Clarity before everything else?

Something that becomes apparent when you watch businesses and brands develop is that growth is rarely as complicated as the language surrounding it suggests.

 Businesses need customers, and they need those customers to understand what they offer. They also need customers to have sufficient confidence to act on that confidence.

 The marketing sector has developed an ability to make this straightforward relationship much more complicated. We talk about purpose, values, engagement, impressions, reach, authenticity, pillars, and we have a whole plethora of metrics.

 But are we at risk of simply becoming better at measuring activity?

 This isn't an argument against measurement, nor against purpose or values. They are all important. A business without principles risks becoming purely transactional and marketing without measurement becomes little more than guesswork.

 However, problems may arise where enormous energy has been devoted to defining why an organisation exists, while considerably less attention is paid to explaining why a customer should choose it.

 A compelling purpose gives an organisation direction, unites employees and influences behaviour, but customers still need a proposition. They need to understand what the business does, why it is relevant to them and what makes it worthy of consideration.

 The same problem exists with values. Looking over a host of corporate websites, a familiar collection of words begins to emerge. Integrity, innovation, collaboration, excellence, honesty, people, and trust.

 There is of course nothing wrong with any of these. The question is whether they influence how an organisation behaves?

 Successful businesses rarely need to tell people repeatedly what their values are. They are embedded in the way the company behaves, the decisions it makes, the people it employs and even the opportunities it is prepared to turn down.

 Values are much more powerful when they are demonstrated rather than framed.

 This is why I believe that the starting point for effective brand and marketing work should be clarity, before all else. Does the organisation understand what it is, who it is for, what makes it valuable and why anybody should care?

This may sound elementary, but it is remarkable how many businesses struggle to articulate it. Growth creates complexity, services are added, markets change, acquisitions happen and propositions evolve until eventually the organisation knows lots about what it does but has lost the ability to explain it simply.

 Once there is clarity, confidence will follow.

 Confidence isn’t just self-promotion, it is the ability of a business to articulate its value consistently without constantly searching for new language, new positioning or the next big idea.

 You can even sense it in strong organisations. Leadership speaks the same language as sales and sales speaks the same language as marketing. Employees understand what the business is trying to achieve and customers see a coherent version of the same story.

 The strongest brands make things incredibly simple. They know what they stand for, but also what they sell, and they understand their values and demonstrate them through behaviour. They measure marketing, but don't confuse the things that are easy to measure with the things that matter most.

Mark Wolstenholme