Partner at BrandActive.
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In today’s uncertain environment, the market is rife with activity as organizations look to protect themselves, position themselves for growth and continue to drive efficiency. This might take the form of a rebrand, or the time may have come to engage in a more significant measure such as a merger and acquisition.
Whatever the case may be, fortune favors the prepared mind. Both brand and marketing teams and their agency partners need to be agile, prepped and ready to address either of these scenarios. Whether an M&A occurs or not, organizations that implement operational improvements enable themselves to produce far better results because the savings they achieve allow them to fund innovative programs and the big ideas that produce results. Right now, some organizations are hunkering down, while others are placing strategic bets. Sound familiar? Stepping back and getting your house in order can change this.
If you’re one of those corporations grappling with the question of efficiency, taking the time to streamline your brand and marketing operations can ultimately help your organization by freeing up funds for your marketing budget and enabling your marketing teams and agencies to stop reacting to budget cuts and get back to doing what they do best.
Drawing on my experience as partner in a rebrand implementation consultancy, here’s my advice for organizations that are considering how to improve their brand and marketing operations in preparation for a rebrand or M&A.
What Do You Have To Gain?
To answer this question, think about how your organization responded to changes this year. Were you able to quickly produce on-brand materials for new cross-functional campaigns without heroic (read: expensive, time-consuming and/or chaotic) efforts? Many organizations found that they needed to circumvent existing processes because they were too cumbersome. If that was the case for your organization, you aren’t alone.
Also, consider the scale of your organization to understand the potential impact. Your brand is applied throughout the organization. Facilities are often responsible for signage, operations for fleet management, HR for recruitment materials and so on. Inefficiencies and drivers of brand inconsistency often hide in the gaps between these silos. Marketing can be the catalyst to find and fix these.
Getting your house in order not only improves agility, ROI and brand consistency today. It also allows your organization to respond quickly and effectively to future business changes.
That said, tackling your brand and marketing operations can feel like a daunting prospect. For one thing, without specifics, detailed rebranding scenarios can’t be constructed. Optimizing may also seem like taking on extra organizational work to address an area that is already functional — poking the metaphorical sleeping dog, as it were. In fact, many organizations begin rebrands or M&A’s without having optimized their operations beforehand and are then unsure of where to even begin when it comes to gathering branded asset inventories or defining optimized processes. The result? Costly, inefficient rebrands and inconsistent brand expression.
The truth is that getting your organization’s brand and marketing in order will help pave the way for a smoother rebrand or M&A, whether you are rebranding one organization, two or more. Having that groundwork in place will help make the process much less overwhelming.
Steps To Improve Brand And Marketing Operations
One of your first steps should be to conduct an in-depth assessment with an emphasis on auditing branded assets. The goal is to functionally catalog every branded asset used in your organization. Key data to capture for each asset include quantity, frequency of replenishment, specific procurement processes, internal ownership, preferred production vendors and any associated costs to produce, update or maintain said assets.
This full accounting of all your branded assets — what they are, who uses them and where — will allow you to keep things streamlined by retaining those assets that are most frequently used and offer the highest impact. It also will empower your brand and marketing teams to retire or rationalize any assets that are duplicative or past prime.
Brand and marketing processes is another area that is ripe for improvement. Consider: Do your people know the proper ways to apply your brand? Do they have robust guidance to help actualize the full value of every new initiative? Do they follow established asset creation and approval processes, and is this something that can be audited for compliance? Understanding your existing operational behaviors will identify pain points and uncover root causes for any unclear areas.
Often, one of these areas is roles and responsibilities. Among your stakeholders — internal teams, vendors, agency partners — there can be confusion as to whom is responsible for what. Roles and responsibilities may not be clearly defined, or people may lack the correct training to understand how their role fits into the marketing and brand organization. Optimizing this will put you in a position of significant advantage for any organizational change requiring the mobilization of a large amount of effort and resources.
And, of course, technology is the framework that enables and connects all the other pieces — assets, people and processes — together. Rapid advancements in technology to improve brand and marketing operations have left some organizations unaware of best practices. Assessing your existing marketing technology stack will illustrate what tools you currently use and their various strengths and weaknesses. Are there any obvious redundancies or any tools that are more frustrating than useful? Does your brand management system support organizational efficiency, or is a change needed? Being armed with a thorough understanding of your technology will prepare you to make good decisions when a major organizational change, such as an M&A or divestiture, brings together or splits apart marketing departments.
In the midst of today’s uncertainties, marketers can lay the groundwork to improve agility and efficiency. Improving brand and marketing operations will help you “find the money” for key strategic marketing efforts and reduce the costs of branded assets organization-wide. Act now, and you’ll be ready to make the most of the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead.
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Author: James Burn, Forbes Councils Member
