7 Steps to Creating a Powerful Technology Brand - Branding for Technology Branding - by Rakesh Shukla, Chief Executive and Founder, TWB_
30 Dec

7 steps for creating a powerful technology brand: Branding for Technology (Part 3 of 5) by Rakesh Shukla

By TWB_ In Communication, Corporate Training, Leadership, Product Strategy, Strategic Marketing /  5 No Comments

Discussing branding for technology, we’ve seen earlier what makes a brand — the idea of brand promise and lessons from FMCG branding for technology branding. In this article, we elaborate on brand concepts and suggest some specific steps senior managers can take to move their companies from a product-centric to a promise-centric, brand-driven business.

Let’s consider how the buyers and sellers of technology participate in the sales cycle and perceive branding,

From a tech buyers perspective: When B2B consumers of technology especially information technology weigh the merits of a vendor’s bid, they weigh not just how well the vendor’s products and services complement their own business and technological environment but also how the purchase decision looks to others. They are just as concerned with the image of the product as they are with the technical merits. Therefore while it is meant to be a rational decision that maximizes value, it is based on objective or subjective data. That is where a technology brand comes in.

From a tech marketers perspective: Conversely managers in high-tech businesses find brand management concepts interesting but see no merit in moving from a product-centric to a brand-centric model. The common refrain is “it doesn’t apply here”. This argument is based on what they believe to be unique characteristics of high-tech products and markets, mainly fast-changing technology and high levels of uncertainty.

As we’ve seen in the previous 2 chapters it is precisely this expectation gap that a technology brand solves. Indeed when things change quickly, buyers face great uncertainty and they want to deal with a company they perceive has a vision of their needs.

Challenges in high-tech branding are the same as others businesses in formulating distinctive and credible promises of value. However, in high-tech markets, offering a distinctive value proposition is especially difficult since competitors match one another’s clearly defined performance characteristics. There isn’t a great deal of trust between customers and companies in high-tech markets simply because there are many and frequent new entrants, and most have not had the time or the wisdom to build a promise of value that goes beyond price-performance.

For technology branding in the first place it important that before defining a brand for the company to define where it is and where it wants to go. In the first instance: what’s the brand promise? Google stands for discovery. Apple stands for quality and innovation. What’s yours? Aspiration? Trust? What should the customer feel each time they think about the company or use the product. This emotion is what needs to be built into the brand.

In the second place, the process involved in the development of a branding strategy requires us to review the purpose of the company, its reason to be. “Why we do what we do” is much more important than “what we do” and “how we do it”. What do customers, prospects, partners, investors, reporters, analysts, even competitors think? Bridging the gap between the two with messaging, positioning, and a visual language is the branding.

7 steps to creating a powerful technology brand

Price – Performance in branding

“Price” and “performance,” for example, may mean different things to different people. Does price mean initial cost or life cycle cost? Does performance mean microprocessor speed, the speed of delivery of services, the product’s ability to keep pace with the market? Does performance include presale and post-sale service and support? High-tech companies can make it clear exactly which aspects of their offerings’ price and performance benefit their customers through branding.

Developing the brand promise

The promise of value must be relevant to the people or businesses a company wants to have as its customers; no business can promise everything for everyone. But it is possible to tailor a promise to meet the desires of a specific subgroup of customers, as long as that promise can be kept and as long as it doesn’t confuse anyone. That’s why a company must consider its own capabilities and its target customer segments before developing its brand message. 

Branding on Benefits

Many high-tech managers are most comfortable a brand as a set of tangible, verifiable product characteristics. However, high-tech purchases involve not just technologists but also business managers and end users, who are far more interested in what a technology product does for them than in how it works. As high-tech managers come to understand this, many start changing the way they speak of their offerings. Instead of selling “products,” they sell “solutions” or “benefits.” Such a shift in thinking is not enough. A company needs to decide it wants to be in the space of product competition or brand competition. Competitors can continually match and leapfrog over one another by offering better and more features and by identifying the benefits of their products for customers.

