The project has met the cost, quality and time objectives of the project. On paper, it’s a success.

But how are the post-closure activities going? How well did your project transition and cutover go? Did you have a project transition team? Have people been weaned off the legacy systems the new IT platforms were supposed to replace? Are they still reliant, emotionally or psychologically on those end-user computing tools that the new system has the capability and integration for them to do that same work on?

Is data still therefore not centralised, knowledge still siloed and largely in people’s brains because it’s not making it into a centralised platform, which was a stated objective of the project? Are people therefore stretched, dissatisfied perhaps with having to duplicate the work, the entries and the data?

What will these misplaced efforts and time mean for the employee satisfaction and is there a knock on effect on the service the customer receives? Negative responses to any of these question represents a risk to your brand equity dimenensions and probably indicate that the project was not a brand building and protecting initiative.

Change Strategy = Brand Equity Management Strategy

When we consider that your change initiatives and the transformation projects that companies undertake are ultimately a brand equity management strategy in terms of solidifying, reinforcing your business’s position with a view to expanding the business’s footprint through growth and wider reach, it matters that at the end of the process, your brand equity measurement is not in deficit and your key brand equity dimensions, i.e. the elements of your brand that are differentiators and that define your appeal in the market are not affected adversely.

Customer Experience

If people value the ease of reaching your support team and speaking to the right person within just two process steps, the change management initiative should not damage this customer experience marker by increasing the number of steps your customers need to reach a resolution. If they value speaking with an actual human being in certain situations, for example, when they are upset or dissatisfied, and want to express it, that touchpoint should likely not be replaced by a bot because customers might infer that your business does not care.

The rise and opportunities of digital transformation are exciting and necessary but we must never forget about the customer experience perspective of your business by replacing all human interactions with bots where customers really think it matters. All the Big Data capability in the world has failed us if the insight we extract from the data we capture from our customers do not lead directly to serving those clients better, faster and in ways they find more delightful and less dismissive. These factors all matter for both building and protecting your brand equity, and your business’ change management strategy for sustainable change should be cognisant of them,

Employee Experience

Change Management as a discipline, has as a primary part of its construct, a focus on how well people are managed and brought into the process of the change definition, solution, execution and implementation, and it is this that separates it from simple project management. It recognises that people are central to the success of any change initiatives. Smart leaders acknowledge that their people are central to their business success. A people focus supports a brand focus and a brand focus necessitates a people focus in a holistic change solution. Empowering staff through the change process with information and agency and equipping them with all the clear roles and responsibilities, tools and training they will need to thrive in the target state are fundamental for driving success beyond the project dimensions. We must redefine how success is measured and extend project success dimensions beyond budget and time to fully incorporate the people dimension across all workstreams and just by so doing, you will automatically be engaging in better brand equity management.

Integrate a brand equity management system in your change management strategies and both brand and people will be protected. Brand and people focused strategies for change management are critical drivers of successful and sustainable change management protecting the brand dimension.

Your change management system, therefore, must incorporate implicitly or explicitly ideally, a brand equity management system.

Project leaders who embrace a brand mindset will be in a stronger position to achieve their goals and deliver on the organization’s business strategy.

Karen A. Brown, Richard Ettenson, Nancy Lea Hyer MIT Sloan Review June 2011

Embracing a brand mindset can transform change management project outcomes from the outset and beyond maintenance and the factors that create a project brand in the mindset of the change team and the change, organisation are directly correlated to brand equity dimensions and business strategy objectives.

Projects positioned for success ‘offer(s) many of the same advantages as, a well-organized, external-customer-focused brand campaign’. The themes of customer focus, internally and strategically aligned with employees and basic drivers of a brand campaign are inescapable.

The Cherry on Top is The Brand Dimension

The cherry on top of the beautifully executed change management cake is the brand dimension, and the focus on it makes everything better. All eyes are drawn to it, so everything should be planned around it.

• It’s important to think long term and broadly. The project does not exist in isolation and should take its heart and impetus from the business and its purpose. The process should reinforce the principles and ethics of the business.
• Go beyond good change management and deliver great change management by focusing on people through target operating models that centre people in the protect. Ensure there is a widely collaborated and validated target operating model with great clarity and transparency around the changes, to keep employee engagement, satisfaction and buy in at high levels.
• Have a brand standards protectorate with brand equity dimensions within the project governance and ensure alignment of business strategy to the brand values, principles and promises should be a critical part of the change management and project structure
• Be aware of the customer experience and be alert to changes that will impact this negatively and evolve a plan to avoid or mitigate this.
• Ensure there is a robust business transition and cutover strategy that focuses on sustainable change.
• Leaders should adopt an enterprise-wide view and consider opportunities to improve the customers’ interactions with the business and for empowering staff in the new and transformed state of the business