How do central enterprises manage their brands well?

How do central enterprises do a good job in brand management

Brand touch points refer to situations where customers have the opportunity to face a brand message, and are the sources from which customers receive brand messages. In our lives, every consumption experience contains one or a series of brand touch points, and each brand touch point spreads brand information and affects consumers' purchasing decisions to a greater or lesser extent.

Successful brands are good at influencing customers through brand touch points, rather than pure advertising or communication. This is even more important for central enterprises. Because most state-owned enterprises are group enterprises with diversified businesses. Brands are hierarchically divided into group brands, business brands and product brands. A single advertisement is not enough to fully express the core values ??of the brand. Through brand touch points, you can at least brand the organization's behavior, influence target customers through a series of experience links, and let the brand image take root effectively.

So, how can central enterprises do a good job in brand touch point management? Based on years of consulting practice, the author summarized the "Four Four One" model, that is, "Master the four steps and grasp the four keys." Form a brand touch point card?.

Four steps of brand touch point management

When designing brand touch points, companies can refer to the following four steps to carry out relevant work.

1. Comprehensively sort out brand touch points

Enterprises must comprehensively sort out brand touch points, such as pre-sales, in-sales, and after-sales touch points. Pre-sales usually include advertising, telemarketing, sales visits, promotional activities, etc.; sales include service support, communication with customers, product or service experience, etc.; after-sales include interpersonal communication, follow-up visits, etc. Enterprises must fully mobilize their employees to sort out and take stock of these touch points.

2. Determine key brand touch points

With these brand touch points, companies can sort and filter by impact and value weight to determine the brand touch points that need to be focused on. For example, a certain technology central enterprise has a series of expert resources and technology leaders within it. Its most important brand contact points are training lectures, columns, interviews and forum speeches. Therefore, in order to highlight the core value of their technology, they promote the celebrity strategy and use the image of internal experts to promote the technologically leading brand image of central enterprises.

3. Develop key touch point operations and behavioral norms

By formulating key touch point operations and behavioral norms, all key touch points can be branded and standardized. When we provided brand consulting for enterprises before, we proposed the concept of all-employee brand management. By formulating brand touch point management cards for enterprises, each business link and each internal member of the enterprise has its own brand responsibilities and requirements, and clearly communicates with the enterprise. Brand-related behavioral norms, so that every department, every behavior, and every voice of the company adds points to brand building.

4. Use the assessment mechanism to promote and promote brand communication

Implement management assessment of brand-related work and continuously optimize norms and mechanisms. First, formulate employee responsibilities and then formulate corresponding assessment indicators to promote and promote the spread of the brand. For example, the top management of a central enterprise has three responsibilities related to branding:

1) Unify the thinking of employees throughout the enterprise, clarify the meaning of the brand for all employees, enable employees at all levels to form a correct brand concept, and make it clear that the brand is not only The responsibilities of the operating department, and the responsibilities of all employees;

2) Determine the responsibilities of personnel at all levels in the brand system for all employees, and provide corresponding training, such as brand connotation, brand management methods, marketing methods, etc.;

3) As a member of the marketing system, corporate executives should directly or indirectly promote the corporate brand through customer communication, participation in relevant meetings, and acceptance of media interviews. Based on the responsibilities of the company's top management, clear KPI assessment indicators are formulated.

The same applies to other employees. They must formulate clear responsibilities and design specific assessment indicators. Through performance appraisal, employees at different levels can ultimately be driven to deliver brand information through different touch points.

In the specific process of promoting brand touch point management, in addition to understanding the work steps, another important point is to master the four keys.

Four keys to brand touch point management

These four keys include key objects, key personnel, key links and key events.

1) Key targets such as opinion leaders, valuable customers and authoritative figures need to sort out their messages and evaluations of the company, and consciously carry out witnessing dissemination.

Take the State Grid as an example. They divided the key targets into four types: government authorities, media and opinion leaders, power industry partners, and important power users, and focused on developing these people as strategic groups.