Brand promises need to be enduring

While a brand needs to make an enduring promise. Making and keeping a promise, and keeping it consistently, can be a powerful source of competitive advantage. However making too many promises, or changing them frequently, raises uncertainty and erodes brand value. There’s a high probability that truly strong brands will continue to be leaders because they make and keep a promise of value over successive generations of technologies. True, newer technologies can eclipse older ones but an enduring promise of value can buy time for a brand in the face of new technology even the face of serious lapses in product quality.

Market share is not brand promise

Companies sometimes think that a leadership position in a market is a promise. However, market share, even overwhelming market share is not, a promise of value. Brand equity will distort customer perception of size and value very quickly and there is no way that a company can stay immune to if the competition focuses on it.

Brands provide emotional rewards

It is very difficult for many high-tech managers to acknowledge,  the idea that emotions can be so important to a company’s success. But goods and services that reside in that third level are indeed developed and positioned as a way of fulfilling a promise of value to selected customers, not simply as technologies in search of a market. How do customers feel when experiencing the benefits of the brand? Do they feel confident? Productive? Innovative? Caring? Responsible? Successful? 

Brands have personality

Brands have deeper values — such things as conservative values, family values, achievement-oriented values. These are characteristics the brand would have if it had human qualities: friendly, warm, caring, confident, decisive, aggressive, or the like. They attract a customer set they are focused on and are the differentiating characteristics of the brand. 

Brand Performance should be measured

Too often the only yardstick of performance is awards or 3rd party rankings – both of which may not be adequate -markers of brand performance. For high-tech companies, it is important to track how customers perceive the brand relative to its competition over time. It is also important to monitor the health of key dimensions of a brand’s promise of value. Even the most benchmarked aspect of customer satisfaction managers need to determine if satisfaction is leading to loyalty.

A company cannot expect to build broader acceptance simply by making a promise of value in advertising. It must first know what promise to make and to whom. That requires the ability to assess the potential of relevant technologies and to anticipate its customers’ current and future needs—even before customers can articulate those needs. It must also ensure that the promise of value is understood and fulfilled as the company manages complex networks of value-adding partners, ranging from consulting firms to systems integrators, from independent software vendors to resellers.

 

Rakesh Shukla, Chief Executive & Founder, TWB_ I The Agency for Technology Brands I www.twb.in

Rakesh Shukla, TWB_

Entrepreneur, TEDx speaker, Philanthropist, Rakesh Shukla is a 1996 MBA graduate and 1993 BTech. Rakesh Shukla is the Founder & CEO of TWB_ which is the partner for technology & business content for Fortune 500 leaders worldwide. A motivational speaker he speaks on creating success from professional and personal failure. He divides time between his 2 homes in Bangalore and is called the ‘dog-father’ for being papa to the 750 rescued dogs that live with him at the VOSD Dog Sanctuary. Rakesh has featured in 100+ interviews on the BBC, CNN, Al-Jazeera, CNN-IBN, NDTV, India’s national dailies, and at TEDx talks.

 

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Storytelling for Business - by Rakesh Shukla, Chief Executive and Founder, TWB_
30 Dec

Great storytelling for business leadership: What makes listeners connect?

By TWB_ In Communication, Corporate Training, Leadership /  10 2 Comments

How many of your management team are true leaders — those who can inspire the organization, set a vision, teach important lessons, define culture and explain what the organization. Of those who are, how many are great communicators? Turns out some of the leadership and all of the communication are learnt skills. The easiest and the most powerful communication skill is telling great stories or ‘storytelling’.

Storytelling is critical for management and leadership because very often nothing else works. Graphs will leave listeners untouched. Conversation and dialogue can be too didactic. But the same listener can be moved with a great story. Storytelling in the business context translates abstract numbers into compelling statements of a leader’s goals —  by drawing the listener(s) into the story. Though business cases are made of hard numbers, stories make them spring to life because storytelling can show causal relationships. The question, therefore, is not about telling or not but rather to tell them unwittingly and clumsily or intelligently and skillfully. Storytelling can be learned by anyone who wants to be a leader — CXOs, Senior and Middle management.

