Branding – Tobias Lassen Falkencrone

Brand Guide To Mergers And Acquisitions

CPHT77 — Mon, 07 Sep 2015 14:10:37 +0000

From a brand perspective this guide is intended to help you think through the key decisions that will drive the outcomes of your merger or acquisition. Branding issues are myriad for mergers & acquisitions. First there is the question of why the merger or acquisition is even being considered. What is the purpose of the merger or acquisition? Is it to extend the company’s geographic range? Is it to extend the company’s appeal across new market segments? Is it to move the company’s offering upscale or downscale? Is it to fill in a product or service gap? Is it to fill in a technology gap? Is it to acquire a proprietary product feature or technology? Is it to round out the company’s brand portfolio? Is it to gain greater economies of scale? Is it to leverage potential synergies? Are you trying to pick up a distressed brand in a “fire sale”? If so, are you hoping to turn that brand around with smart management? Do you have a deep understanding of what that brand’s problems are? Or is the acquisition a non-strategic investment to make use of excess cash flow?

Deal Terms
Once the reason for the merger or acquisition is clear, then it is time to think about what the terms of the deal will be. There are at least a few brand-related questions at this stage. What is each brand’s value? How much should you pay for the acquired brand? What intangible benefits does the acquired brand bring to you? What is the brand’s awareness level among key customer segments? What are the brand’s associations? Are the associations mostly positive, mostly negative or something in between? Does this brand complement your existing brand in some way or is it redundant? Or, worse yet, is it associated with things that you do not want your brand associated with?

Brand Culture
There are also the questions regarding merged cultures and how that is likely to play out. Which elements of each culture should remain and which ones should be changed? These decisions will affect how the remaining brands will be perceived in the marketplace.

Brand Portfolio & Architecture
The next thing to decide is which brands stay and which brands go. Was the original intention to move to one brand or to build a brand portfolio? Combining brands may or may not make sense given the relative awareness and associations of each brand. You must also consider how these play out with different target customers and audiences. Combining brands is likely to save money in the long run but is also likely to cost money in the nearer term because the brand’s identity on signage, business cards, vehicles, employee uniforms and other media must change along with any brand change.

Keeping one, the other or both brands are not the only three options. You might decide it is best to create an entirely new brand for the newly combined organization. Or you might decide on a sub-brand or endorsed brand structure, in which you use two or (hopefully not) more brands together.

Transition Planning
Once you have decided on the brand portfolio and architecture, then you must decide how you will transition from your current brand structure to the post merger or acquisition structure. It can be a one- or two-step process and the steps might be triggered by external benchmarks such as degree of brand equity transfer. Finally, you must decide if everything will change at once for each transition step or if it will happen gradually based on budget constraints, depletion of inventories and natural obsolescence.

Corporate Strategy
Ideally, the publicity generated by the merger or acquisition and any brand change creates the perfect opportunity to announce any new mission, vision or strategies to the world (or at least your target audiences). You should have carefully thought this through and scripted the messaging in time for the marketplace announcement.

M&A Strategy
Another thing we have noticed is that companies that participate in mergers & acquisitions usually don’t stop at one. More M&A activity is typically in process or on the way. This must be taken into consideration too. The approach one takes to address today’s merger or acquisition must be flexible enough to accommodate future mergers & acquisitions. Sometimes you need to slow the process down or speed it up to address a string of mergers or acquisitions.

Brand Identity
And I haven’t even touched on the brand identity considerations themselves, including naming, icons, color palettes, typography and visual styles. These are all tactics after the strategies have been determined.

The entire process should be based on the organization’s strategic intent informed by market research.

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Why a digital strategy is a customer strategy

CPHT77 — Sat, 29 Aug 2015 12:12:14 +0000

It is critical that you design your digital strategy around your customer

While customer experience is a key business driver for any company, few have yet to understand that, in the digital age, when customers can instantly access swathes of information about a company and its competitors, it has become fundamental to obtaining a real, sustainable, competitive advantage in a rapidly changing marketplace. With clients’ expectations becoming much more demanding, it is essential for any business to think with the customer at the centre when making any business decision.

Plenty of corporate strategies talk about the benefits of being customer-centric, but so far, few are realising its potential. This can only be reached by placing the customer at the heart of every stage of your digital strategy, and that ultimately means changing how you do business through the following six steps:

Define the target audience

A digital strategy should start off with a clear understanding of who the audience is. Building personas and segments into the programme ensures your content will be relevant to the customer. Your digital strategy needs to be informed by a shared understanding of who your customers are, how they perceive the interactions they’re having with your company today, and what they want and need from your company in the future.

Learn

This is all about getting customer feedback on your company as they experience it now, and what they want and need in the future. Listening to the customer allows you to develop the content and process accordingly.

