Brand & Business Alignment

Bring the voice of the customer and your promises to them into every decision-making moment in the business.

“Caffeine helped initiate and operate an integrated framework for aligning and managing our brand through a senior management forum known as the Brand Leadership Team. They demonstrated a clear understanding of our business and most importantly the ability to inspire new and creative thinking amongst the Nissan team routed in a customer-centric approach which businesses can often lose sight of. Most importantly for a vertically integrated business such as ours, they impressed senior management across the functions from manufacturing through to sales and marketing.”

BRAND POWER, NISSAN EUROPE

What is brand and business alignment?

Aligning the business with the brand means ensuring that the major processes, policies and procedures in your business are designed and developed to deliver brand and customer objectives whilst hitting business goals. In fact, the business goals are achieved through hitting brand and customer targets. Successful brand and business alignment requires:

  • Board level commitment and Governance through a senior team
  • Cross-functional collaboration
  • Purpose and values led decision-making
  • Regular reporting and communication
  • Aligning business goals and measures with customer and employee goals measures

Our approach to brand and business alignment is to make the voice of the customer and the promises you have made to them present in every decision-making moment in the business.


How we help

  • Establish the governance needed to ensure alignment happens – successful integration of the brand and customer promise into an organisation is dependent on the most senior and cross-functional team championing it. It needs the ‘triad power’ of Operations, HR and Marketing to come together and the ‘air cover’ of the Board to drive progress forward. We help our clients, some of whom are highly complex organisations, establish and facilitate senior teams to set the vision, identify the priorities and measure progress through regular reporting.
  • Measure the Organisational Alignment – our OAS (Organisational Alignment Survey) is a proven tool both as a diagnostic of current alignment within the business but also as a measurement of progress on the desired alignment.
  • Engage the organisation – as you align the organisation’s priorities and processes you also need to engage the organisation, informing people of what your ambitions are but also inspiring them and integrating the brand into their work (link to Employee Engagement).
  • Roll-out, measure and report – designing a process that is cross-functional, collaborative and cascades through the organisation. With regular reporting and measurement of progress to help maintain momentum and course-correct where necessary.
  • Treat it as transformation and communicate success – aligning an organisation behind its brand is for most companies one of the most significant business transformations it will undertake. We ensure that it is treated as such and that every success (a quick win or a long-term initiative that’s approved) is communicated out to the business and branded to keep the importance of the transformation top of mind for everyone (link to Internal branding).

Video: Setting yourself up for success

Watch out for...

Death by initiative overload

Aligning an organisation behind its brand means making hard choices and focusing on the fewest things that will matter most. Too many organisations simply bundle all they are currently doing and then add a load more ‘new things to do’ to make it look like the business is serious about becoming more brand and customer focused. This leads to initiative overload. It also leads to the same few people sitting on lots of different committees and sub-committees and still being expected to do their day job. Use your brand purpose and your customer promise to cut initiatives not add lots more on top. Use it to accelerate decision-making rather than prolong discussion. Your “To Not Do” list may well be more important than your “To Do” list. It might even be longer.

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