Why is storytelling important?

In a  meeting or a talk in a short time-span, a leader can communicate maybe only 1 or 2 powerful ideas. Storytelling, however, allows for multi-layered complex ideas to be told since they are not sequential but interwoven. It is this association that and sharing of complex ideas that can allow leaders to – spark change, transmitting values, share knowledge and lead people into the future.

Leaders establish credibility through telling stories. The audience can feel and respond immediately and deeply. Stories can communicate complex ideas, break status quo, generate interaction & transformation. Rather than merely advocating and counter-advocating positions through constructed and business focussed meetings, talks, emails and other such communication a  story, especially a personal one, breaks through the acceptance barrier. Communication becomes empowering – even as the leader comes across as more vulnerable – yet someone who is still a leader because (s)he has persevered.  

Why is storytelling so powerful?

Storytelling draws in the listener and draws on the active, participation of individuals as against conventional management focuses on lifeless elements  – mission statements,  strategies, processes, budgets and assets. Stories make people discover a degree of coherence that is otherwise very difficult to achieve — something that has been an underlying principle of psychotherapy.

When a listener hears a story that touches him or her they feel their lives have a meaning.  This feeling eventually vaporises and the listener inevitably falls back into an everyday pattern — but with the difference that a radical shift in their lives have taken place and their motivation and behavior are primed for change.

What makes a good story and a good story-teller?

First and foremost the story needs to be personal and it needs to imply values. People make deep associations with leaders that have the courage to tell a strong personal story, and where the story implies certain values. The second is that the audience associates with people with a ‘consistent’ self‐image. For a leader, it is important to have a clear view of a personal life‐story that is aligned that is the thrust what you want the audience to see.

The leader tells a story to show people who they are. Their identity as an individual doesn’t lie in their roles, it is in the one‐of‐a‐kind person they have become as a result of the experiences they’ve had. The leader must tell stories interactively and model it on a conversation — that creates a relationship between the leader and the listener that is symmetrical — such that the listener could speak next. It is this feeling with the listener of being in an open conversation that the leader is vulnerable that the listener is drawn ‘into’ the story.

Types of storytelling

  • Style: The leader should tell the story as if it were being told to a single individual. The story should be kept simple, focused and clear with no alternate points of view. 
  • Don’t argue the truth: The leader should offer listeners an unobstructed view of the truth and listeners will see it and recognize it for what it is — that any reasonable person would have to agree.
  • Practice ease: Only 7% of the meaning of a communication came from the content of the words spoken 93% comes from nonverbal communication. The leader should seem spontaneous. They should choose the shape of the story and stick to it. Practice ease. 

Points of action

The story needs to have an end in mind — what do you want the listener to do when the story is over? These could include:

  • Sparking action: The story describes how a successful change was implemented in the past, but allows listeners to imagine how it might work in their situation. Communicating who they are – provides audience‐engaging drama and reveals some strength and vulnerability from the leaders past.
  • Transmitting values: The leader uses believable characters and situations and ensures the story is consistent about values and actions.  This feels familiar to the audience and will prompt discussion about why they can’t follow the same values/ action too!
  • Sharing knowledge: Leaders focus on problems and shows, in some detail, how they were corrected and why the solution worked and solicits alternative – and possibly better – solutions.
  • Leading people into the future: The leader evokes the future they want to create without providing excessive detail that will prove to be wrong.

No matter how compelling the numbers of sheets, charts or infographics if they require people to act in unfamiliar ways that is unlikely to happen. But effective storytelling often does. Storytelling can inspire people to act in unfamiliar ways. And remember storytelling not only gets the message across effectively, its incremental cost is zero. 