Align

Teams must be aligned to give the customer a consistently high standard across all departments, from marketing to sales and customer management. This is known as a “single customer view” and is especially important in the digital age with numerous channels of communication available.

Map

To achieve a single customer view, it is vital to use the tools now available to map each customer journey throughout the customer lifecycle. This will allow you to understand how to best guide each customer through the process of interacting with your brand online.

Transform

It is essential that your strategy is actually a company-wide strategy, and not simply a silo in marketing. A conscious culture shift needs to take place at every level, to reach a point where the customer is central to all aspects of the business.

Measure

Data can be used to ensure that everything from the customer’s first click, through to becoming a loyal customer, is carefully and usefully analysed, with all the necessary tools, measures and people in place to monitor and ultimately improve performance.

Changing the way you do business to make your digital strategy truly customer-centric is no simple task, requiring a shift in priorities and careful planning. But it will undoubtedly pay off, giving you that competitive edge to reap dividends many times over for the foreseeable future.

Thanks to Mark Donkin for sharing his advice and opinions in this post. Mark is Managing Director at of SuccessFlow. Y

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The critical importance of an emotional dimension for B2B brands.

CPHT77 — Wed, 26 Nov 2014 17:18:32 +0000

When B2B brand messages miss their target

Nils Hoffman (partner) and Agnes Claye (senior expert) from McKinsey spoke at the recent Corporate Financial Group roundtable event about the power of brands.

What did you speak about?

“Different touchpoints have different amounts of influence depending on where the customer is in the decision journey.”

We talked about the importance of brands in B2B industries and in financial services. From our research, we know that brands matter, and they create bottom line impact—brands influence about 20 percent of a purchaser’s buying decision. One important revelation for B2B companies is how important the emotional dimension of the brand is. “Hard” facts matter, such as expertise, but the emotional components, such as “fits in well with my values and beliefs,” is an important element when B2B customers consider a brand. That reflects an important aspect of our research, which is that the core messages that companies communicate about their brands are often quite different from the characteristics their customers value most. Topics such as social responsibility and global reach, which many B2B companies emphasize, appeared to have a minimal influence on buyers’ perceptions of brand strength. On the other hand, two of the most important themes for customer perceptions of brand strength—effective supply-chain management and specialist market knowledge—were among those least mentioned by B2B suppliers.

We also discussed the need to think more carefully through all the touchpoints a customer has with a brand. The sales force isn’t the only place where customers experience the brand, which is traditionally where companies think about it. Today it’s also about the customer experience with the website, word of mouth, industry events , PR, etc. What’s really interesting, however, is that different touchpoints have different amounts of influence depending on where in the decision journey the customer is. That has big implications for how, when, and where companies communicate their brands.

What part of your presentation had the most impact?

“The emotional dimensions of the brand really matter for B2B companies.”

What really resonated was seeing the data that demonstrated the impact of the brand. Senior marketers strongly believe in the power of the brand, but in practice they often find it very difficult to make the rest of the organization see and understand that. Another “aha moment” was seeing that the emotional dimensions of the brand really matter for B2B companies. In many ways, they have not been able to communicate their capability in the marketplace. For all the difficulties the banking industry has faced, for example, banks have also been enabling businesses to survive, invest, merge together and create funds for shareholders. But they don’t tell that story.

There was also some very interesting discussion about the leadership and innovation in the industry. This is an area where many financial companies have struggled. They realize that they need to develop thought leadership, which requires sophisticated publishing capabilities.

What was the most interesting thing you learned?

“B2B financial services companies have a unique challenge when it comes to communicating their brand.”

B2B financial services companies have a unique challenge when it comes to communicating their brand, because so many of them have a B2C arm of the business. And those commercial banks have large advertising and marketing programs already in place, which shapes the image of the entire bank. Many of these companies have a history of success, a strong heritage, and have provided lots of positive impact, but when it comes to thought leadership and innovation, their brand scores are low.

How b2b brands talk past their customers from McKinsey on Marketing & Sales

Source: http://mckinseyonmarketingandsales.com

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Brand in action

CPHT77 — Wed, 26 Nov 2014 13:24:02 +0000

From Transform Magazine’s Brand in Action series:

On the seven seas

Who: Maersk Group

What: Maersk Group is one of the world’s largest logistics providers and is comprised of a number of business arms with a shipping fleet that includes 192 container shipping vessels, 172 oil tankers, 184 safety and support ships, 18 offshore drilling platforms and 67 extractive sector support ships; not to mention the innumerable containers, aircraft, port machinery and equipment, employee uniforms and the like. Because of this wealth of brand assets, all of which form an integral part in the world’s logistics operations, Maersk Group uses its physical resources as brand advocates.

