Brand led business transformation

Digital technology has undoubtedly been the driving force behind business transformation over the past decade. Creating new digital businesses and bringing the power of data and digital services to established organizations.

Digital Business Transformation (DBT) has dramatically improved the way businesses serve their customers. Exceptional customer experiences have transformed entire categories, built new businesses and reinvigorated legacy businesses.

But digitally-led business transformation has its limitations. While it saved huge amounts of money on the supply side, DBT failed to secure a sustainable competitive advantage. Once best practices are established, popularized, and adopted, every first step in customer experience is re-commoditized. The advantage is lost.

At one time McDonalds was the only quick service restaurant that provided make-your-own screens, now everyone does. At one time Monzo had the best direct banking customer experience, now every bank is there.

We need to realize that DBT has come a long way, not as a powerful means of delivering new digital experiences and services. But as a driver of business transformation.

It’s time to usher in a new era of brand-led business transformation.

Well-built and surgically focused brands offer the vision and direction necessary to build lasting advantage for organizations. This can then be provided by any customer experience, digital or otherwise.

If this seems a little odd to you, if you are confused by how something as seemingly ephemeral as a brand can accomplish this task, you need to ask yourself what role your brand plays in your business. And you should probably be interested in the value of your CMO.

We’re not talking about brands as trinkets that sit on the periphery of the business to lure people into a customer experience that fails. But as instrumental drivers that articulate the distinctive way a business will serve its customers and help them achieve this through every experience, every service and every journey.

If the goal of many businesses today is excellent customer experience, the brand is a guide to the nature of that experience.

Once upon a time, brand meaning was shaped to frame and reframe the products and services an organization delivered to the market. Today, an organization’s products and services must be created to serve the brand and the role it plays in people’s lives.

The rebirth of EE as the main consumer brand for the BT Group is a foreshadowing of this new approach. Brand-led business transformation.

While EE’s new offering combines BT’s engineering and expertise with EE’s innovation and customer service, it is about more than just bringing two brands together.

The new EE came to the market with much more ambition than BT and EE.

For one thing, there is no fighting tooth and nail for market share in premium connectivity. It exists to serve more human lives than its predecessors ever could.

The new EE brand exists to harness the power of technology to make everyday life better for people, regardless of traditional business vertical.

It is this common thread into the future, through current and adjacent categories, current and growing audiences and all customer journeys, that is at the heart of brand-led business transformation. Rather than iterating into an unknown future, this is an apparent takeover of the company’s destiny.

DBT was “customer centric”, meaning it has intuitive user experiences that match real shopping journeys. Brand-led business transformation is customer-first, meaning it always asks “how can we help” before asking “how can we sell”.

And while conventional brand thinking focuses on building affinity with customers, often through shared values, brand-led business transformation is about establishing relevance in people’s lives through understanding what they need and how a brand can act on that desire.

But the most important brand-led business transformation is about imagination. It is the ability of the organization to imagine a new future. Freed from the category of orthodoxy, best practice and the tyranny of the tried and tested.

There is real joy in this process. Literally freeing the organization from legacy and the established will of the market and giving it agency and control. Allow for rebirth and not just re-evaluation.

But if you want to use your brand to transform your business, you need the right partners. People who can help imagine that new future. People who know that analytical thinking can only be repeated do not change. People who can use imagination and put it into practice.

Unfortunately, our corporate business culture is not good at this. Whether it’s due to the tyranny of quarterly reporting, whether it’s the dead hand of best practices, or whether it’s an MBA curriculum that devalues ​​imagination, it’s in short supply in many organizations and consultancies.

Too few businesses and business strategists can imagine their way out of a paper bag, so they are trained in orthodoxy and category behavior. Therefore, it is much more convenient for them to make products and think about how to sell them than to imagine a new future for the company and then figure out how to fulfill this promise.

All of this is important because of the need to find growth in low growth markets.

The battle for share in established markets is all too often like a ground war in a stalemate, with each side scraping every centimeter, often at great cost. Seeking to serve a larger part of your customers’ lives by leveraging the power of your brand to open up new audiences, new categories and new services, while repackaging existing offerings in a different light, offers an opportunity to deliver new growth.

And that’s the power of brand-led business transformation.

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