cio branding
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TRANSCRIPT
Joel A Manfredo Managing Director, CIO Practice
Acies Consulting Corp.
6-Nov-2012
Take control of your brand: If you don’t, others will!
Branding and Marketing IT:
AGENDA
Background and IT’s risk of irrelevance
•What is a brand?
•The world’s most powerful brands
•Brand blunders
•Why branding is important
Brand Background
•Where do you start?
•Generic approach – Sandra Selllani
•IT specific approach – Gartner strategies in different markets
What to do?
•County of Orange
Example
Conclusions and
Questions & Answers
IT
The Story: Overview
Background…
Environment, Goals and Results:
Organization: 1. A culture built on Heroics
2. Bad relationship w/ vendor (expiring K)
3. Siloed organization
3. Assigning blame
4. Resistance to change
5. No priorities
Goals:
1. GET BETTER
2. GET TRANSPARENT
3. GET CUSTOMERS
Results:
1. Moved to top 10% against benchmark
2. Reduced Budget 27%
3. Increased customer satisfaction 16%
4. Reduced SLA exceptions by 77%
5. Reduced incidents by 38%
6. Improved incident resolution from 5 days
to 2 days
How:
Combination: 1. Leadership
2. Soft skills introduction
3. Sustained “drumbeat”
4. The persuader
5. ITSM principles
Method: 1. Plan
2. Implement
3. Absorb
4. Measure
“Be transparent, or be gone”
The Story: Actions
Background…
The Story: Actions
Background…
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
Dec-09 Jul-10 Jul-11
Better
Equal
Orange County Percent of Characteristics "At or Better" July 2011
The Story: Results
Background…
Head
count
- 27%
Top 10%
Gartner
Source: “Building the IT Brand: Impacting the Front Office and Beyond”, Meehan & McMullen, Gartner Executive Programs, October 2011
Risk of Irrelevance
Look at the press…
Risk of Irrelevance
Source: 37 Signals, Feb., 2011
Source: ComputerWeekly.com, August 2012
Risk of Irrelevance – Frightening Dichotomy
Uh oh… Is this where we’re headed?
Necessary evil
Necessary
Unnecessary?
Sources: “The Great IT Freezeout: Is IT Becoming Irrelevant? ”, Unisys Disruptive IT Trends, July, 2011
“Leading Through Connections, Insights from the CEO Study”, IBM Institute for Vusiness Value, May 2012
External forces that can impact organizations
Risk of Irrelevance
Why are we failing?
But, we do good stuff!
Do we run like a business
Is there Marketing? Sales? Finance?
Peter Drucker: “Because its purpose is to create a customer, the business has
two – and only two - functions: marketing and innovation. Marketing and
innovation create value, the rest are all costs.”
What do we communicate to the business?
The network is currently experiencing an outage…
Great brands communicate a
consistent message over and
over and over again
Risk of Irrelevance
Framing the Marketing and Communication Problem
Great brands communicate a
consistent message over and
over and over again
Source: “Marketing IT: Avoiding the Road to Disenfranchisement and Disempowerment ”, Gartner, April 2012
What is a Brand?
A brand is:
“the gut feeling that people have about your product or service”
“the ability to create in the mind of the prospect the perception
that there is no other product quite like yours’
“the internalized sum of all impressions… resulting in a
distinctive position in the customer’s minds eye”
“proprietary visual, emotional, rational and cultural image that
you associate with a product or service”
“a promise comprising both a commitment that sets
expectations… and a definition of the provider’s expected
capabilities”… “in short, it’s what users say about you.”