How: Maintaining brand consistency at this scale is no easy task, but the strength of Maersk’s seven-pointed star logo and bright blue colour – both in existence since 1904 – act as simple, yet powerful brand icons. The year-old Triple-E, the world’s largest ship, requires 955,250 litres of paint. There will be 20 in the fleet. Beyond that, however, Maersk Group values brand awareness across all its stakeholder groups. Social media, then, has become an important part of the company’s communications. Maersk Line’s Twitter feed is rife with images of container ships – a means of communicating the locations company serves, the massive volume of stuff it transports and the role it plays in global shipping. But, it acts as an important tool for brand awareness and engagement with stakeholders

Why: Tobias Lassen Falkencrone, Head of marketing & branding at Maersk Group, says, “In reality, these are our global outdoor campaign and our containers are our billboards. And in addition if you live near a port or terminal, it’s probable that you, at some point, have seen the blue vessels of the Maersk fleet come in. Combined, they provide us with a strong starting position when building brand awareness.

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Revolving door opens the information highway

CPHT77 — Wed, 26 Nov 2014 13:11:26 +0000

The front doors at Esplanaden, the Maersk Group headquarters in Copenhagen, have been revolving for 35 years, keeping out drafts, noise and strays, keeping in heat and protecting the precious aura of a particular shade of blue. Or so it used to be.

One person passing through them recently was a freelance television director, perhaps a little bewildered and shocked about the meeting he’d just had. He’d come in to pitch an idea and left, his mind abuzz with ideas and opportunities. These had replaced the anxiety on arrival of making a novel proposal in what might have seemed like the ultimate crucible of conservative thought.

Over the past decade there’s been a significant revolution within Esplanaden and the revolving door might well be its symbol. It is a constant which maintains a controlled atmosphere inside, countering conditions outside whilst allowing a free-flow of ideas and information, in and out.

Esplanaden, once a journalistic cul-de-sac, is now an information highway. It has been recognised as an innovative leader in communicating, particularly in relation to social media.

The television director had just spent over an hour with Tobias Lassen Falkencrone, Head of Marketing and Branding, and was leaving inspired and full of positive hope that the series proposal he’d tentatively made, would itself be made. The major difference in this new world is that the director would be granted access that promised to be free from corporate colouring.

Now it was my turn. Meeting Tobias is like an encounter with a passionate evangelist, but with one enormous difference – he doesn’t try to force feed you his own particular brand of religion. Certainly he oozes a certain shade of blue* with every word, but there is no preaching about the sacredness of the star, the preciousness of the font. I’d expected a pantone tone referenced conversation with the Ten Commandments on where, when, why and how to place the logo on everything from an envelope to an antelope.

But no. The head of branding for one of the three most identifiable of Scandinavian commercial names, sees the gold at the end of the rainbow, not by following colours, but by taping in on a spirit. It is a spirit which he sees distilled from the company’s long established core values.

What is a brand?

As Tobias views it, it is the pure simplicity of the values which makes them endure -, it is the manner in which the business card is exchanged, the quotation made and not the exact shade of the white star’s background that makes the difference. Uprightness he says will never go out of fashion.

‘What is a brand?’ he asks. ‘A brand is not just sales or just marketing, it is not the wrapping or lacquer on our cookies, it’s not the logo on the brochures – the brand is the sum of every single contact point we have with every single stakeholder out there.

‘From a look in the eye to the handshake from the salesman who is going out, to the email with quote that gets to the customer fast, to the presentation for the annual general meeting, to recognition of the star on the funnel as the vessel comes in, to the stories you read about us in the newspapers – all of these are part of and contribute to the brand. It is that full perception of everything we do, how we do it and how it is perceived. So it’s not just one thing.’

One thing that Tobias’s department is not, is a branding police department. He points out that it is too time consuming and it serves very little purpose ‘because you are trying to stem a flood. What I’ve wanted is to educate, make people know why it matters.’

Last year his department did a survey in Kenya with students, potential employees and business people. It was focused on trying to gauge Maersk’s footprint in a country in which it has no physical presence. Despite the low local profile, around 50% instantly recognized the logo, and 25% put it in the right category.

Whilst marketing takes your resources and message outside, Tobias spends much of his time keeping the branding message inside, getting it into the culture so that when everyone of the Maersk employees go through the revolving door, those on the outside see ‘a certain kind of person.’ The words are treasured ones for Tobias. It is not about being the best, it is about being distinctive in manner, approach and how situations are tackled. Quoting the late Mærsk Mc-Kinney Møller ‘we are a “certain type” of people,’ he says.

Who we are

‘I’d like to think there is something special about the way we do things here,’ he says. He turns again to the values which define the company and plays one off against the other. How difficult is it to have pride, which is a natural emotion, but within the confines of remaining humble, which is a value?

‘We are not satisfied with having the most efficient ships in the world, we want to go that one mile further striving for better performance with less effect on the environment, as with the Triple-E’s.’

Returning to the TV director Tobias explains how he would like to feel about how he reflected on their meeting. ‘I hope he goes away thinking, these are people I want to work with, these are stories I want to tell.’

