Branding during the great resignation – Part 2: Personal and system accountability

March 3, 2022 By BEAM

If you haven’t already, please check out Part l of this series: Branding during the great resignation.

A System of Accountability

The harsh reality of bad management shows up in the news and stock prices, quickly. To minimize brand failure, two forms of accountability are required:

• Personal
• Systemic

Personal accountability requires a rethink of job design.

Decentralized work that creates engaged employees delivers resource, control, and authority. Decentralized accountability requires feedback that supports learning.

Feedback needs to be focused on the work itself. Separating the person and their idea is critical. If we don’t, feedback may seem unconfirming, harsh and invalidating. Feedback is not aggressive. It is helpful and instructive.

I can tell someone that an ad lacks key messages or too many design components. I cannot tell them making that mistake is stupid and they should go crawl in a hole. In the coming years, we will be sure to see AI tools that find “off brand” work and inform the producer directly. Until then, we will have to talk to each other and hope the sippy cups don’t fly across the room.

Systemic accountability requires brand owners to rethink how they explain results.

For many brand managers, linking brand to results is a new concept. For others, they may rely on measures like brand perceptions to justify the investment in brand.

Leading brand managers tie their efforts and investments toward business outcomes. In the book “Product Roadmaps Explained,” the authors identify three categories of business objectives:

• Sustainable value that supports the product’s core value or creates barriers to entry
• Growth in things such as market share, demand fulfillment, new market development, or improvement in recurring revenue
• Profit where brand supports higher prices, increases the lifetime value of customers, lowers costs, or creates leverage of existing assets

Building objectives requires thoughtful consideration of the key results. In all cases, one of the results to strive for is employee satisfaction.

Satisfaction that comes from their achievement and not what they may have eaten, seen, or attended.

Anxious to hear more about branding during the great resignation and what that might mean for your organization? Let’s continue the conversation, reach out to us, we’d love chat.