They are deeply aware that for this group of people, they cannot communicate generally to the general public, but must carry out targeted and key communications.

For example, its subsidiary Putian Electric Power Bureau has given copies of the magazine "Special Attention" to high-end customers such as government departments, enterprises and institutions, and achieved good results. Later, six well-known local middle schools were selected to target teachers and students of junior and senior high schools. The magazine "Inside and Out of the Classroom" was used as a carrier to print exquisite color pages in a way that students would like to see and hear, popularizing knowledge about safe and scientific use of electricity, and promoting power supply services. The content is to disseminate the State Grid brand slogan, corporate culture, values ??and smart grid development prospects, advocate low-carbon life among teachers and students, and create an energy-saving environment. In this way, the State Grid can establish an affinity and characteristic public welfare brand image. These activities targeting key targets further attracted media attention and generated secondary dissemination.

2) Key personnel such as business personnel, customer service personnel, project managers, etc. have the most direct and frequent contact with customers and are an important source of customer experience. Their management focuses on standardizing words and deeds, implementing rewards and punishments, and always catching up. unremitting?.

To standardize words and deeds, we must strengthen the brand concept training and assessment of key personnel, and formulate codes of conduct for key personnel with the purpose of achieving customer satisfaction and following the brand concept, such as codes of conduct for marketing personnel, codes of conduct for business personnel, and customer service personnel Code of conduct, code of conduct for customer contact of other relevant personnel, etc., form a system through the code of conduct and develop the behavioral habits and consciousness of key personnel.

To implement rewards and punishments, we need to incorporate the code of conduct into the performance appraisal of key personnel, formulate relevant regulations on rewards and punishments, and clarify the responsible persons, processes and methods for the supervision and assessment of the implementation of the code of conduct. Only in this way can the brand behavior of employees be constrained.

Constant attention means that new employees in key positions must undergo relevant training and assessment before taking up their posts, and the behavioral norms and performance of key personnel must be linked to the performance of relevant departments and supervisors at all levels. At the same time, employees with outstanding performance or outstanding performance must be regularly evaluated. Internal recognition and criticism of underperforming individuals and departments.

3) Key links are also an important source of customer experience. Customers often judge and perceive the brand from them, so these links must be "branded".

State Grid takes into account the multiple aspects of users’ exposure to information, and simultaneously develops multiple communication channels to create user experience in different links. For example, they use advertising carriers such as radio and community bulletin boards to communicate; they develop mobile phone text messages in the form of animations to spread knowledge about safe and scientific electricity use, and send blessing text messages to the public during holidays to enhance the coverage of brand promotion; they carry out "Cultural Going to the Rural Areas" communication, Let the culture of electricity consumption be effectively conveyed; these are all ways to create diversified communication links, convey brand value in different links, and enhance the value recognition of the work of State Grid among strategic groups, media, and customers.

4) Most of the key events are important moments that directly affect the customer experience. Basic processes and standard procedures need to be carefully planned in accordance with brand requirements to ensure that customers can be left with a deep and unique brand impression every time. and memory.

For example, Putian Electric Power Bureau has carried out "tourist attraction communication" activities in different places based on the actual situation of the region; carried out activities such as "Branding Me" and "Do you know about power supply services" for front-line employees; arranged professional and technical Personnel went to the campus to hold lectures on scientific electricity use, and teachers and students from the school were invited to enter the State Grid to experience the daily production work of power grid enterprises.

These are critical events. Through these key events, a unified brand image is disseminated in external communications, further enhancing brand support, enhancing brand value output, and strengthening brand impression.

A brand touch point card

With these four keys, the next step is to complete the internalization of the brand, that is, to make more employees themselves become brand touch points. The key link is to influence customers through your own brand behavior.

Therefore, it is necessary for companies to create a brand touch point card for personnel in different positions. According to the different sales stages, the personnel involved at different stages, and the communication channels, a brand touch point guide for your own position is formed, so as to implement more targeted communication. ;