Guide-Coach-Enabler
A different kind of brand consulting relationship, for the Brand Fundamentals and in making Brand real inside the organization and out there in the marketplace. What if the brand consultant worked inside your team, not above it?
One of the most problematic aspects in Brand Consulting is the distance between what's been decided and making it happen as intended.
Historically, Corporate Brand Consulting has been top-down: the consultants do great work and deliver smart and strategically sound toplines - Brand Platform, Brand Architecture, Messaging Framework, Identity System, Guidelines. Then a longer-term retainer agreement may be set up, or the project did include market implementation. That’s the reality, and I’ve been living all of these relationship types throughout my career. And the dynamics are the same: the consultant does the work and hands it over to an internal team made of business, marketing, and communications professionals of many types who know their own company better than any outside advisor ever will. They are the ones who take those toplines and articulate them in all of their granular complexities, day after day, in the messy and interconnected reality of the company’s inside and the requirements and vagaries of its external marketplace. They are the real heroes of Corporate Branding.
My new Guide-Coach-Enabler service is based on all that, and it came about almost by accident.
I’ve had a great client for the past six years: we’ve worked through a major repositioning, a merger, a visual re-identification, architecture, culture, naming – all according to the traditional project-based consulting structure. But earlier this year the client’s needs and requests became more granular, varied, and continuous to be packaged as discrete projects, and we started a different kind of relationship where I’d work directly with their teams as an embedded colleague: meet regularly, once or twice a week, interpreting needs, uncovering dependencies that only their in-house knowledge can see, a common chat and a LinkedIn group, planning work breadth and depth together, bringing to bear relevant parts of my online course and its case histories, assigning and reviewing work, then finalizing and codifying - all at their pace and schedule, and on their executive managers’ radar. The team hums along in unison, continuously improves/gains skills, the work gets done, and the cumulative effect yields real and lasting value. And, importantly, all at a highly reasonable retainer fee.
Three months into it, I’ve identified seven key traits of a successful relationship of this type.
1. Executive guidance and support. Trust at and in the CMO level is indispensable, as the team feel understood, supported, and protected – and all based on a shared understanding of direction that gives the work coherence and authority.
2. Efficiency & Effectiveness. No operational obstacles like procurement cycles, project kick-off delays, and multiple onboardings, yielding a frictionless and organic relationship: the work fits into how the team operates, and in the context of everything else.
3. Granularity. This working model eliminates the typical Big Things Are Done and Small Things Are Ignored syndrome, catching and considering everything before anything problematic can compound.
4. Focused Direction. Everything is directionally aligned, as one hand knows what all other hands are doing and what are the opportunities and dependencies: this yield no deviations in intent, and ‘Brand’ doesn’t contradict at the edges while it's being built at the center.
5. Openness and team trust. The format equalizes every member of the team and part of the responsibility is lifted from them and assigned to the Guide-Coach-Enabler – but in a highly collegial manner.
and finally, what I consider to be the catalysts of it – and my personal contributions:
6. Clarity on the Brand Fundamentals: they are few, they are precise, they’ve always been the same, they never go out of style, and they are the indispensable roots of ‘Brand’ - no matter any of the new ‘theories’ of the past thirty years.
7. Experienced knowledge in a way that transfers: not lectures and reports, but the sharing of a way of thinking borne of extensive experience in the form of perspectives and case histories immediately applicable to the matters at hand.
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Finally, I wanted to share a personal context.
Not too long ago I came across a quote from Netflix co-founder Marc Randolph: "Stay married to the problem you're trying to solve, not the solution you think will solve it (as that may change)."
The problem I've always been trying to solve since starting Masterbranded a year ago was the weakening of the Brand Fundamentals in companies – and in practitioners’ skillset. And the solutions I've iterated, from traditional consulting to the online Course and from Sprints to Workshops and Workgroups, have been working well in a variety of settings and situations. This newest Guide-Coach-Advisor approach seems to be working great for corporate teams – and very importantly is making me happy (which, at this point of my long career, is not a small thing).
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