 

Rakesh Shukla, Chief Executive & Founder, TWB_ I The Agency for Technology Brands I www.twb.in

Rakesh Shukla, TWB_

Entrepreneur, TEDx speaker, Philanthropist, Rakesh Shukla is a 1996 MBA graduate and 1993 BTech. Rakesh Shukla is the Founder & CEO of TWB_ which is the partner for technology & business content for Fortune 500 leaders worldwide. A motivational speaker he speaks on creating success from professional and personal failure. He divides time between his 2 homes in Bangalore and is called the ‘dog-father’ for being papa to the 750 rescued dogs that live with him at the VOSD Dog Sanctuary. Rakesh has featured in 100+ interviews on the BBC, CNN, Al-Jazeera, CNN-IBN, NDTV, India’s national dailies, and at TEDx talks.

 

 

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Lessons from FMCG branding for Technology Branding - by Rakesh Shukla, Chief Executive and Founder, TWB_
30 Dec

Lessons from FMCG branding: Branding for Technology (Part 2 of 5) by Rakesh Shukla

By TWB_ In Communication, Corporate Training, Leadership, Marketing Content, Product Strategy, Strategic Marketing /  9 2 Comments

Because the brand concept evolved in the consumer goods markets it is no reason to reject it in business-to-business technology markets. But neither can it be used as is. In this article, we understand the branding gap, draw lessons, and understand the differences, from an industry that creates enduring brands – the FMCG businesses.

A great deal of our knowledge about branding and brand strategies comes from the accumulated experience of consumer-packaged-goods companies (FMCG) such as Unilever,  Procter & Gamble and Nestlé. They practically invented brand management and have created a wealth of enduring and highly profitable brands. We’ve seen in Part I how for a large part of the high-technology businesses identity is seen as a logo or trademark and branding, where does that thinking come from and why. That is the major gap in how enduring the technology is in the market-place.

High-tech markets are often more segmented, focused, and granular. Marketing high-tech products and services, especially to the enterprise, costs less than marketing consumer packaged goods. An individual’s decision to buy a certain brand of soap may be more emotional than that of a company’s decision to go with a certain line of networking equipment, but the line between a high-tech product and a consumer product is becoming increasingly fuzzy. Parallel motives exist even in business-to-business high-tech purchases. Therefore there is a great deal to learn from the FMCG business on bridging the technology branding gap.

Lessons from FMCG branding

While the High-Technology industry is crowded and thrives on discontinuous change, marketing hardly ever focuses on benefits. The FMCG industry (as a surrogate for other industries with mature marketing practices) on the other hand has a much slower rate of change but articulates great continuity in branding! They very successfully make a promise of value is critical for a company to differentiate itself from its competitors and stake a solid claim in its intended market sometimes for decades.

But if FMCG industries are great in branding then why don’t tech companies just run with it? Why doesn’t the high-technology industry leverage FMCG (say) marketing? In the first place, each is defined by the contours of its industry. The channels are not the same. The customer is not the same. The buying decision is not exactly the same. Understanding the differences allows us to highlight how to fill the branding gap in high-technology. Here are some high-technology branding aspects and how they are different from their FMCG counterparts.

Promise of Value

A fast pace of change renders all technology product brands obsolete quickly. Customer criteria and expectations change rapidly. The overall expectation of experience that a customer has with the brand that is it’s purchase-use- feedback-repurchase is the something that the FMCG business likes to tightly control even though the product travels through long-chain channels for delivery and renewal. On the other hand technology businesses have fewer degrees of separation from the actual consumer to where the product originates but the high-tech businesses seldom actually completely articulate their promise of value which is core to building a brand.

Product Longevity

In the FMCG industry, technology is not fast changing and there is a greater emphasis on emotional messaging and building a connection with the consumer. The relationship between a brand and its consumer forms the basis of loyalty and companies build a brand with a horizon that is years if not many decades. In high-tech businesses, not many brands attempt to establish that connection with the consumer primarily because even the best B2B product life cycle is seen as 3-4 yrs.

