I love this post on Attraction of Identity from my kindred spirit, Russ Aebig. (And not just because he references my work on Business-IT Maturity!) Russ poses the question:
As an organization, who are you? What is your internal and external story?”
Russ goes on to say:
IT organizations typically are not oriented around branding and when pushed to think about it realize they have many disparate, confused, and mixed identities, each shaped by recent events with their customers. From a brand perspective, there will be no clear message which the IT customers can positively associate with.”
The IT-Marketing Disconnect
Hallelujah! And I’d go further to say that IT organizations typically have little to no sense of marketing, the core set of disciplines within which branding belongs. Many years ago, as an intern, I did a stint in both the sales and marketing organizations of a British computer manufacturer and quickly learned some of the key differences between these disciplines and how they play off against each other. As a marketing executive defined it to me back then, “Marketing is about ensuring an environment in which your products (or services) sell!” As such, marketing has much to do with understanding the market needs and dynamics, then shaping perceptions in that market so that your product’s (or service’s) ability to meet those needs is known and compelling.
Against that background, you can imagine the many shortcomings in how IT organizations:
- Create deep understanding about their markets, segments, problems their customers want solved
- Position their products and services in ways that can help solve those problems
- Make it easy to find and engage in the IT organization’s available services
- Price their services in ways that make sense to their customers and are “easy to do business with”
- Communicate in powerful and positive ways to shape perceptions about how they are solving business problems and creating value
The Power of Branding
If IT organizations were automobiles, what make would your organization most closely equate to? Would you be a Ferrari – extreme high performance, lots of pizazz, reserved for the enlightened few with the means to drive it? Or perhaps a Mercedes – high quality, superbly engineered, high technology, style, and within reach of (some) mere mortals? Or a Mazda – quality at an affordable price, with lots of innovation, to boot! Or a Chevy truck – great value, solid dependable performance for going beyond the normal needs of a family saloon?
If you don’t like the automobile analogy (which I use somewhat tongue-in-cheek) pick something closer to home – perhaps a retail store chain, or consumer service provider, or a hotel chain. Do you want to be known for breadth of service, with all the bells and whistles? Or tightly focused on some core competencies? Are you an innovator? Or more about the nuts and bolts services needed in day to day operations? This kind of branding analysis and execution may lead you to recognize that you have more than one brand to your IT organization (think FedEx Express, FedEx Ground and FedEx Office!) With different types of services, different value propositions, and different ways of engaging.
The key, I believe, is to be thoughtful, as Russ suggests, about your value proposition(s) – how you want them to be seen and felt. This is not only “good marketing” – it’s also a great way to build alignment among your leadership team as you work through the definition of your organization’s mission, vision, values and brand messages.
Image courtesy of Lauren Fernandez
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Filed under: IT Management, IT Maturity | Tagged: Add new tag, Brand, Business-IT Maturity, Customer experience, IT leadership, Markets, Value proposition
Interesting. I would say that this was true throughout history of Commercial computing.
When “branding” an internal IT organization I would recommend an extra measure of attention to how the marketing campaign might be felt by the business.
Vaughan, you may recall working with me to bring together several disparate IT organizations in order to enable some transformational enterprise level initiatives (ERP, CRM, Y2K, etc.) We “branded” the new organization “eIT” (for “Enterprise IT”) and used that overarching theme to create a shared vision within the organization and throughout the enterprise.
While it would be hard to argue with the theme’s usefulness in aligning the IT team with the vision and the ultimate business outcomes, I was late to recognize that we had created a strong undercurrent of resentment amongst certain “C-suite” managers who felt that the real agenda was to create a separate IT “empire”. While we recognized the potential for that we nonetheless created barriers to future collaboration with those leaders. In retrospect, we fell into the trap of assuming that our branding “message” of partnership with the business was successful. That was a significant error that should have been avoided – after all, some of those same managers had lost their absolute control of IT resources in the creation of an enterprise level IT organization.
So, the CIO must balance branding of the internal IT organization with an oversized emphasis on making sure that IT behaviors clearly reflect an ethos of partnership with internal clients. This hard work is made more difficult by the fact that the CIO must continually walk the razor’s edge of partnership and governance. That isn’t easy.
Brad, thanks very much for this excellent and important reminder of the dangers inherent here.
I’m actually very conflicted over this (my post) whole line of reasoning. On the one hand, one can argue that the ‘IT organization’ as such should be ‘invisible’. When great infrastructure works, it should be like great background music – soothing and satisfying at a subconscious level but never intruding into the foreground. On the other hand, one can argue that the distinction between ‘business’ and ‘IT’ should by now be moot – the two have become seamlessly integrated.
However, I think ‘Intel Inside’ might be the most relevant branding exemplar in this space. To most PC users, the internal processor is invisible – but Intel Inside reinforces an assurance of quality. When we buy a PC branded this way we know that the primary label (HP, Dell, Lenovo, etc.) is where ‘the buck stops’ so to speak, but we generally feel good about having a quality (Intel) component at the core. This, I think, is the right balance between the processor’s (Intel) branding and the PC manufacturer’s (HP, et al) branding.
But your caution is well taken – any time we do something visible that is about ‘the IT organization,’ we risk reinforcing the “we/they” dichotomy, which is always risky!
Thanks, as ever, for your most insightful comment!
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Well, thank you very much! It’s comments such as yours that keep us blogging! Happy commenting!