How Advertising can Kill your Brand

Gregg Lederman, founder and managing partner of Brand Integrity and award-winning author of Achieve Brand Integrity asks: Does your company keep the promises that it makes, or are you killing your brand? Lederman says too often, companies put together taglines, clever messaging, and brand promises to attract customers without preparing employees to deliver on these promises. If you want to get the highest return on your advertising investments, take your promises off your walls, website and ads and put them into employee performance. Start this process by taking the following steps: Conduct research to truly understand your target customers and their desired outcomes. This will help you identify how your product or service can solve their problems. Use this insight to uncover what actions or experiences your employees can do to deliver meaningful points of difference to your customers. Translate these actions and experiences by documenting the behaviors employees must do to bring your brand to life for customers every day on the job. Integrate these behaviors into employee systems so that you can attract and hire people who are capable of doing them, effectively onboard and train employees how to deliver them, and assess their performance regularly to hold them accountable for actually doing your brand. Wegman’s Food Markets is just one company that has successfully aligned its brand with employee performance to realize significant results. Instead of helping customers simply shop for groceries, employees help customers decide “What’s for dinner,” locate the best ingredients, and provide instruction on how to cook them. In satisfying the desired outcomes of their customers, the company has been able to significantly reduce its advertising budget, while increasing store visits from their best customers to 94 per year when the industry average is only 36 trips. So, stop killing your brand, one ad at a time.