“Name, term, design, symbol, or any other feature that identifies
one seller's good or service as distinct from those of other
sellers.“
“Brand is strategy conveyed to your target audience”
Marty Neumeier
The Brand Gap
Al and Laura Ries
Duane Knapp
The Brand Mindset
Charles Pettis
Gartner
Wikipedia
Sandra Sellani
The World’s Top Brands of 2012
Source: brandirectory.com Source: Forbes
Brand Blunders: please don’T self - inflict
You’ve got to be kidding Three examples
Legal Practice: Leadership Integrity Excellence
Utilities: Comprehensive Commercial Construction Program
LIE
“From each according to his ability,
to each according to his need”
CCCP - Союз Советских Социалистических Республик,
meaning the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, or USSR in English
Transportation: South Lake Union Trolley
GM: Another death related bad translation took GM to a new low. GM translated their advertising campaign’s
tag line ‘Body by Fisher’ as ‘Corpse by Fisher’ in Belgium.
Schweppes: A translation for Italy leads Schweppes Tonic Water to be translated as ‘Toilet Water’.
Nestle: In central Africa, people are used to labels of packaged foods picturing the inside contents. Nestle
caused an uproar when they released their Nestle baby milk with a smiling caucasan baby on the front.
KFC: KFC’s famous ‘Finger licking good’ slogan translated as ‘eat your fingers off’ in China.
Colgate: Market research disregard: Colgate releases a toothpaste in France called Cue which was similar
to the name of a popular porn magazine.
You’ve got to be kidding Learn from the big boys?
Brand Blunders: please don’T self - inflict
Why is branding important?
Four simple reasons:
1. Branding can deliver the message clearly
2. Branding can create business credibility
3. Branding can create a connection between the product and the clientele
4. Branding helps motivate the buyer
1911 Morton starts adding magnesium carbonate
(an anti-caking agent) to salt, creating a table salt
that flows freely, even in humid weather. This
additive has since been changed to calcium
silicate.
Where do you start?
Three questions:
1. Who are you?
2. Who do you need to be?
3. Who do you want to be?
“Be transparent, or be gone”
Who are you?
1. Who are you? – four questions
2. What are your brand elements?
3. VRIO Analysis
Where do you start?
Survey: Southwest Airlines is USA's 'most desired' brand
Feb. 22, 2012
Who are you? – Brand Archetypes
Where do you start?
ARCHETYPE EXAMPLE
Dove soap, Ben & Jerry’s ice cream
BBC, CNN, Gallup, PBS
Indiana Jones, Jeep, Marlboro
IBM, Microsoft
Lego, Sony, Crayola
Mother Teresa, Johnson’s Baby Shampoo
Disney, Dreamscape Multimedia, Oil of Olay
Nike, Superman
Harley-Davidson, Apple also called “Outlaw”
Victoria’s Secret, Lady Godiva
Motley Fool, Muppets
Home Depot, Wendy’s
Who are you? – Brand Archetypes
Where do you start?
Motto: The truth will set you free.
Driving desire: to find truth
Goal: to use intelligence and analysis to understand the world
Biggest fear: being duped, misled—or ignorance.
Strategy: seeking out information and knowledge; self-reflection and
understanding thought processes
Weakness: can study details forever and never act
Talent: wisdom, intelligence
Also known as: expert, scholar, detective, advisor, thinker, philosopher,
academic, researcher, thinker, planner, professional, mentor, teacher,
contemplative, guru
Sage archetypes in the wild:
•provide expertise or information to customers
•encourage customers to think
•based on new scientific findings or esoteric knowledge
•supported by research-based facts
•differentiate from others whose quality or performance is suspect
Archetype examples: BBC, CNN, Gallup, PBS
Who are you?
1. Who are you? – four questions
Where do you start?
“Southwest is a customer service organization that just
happens to fly airplanes” – Colleen Barrett, President
Who are you?
2. What are your brand elements?
Where do you start?
Who are you?
3. VRIO analysis - it’s about THEM (customers)
Where do you start?
- Valuable
- Rare
- Costly to Imitate
- Organizational Leverage – every part of the organization
communicates the brand
Piano Works example:
Gartner Approach
Building IT Brand Impact Building IT Brand Impact
Source: “Building the IT Brand: Impacting the Front Office and Beyond”, Meehan &
McMullen, Gartner Executive Programs, October 2011
Gartner Approach
Building IT Brand Impact Building IT Brand Impact SEE
Shine in captive IT markets Captive markets comprise the traditional back-office IT services and support: HR, finance and operations (such as
supply chain). Strong IT brands shine in the back office, going beyond merely delivering on expectations.
