The Marketing Team is No Longer Responsible for Building Brand Capital

The corporate brand is perhaps the best understood and managed of a firm’s intangible assets. Many firms include brand value on their balance sheets though relationship capital, for example, has rarely been treated that way. One reason is that it is apparently obvious that the marketing team are responsible for it. They develop and refine the brand proposition and control and direct brand expression through the traditional brand communication channels – design, advertising, PR, etc. But should brand building really be their preserve alone?

Firms like Zappos demonstrate to brilliant effect that brands are built and communicated from the inside out and everyone has a role to play.

“Every employee affects your company’s brand, not just the front-line employees that are paid to talk to customers.”

-Tony Hsieh, Zappos CEO

In fact, every team and function in a business has a role to play in building brand capital, not just the marketing department. The responsibility for shaping brand perceptions and building brand capital extends across the organisation. For example, very often values and behaviours are the domain of the HR team. The link to brand proposition in developing culture is rarely strongly made. What Tony Hsieh is essentially talking about above is the importance of what could be called ‘branded behaviours’. It is these branded behaviours which, over time, combine to create a distinctive culture.

As such, the marketing and brand team should be completely joined-up in articulating and encouraging the behaviours which help to deliver on the proposition at the heart of the brand. Too often the ‘values’ that the HR team articulate are unrelated to the proposition and entirely undifferentiating.

Similarly, since it’s clear that a firm’s offices communicate something about their brand, the Head of Real Estate should have a clear understanding of the corporate brand proposition if he is to make sure that as well as functioning well in practical terms, the office plays its role in brand communication terms.

It all starts with a clear proposition and then engaging everyone in the business in what that proposition means to customers and how they can help to deliver on it.