Communication Asks

The purpose of branding is different in both.  FMCG branding builds a communication cycle to build recall or induce purchase. FMCG brands focus on the ‘touch’ points where the consumer will experience it to induce an interaction. For high-tech businesses, a large part of their business may be with B2B customers, and advertising is a less important ingredient of the promotion mix than more cost-effective ways of approaching customers such as trade shows, the Internet, and user groups.

High-tech users look for solutions to problems — they are invariably looking to ease a pain point or make life easier and they often start by searching for an answer. In high-tech branding, therefore, it is utilized communications that reach customers at the exact moments and places where they seek to engage to solve problems.  

Articulating Benefits

The most key lesson that FMCG brings to branding is the focus on benefits. Most high-tech branding talks about features and not benefits. There is a lot of engineering stuff narrated in high-tech branding whereas  FMCG branding has been able to convert those features into a consumer benefit that in turn focuses on a single promise of value.

Perceived Risk

FMCG products typically carry relatively small perceived risk. Unit prices are low. Time to repurchase is short. Demand for user behaviour change is low. High-Tech products, on the other hand, have much steeper learning curves and most of the time a multi-year purchase lock-in. High-Tech branding message needs to address this risk and manage it through the adoption curve.

Purchase Cycles

FMCG purchase decisions are made quickly and most often by lone consumers based on few criteria and purchases often characterized by impulse buying. High-Tech purchase decisions are more B2B decisions and are made by groups or committees over long evaluation cycles based on many criteria followed by extended negotiations. The high-tech brand, therefore, should be used to set and influence decision-making criteria as well as defend pricing and terms.

Availability, Distribution & Time to Experience

FMCG products typically have deep vertical supply chains for delivery direct to consumer at the time of purchase. Consumer enjoys immediate gratification. In the technology business multiple vendor components ‘assemble’ the product experience. Delivery to the customer includes partners, resellers or multiple third parties such as integrators. Implementation and operation trail purchase by weeks or months. High-Tech branding, therefore, has a large role to play to assure buyers of user experience, risk avoidance, and return on investment.

Tech Branding Lessons from FMCG

High-Tech companies often focus too heavily on the product that they’re selling, rather than telling the story behind it. Technology decisions, especially B2B purchases, are expensive especially when they impact an entire organization. These costs are both direct and indirect (maintenance, training, etc). As against FMCG where risk is low, gratification is immediate and cost of purchase is simple. To induce buyers to buy a high-tech brand must sell a vision, not just a product. A customers’ emotional response to high-tech branding has far more influence in their purchasing decision, even a B2B product, than the actual product itself. High-Tech branding requires continual reinvestment to ensure users engage with the product and develop a strong loyalty to the brand.  High-Technology products reach a threshold of functional breadth and depth quickly which then delivers diminishing marginal returns to customers. Only companies which have developed a brand preference, over more temporary ‘product’ preference, insulate themselves from commoditization and set themselves apart for continued growth.

 

Rakesh Shukla, Chief Executive & Founder, TWB_ I The Agency for Technology Brands I www.twb.in

Rakesh Shukla, TWB_

Entrepreneur, TEDx speaker, Philanthropist, Rakesh Shukla is a 1996 MBA graduate and 1993 BTech. Rakesh Shukla is the Founder & CEO of TWB_ which is the partner for technology & business content for Fortune 500 leaders worldwide. A motivational speaker he speaks on creating success from professional and personal failure. He divides time between his 2 homes in Bangalore and is called the ‘dog-father’ for being papa to the 750 rescued dogs that live with him at the VOSD Dog Sanctuary. Rakesh has featured in 100+ interviews on the BBC, CNN, Al-Jazeera, CNN-IBN, NDTV, India’s national dailies, and at TEDx talks.

 

Are you looking to create or improve your technology brand?