‘We used to issue news releases about annual reports, now we have dialogues with journalists and programme makers. Everything we do on social media is also acceptance of the fact that the name of the game is dialogue. We have to be where are stakeholders are and allow them to tell our stories as much as we tell them. The real brand is not defined by us, it is the sum of all those touch points.’

The change in perception from those in the world outside of Esplanaden on how they view the world of Maersk is palpable. ‘I think is it because we have become decidedly better at telling our stories. When I started, pride was seen to run in conflict with our value of humbleness. That’s probably no longer so, there is good reason to be satisfied at a job well done.’

* Pantone 631, if you must know.

Source: https://www.maersktraining.com/revolving-door-opens-the-information-highway

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Get Buy-in for Your Global Strategy with Local Partners

CPHT77 — Wed, 19 Nov 2014 14:51:08 +0000

Some great insights from Kip Knight at HBR here..

– // –

I never considered myself an “ugly American,” but my UK colleagues apparently thought otherwise.

Just before I moved to the UK to head up marketing for KFC International in Europe and Africa, Pepsico had bought out our joint venture partner in the UK. I was part of the new management team that was going to try to turn around a 60-year-old business that had been declining for 10 years.

Because most of the UK KFC system was franchised, it was important to win our franchisees over to a new brand strategy we had been planning before the acquisition took place. I put a lot of work into getting ready for my initial pitch to the UK franchisees, some of which had been involved in the business their entire career.

In my presentation, I did a quick review of the financial mess we were in, laid out three big strategic consumer initiatives needed to turn the business around and made a passionate plea for them to work with me to make this happen. They asked for some time to talk among themselves. I left the room. Finally, Keith, the head of the franchise group, came out to deliver their verdict.

He started with the good news. “Kip, we like you, and we like what you are recommending. You’ve got our support.” I breathed a big sign of relief. Then Keith continued, “But I want you to remember the people in that room have spent their life building this business. Even though it’s in trouble, we’re not stupid. And if you ever come here again and treat us like we are stupid, this relationship is officially over.”

That was a valuable lesson.

During my career, I’ve worked on adapting global brand strategies in 65 different countries, and I’ve learned three principles about how to do this well.

Show respect for your global partners in everything you do. You would think this would be stating the obvious, but I’m shocked at the number of ex-pats, unfortunately including way too many Americans, who totally blow their chances of success in the early days of a new international assignment by violating this principle. Stephen Covey’s advice to “seek first to understand, then be understood” absolutely applies to working with teams around the world to expand a brand from one market to another. For example, I created a “Helping Hand” award at KFC-International given each quarter to a country team that went “above and beyond” to help an emerging market team. This simple and free peer recognition was remarkably effective at fostering a spirit of mutual respect in all our markets.

Be clear about “negotiables” and “non-negotiables” for the brand. Some non-negotiables are crystal clear, such as your trademark, logo and core products (for KFC, that would include the Original Recipe). If you allow the local team to have flexibility about as many issues as possible, the more they will feel they own the finished product. For example, eBay allowed local market units to decide on the categories they wanted to focus on initially and how they wanted to promote them with buyers and sellers. With H&R Block India, we focused more on the Internet-based services and only built a nominal number of retail locations, the exact opposite of our U.S. strategy. By being collaborative and flexible in how you enter a new market, your odds of success go up dramatically.

Understanding the “why” is a lot more important than the “what” for a global brand strategy. When I came back to the United States to manage the global KFC brand, my new boss asked me to travel around the world and meet with the various teams to develop a global strategy and initiatives. When I returned after six weeks on the road, I told him we were in big trouble unless we figured out a better way to explain the importance and rationale for such strategies to everyone. That led to the creation of the KFC Global Marketing College, which brought in teams from around the world for exactly that purpose. While it took several years for this to have a significant business impact, once we had a critical mass of teams that believed in our global strategy, there was no stopping them. KFC International has since grown from a $2 billion to a $14 billion business.

The principles I’ve outlined can apply to any business with international expansion aspirations, whether you’re aiming for two countries or two hundred. If you treat your global business partners with the proper respect, give them the insight into your brand strategy they need, and let them implement it as they see fit, odds are that strategy will succeed.

(source: https://hbr.org/2014/10/get-buy-in-for-your-global-strategy-with-local-partners )

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Want to connect with your stakeholders? Start here

CPHT77 — Wed, 19 Nov 2014 14:45:57 +0000

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Employee engagement metrics.. the black box

CPHT77 — Fri, 05 Sep 2014 04:41:07 +0000

Employee engagement can deliver up towards a 20% increase in productivity and profitability. But how do you track and measure it? Get some great insights to get started from HBR here: A Primer on Measuring Employee Engagement – Which metrics to look for, and what they mean?

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