Expand into adjacent internal IT markets The key to enabling the business to engage adjacent markets is IT’s ability to move its own capabilities
from back-office support to those that will increase front-office digitization. This requires expanding IT’s
brand as a shining back-office innovator such that it also becomes a credible provider of market-facing
business solutions.
Externalize IT’s brand impact IT branding is not solely internal; though IT’s external brand impact is often the sum of its
internal efforts in the front office, leading CIOs have a plan for external brand impact. In other
words, they can answer the question, How does our IT brand help the enterprise keep its
promise?
Source: “Building the IT Brand: Impacting the Front Office and Beyond”, Meehan &
McMullen, Gartner Executive Programs, October 2011
Gartner Approach
Building IT Brand Impact Building IT Brand Impact
Source: “Building the IT Brand: Impacting the Front Office and Beyond”, Meehan &
McMullen, Gartner Executive Programs, October 2011
Gartner Approach
Building IT Brand Impact Building IT Brand Impact – Key Strategy Mechanisms in captive IT Markets
Branding strategy at this stage demands excellence in products, user satisfaction and
efficiency; mechanisms:
• Product-focused branding strategy differentiates IT based on the products it
delivers to internal customers, as when IT acts as a broker for third party providers
• Service-focused branding strategy differentiates IT based on the quality of service
interactions
• Intimacy-focused branding strategy resembles one that is service focused, but it
concentrates on knowing the end user, anticipating user needs and behaving more
like a business consultancy.
CIOs must select one branding strategy to excel at while maintaining a high level of
competency in the other two.
Source: “Building the IT Brand: Impacting the Front Office and Beyond”, Meehan &
McMullen, Gartner Executive Programs, October 2011
Gartner Approach
Source: “Building the IT Brand: Impacting the Front Office and Beyond”, Meehan &
McMullen, Gartner Executive Programs, October 2011
Building IT Brand Impact Building IT Brand Impact – Key Strategy Mechanisms in adjacent internal IT Markets
Three adjacent market strategy mechanisms:
• Examine your stakeholder base to determine where your power base lies, e.g.,
third-person spokesperson
• Look for holes in business strategy where a CIO can make an impact by lowering
business risk and organizational resistance
• Understand new channel opportunities for the business
Gartner Approach
Building IT Brand Impact Building IT Brand Impact – Key Strategy Mechanisms externalizing IT’s brand
Answers the question: How does our IT brand help the enterprise keep its promise?
Map your past impact on the external enterprise brand:
Source: “Building the IT Brand: Impacting the Front Office and Beyond”, Meehan &
McMullen, Gartner Executive Programs, October 2011
Gartner Approach
Building IT Brand Impact Communication: (this is a quiz )
Source: “Redefining “Marketing IT” From Telling to Engagement”, May 2011
Gartner Approach
Building IT Brand Impact Communication: Old school, New school
Source: “Redefining “Marketing IT” From Telling to Engagement”, May 2011
Example
County of Orange – Marketing Brochure
Tag line
Logo
County of Orange - Marketing Brochure
Example
County of Orange – Marketing Brochure
Example
Example
County of Orange – other materials… The Brand is Always There
PowerPoint Presentations Service Catalog
Conclusions
Where do we go from here?
• IT is at risk of irrelevance
• Branding IT can help
• What should I do?
• Start with the generic approach – it doesn’t take long or cost much
• Move to the Gartner framework for captive IT markets
• Leverage strengths and bolster weaknesses
• Become transparent, a necessity
• COMMUNICATE especially to the business folks
• Establish a “drumbeat” – always on message from the whole IT
organization
• Look into other branding resources such as the 12 archetypes
• Have fun!