Brand as an organising principle for your business.

In a services business, people experience the brand through every interaction they have with your business or organisation. A customer forms a view of a bank, a hospital, a law firm or a charity through a phone call, a waiting room, an email that arrives when promised or a conversation with someone who took the time to understand and resolve their problem.

If a brand strategy defines the promise an organisation makes then how the organisation behaves, how your people behave, day in and day out, drives whether the promise is delivered.

About 15 years ago, we decided to focus Genesis’s proposition on services and B2B clients.  Ireland is largely a services economy, yet most of the brand strategy being offered here was based on B2C and FMCG models that weren’t directly applicable to services business.

This is why, at Genesis, we see brand as the primary organising principle for services organisations. A good brand strategy not only gives an organisation a strong understanding of who it is, what it values and what it offers customers, it also shapes decisions right across the business: who to recruit, where to invest, how to design services, how to lead, how to manage performance and what to stop doing.

The ‘say-do’ gap

Most organisations we work with have a clear purpose, a set of values and a successful business. Yet, they struggle to align their communications (what they say) with what people actually experience (what they do).  It’s as if brand strategy is only about communications.  We call this the ‘say-do’ gap.

Customers notice it very quickly and colleagues even faster. When the gap is wide, the brand becomes a source of cynicism and every customer proposition is experienced against a memory of being kept on hold, getting the wrong bill or failures in service provision. You only have to read Conor Pope’s Irish Times articles to see how common this is.

But when the gap is narrow, the brand earns a credibility that is very hard to win any other way.  Vodafone’s ‘Ask Once’ campaign is a terrific promise – hopefully borne out by the customer experience!

Closing the gap starts with aligning purpose and brand. Purpose explains why the organisation exists and the difference it intends to make. Brand expresses that in a way that is distinctive and relevant to the people it serves. When the two are fully aligned, the organisation gains coherence. Strategy, services, operations and behaviour begin to reinforce one another, and the company becomes what it says it is.

Where brand strategy lives and dies

In product businesses, much of the brand can be engineered into the product itself. In services, the experience is the product, and that experience is delivered by people, through processes and systems, often in moments that are far removed from senior leaders.

A services brand strategy therefore lives and dies with the customer experience. A distinctive positioning that is not reflected in how customers are treated is, at best, a wasted investment, and at worst, damages trust, because it raises expectations the organisation then fails to meet.

The practical consequence is easy to state but difficult to do. If an organisation commits to a distinctive brand strategy, it must make an equal commitment to the culture and organisational change needed to deliver it.

What that commitment looks like

Organisations that close the ‘say-do’ gap tend to do five things well.

They translate the brand strategy into values and lived behaviours. Brand attributes and values are made concrete. What does "expert and approachable" mean for how a receptionist greets a patient, or how a partner explains a fee?

They design the experience, intentionally, in the detail. The moments that shape trust most are identified and redesigned around the brand promise.  The customer journey is mapped as it is, and how it needs to be.  This identifies the specific changes that need to be made.

They lead from the front. The senior leadership team sees the value of the brand for the business as a whole and not simply a marketing and comms function.  CEOs live the brand and leadership teams model the behaviours they ask of others and make decisions that show that the brand strategy shapes how the business is run.

They measure what matters. Customer and employee insight sits alongside financial performance, so the organisation knows whether its promise is being kept.  The brand tracker measures the values in action, not just awareness, understanding and media recall.

They bring their people with them. Employees understand the brand, believe in it and see their own part in delivering it. In services, the workforce is the brand's most important channel.

This takes sustained effort, and it touches structure, process, capability and leadership in equal measure.

Why Genesis has invested in culture

Genesis built its reputation in brand strategy. Over many years of that work, a clear pattern emerged: the brand strategies that created lasting value were the ones backed by CEOs and leaders who believed in the power of the brand to drive real organisational change. Where clients invested in culture alongside brand, the results accelerated.

That’s why, in recent years, we have developed a strong competence and culture proposition alongside our brand and strategy work. We help leadership teams understand their current culture, define the behaviours their brand requires, build the capability to deliver them and track progress over time. This work spans healthcare, financial services, public sector, utilities, transport, professional services and the non-profit sector, where the quality of human interaction sits at the heart of the value created.

Bringing brand and culture together in one programme means the promise and its delivery are designed at the same time, from the same thinking. It reduces the risk of a brand that runs ahead of the organisation and it gives culture change a clear direction rooted in what customers value.

A question worth asking

For any leadership team in a services organisation, there is one question that provides real insight. If a customer described us in their own words after their last interaction, would it match what we say about ourselves?

If the honest answer is “not always”,  that gap is an opportunity. Closing it is where brand strategy is worth the investment.