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Business Transformation & Corporate Training I www.twb.in I TWB_
22 Nov

How effective training catalyses business transformation

By TWB_ In Corporate Training, Leadership /  7 14 Comments

Corporations spend millions of dollars on business transformation programmes. These are in the shape of mergers,
restructuring, or transformational IT systems and processes. This change management strategy is aimed to unlock value and growth by aligning people, processes and technology more closely with its business strategy and vision.

Extracting the full benefit from these enormous investments depends on employees having the right attitudes and skills to adapt. Change management also means tremendous learning throughout the organization. While change is not easy to initiate, it’s an even greater challenge to keep friction low within the organization when it happens and it is equally tough to ensure that the real value of the transformation is unlocked.

Most change management focuses on the business context, process and role changes, less on transitioning employees and even less on culture. Though people are the centre of transformational change since they are the ones who execute the new environment most organizations do not assign explicit responsibility for transforming people. The sheer scale of such transformation means that learning is a critical part of a successful solution. Training can transform & impact:

  • Leadership & vision: Change Leadership involves creating a vision for where you are going, ensuring the conditions for success and driving the team towards real business results that transformative rather than incremental. This involves management of different geographies and backgrounds to communicate openly, agree and execute. Training transforms communication.
  • Transferring process understanding: Once the business transformation is underway, processes need to be codified and transformed but this ‘new way’ also needs to be understood and become the everyday work plan and requires a tremendous amount of training to be delivered. Training transforms how people work.
  • Increasing innovation capacity: Having a strong innovative capacity within the culture of the business can be the make or break of a transformation process. Training unlocks innovation. 
  • Transforming Culture: The culture of an organization, more than business strategy, determines how the business grows and transforms. Culture is driven by people’s belief systems. Effective training can convince people that cultural change is necessary and then internalize an alternative belief system that drives a new set of behaviours.
  • Create a vision: A strategic vision for change is more than a well-articulated objective it is a compelling story about the new reality once the change has been achieved. But vision needs to be articulated & communicated to what people can see and feel and implement. Training can make a clear connection between the initiative and measurable business objectives.
  • Upskilling: An essential component of transformation is to have someone at the helm with the skills, experience, and leadership necessary to be successful. Many complex projects are doomed from the start, for not having the right team skills on board from the onset. Upskilling to meet new challenges and direction is key to getting a team to deliver on discontinuous transformation. 

TWB_ has supported scores of multi-million and multi-hundred million dollar business transformation moves in mergers, IT transformation and restructuring. Some of these instances are:

  • World’s leading bank acquires a leading investment bank and turns to TWB_ to unify business processes, develop training and deliver it over 30,000 people and 100 countries
  • World’s leading wealth management company acquires businesses in Asia, South America an Europe and brings in TWB to develop processes and deliver process and culture training.
  • World’s largest systems integrator moves its IT operations from US and Asia HQ to India and TWB_ develops culture, product, process and compliance training and delivered to over 2000 employees.

TWB_ Corporate Training for Business Transformation

TWB_ Corporate Training has catalysed multi-hundred million dollar business transformations. Across the US, Australia, Europe. Businesses to find better efficiencies in Banking, Telecoms, Pharma, and Product Engineering with TWB_. Leaders like AXA, BearingPoint, Fidelity, Genpact, DimensionData, and ABB rely on TWB_ Corporate Training to catalyse learning, transfer processes and implement smoothly.

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19 Jun

The CxO Engagement toolset: for employees, customers & media

By TWB_ In Leadership /  3 1 Comment
As a CxO you are also the Chief Engagement Officer

Being on the leadership team of your organization you need to play (a) for all organizations of your company, (b) should be able to see and articulate further than your peers and (c) engage with employees, customers, and the media.

The CxO engagement toolset includes
  1. A nuanced understanding of organization structure, dynamics & strategy
  2. A strategic view about what employees are thinking
  3. A responsive and authentic communication mindset.
  4. An engagement plan on what, how, and when to communicate
  5. A complete suite of traditional and social communication tools
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