Creating a Brand Centric Company - Branding for Technology Branding - by Rakesh Shukla, Chief Executive and Founder, TWB_
31 Dec

Creating a Brand Centric company: Branding for Technology by Rakesh Shukla (Part 4 of 5)

By TWB_ In Uncategorized /  5 No Comments

A Brand-Centric company is different than a Product-Centric company in how it creates and delivers value. We’ve seen a 7 step process on how to move product-centric managers to create and focus on the brand. In this part we look at the essential steps to creating a ‘brand’ centric company. It is critical for customers to associate the values you communicate with your brand – it is the most powerful unifying force throughout the company.

High-tech companies usually have various roles from very different backgrounds. Developers with strictly technical backgrounds may have little exposure to marketing or other business functions. Conversely, MBA in sales and marketing may have an understanding of their industry’s core technologies and sufficient, but not extraordinary, knowledge of their company’s own technology products. Why should they work together and what experience they should create? The company’s promise of value to customers provides a common denominator and a common language to bridge these different thought worlds.  

Here are 3 things that a company needs to do to become a brand-centric company that consistently delivers its promise to customers.

Bring Management Focus

The fundamental difference between a product-centric and a brand-centric company lies in the shift of the attitude of the people — a shift from selling products or services to selling a promise of value. Once the promise is clear, think about how that promise relates to the company’s strengths and employees’ impressions of what the company is offering. Do the internal and external impressions match? If not, how do they differ? The management needs to think through one central question: What emotional rewards do you get from using this product?

Creating a brand is not just a marketing exercise. A company has to ‘live’ the brand. This step requires managers to make three crucial decisions:

  1. First, they must understand how the potential customer markets are segmented and choose the segments they wish to serve.
  2. Second, they must determine what type of promises are feasible to offer.
  3. Third, they must set a branding policy which answers how do you promise value for selected customer segments?


Determining Brand Promise

If you’re a company whose customers traditionally were IT managers – then you sold service, support, and reliability and because that is what they expected vendors to deliver. Today consumers are younger, technologically highly competent, and not risk-averse. They care less about the order you brought them last decade and are OK with the hassles of working with new technologies for the intellectual and technical challenges they pose. Your promise of value for this group needs to shift to collaboration and technical prowess, on top of your traditional message.

A great example is EMC. In 2010s EMC realized that in IT departments, which were using the storage products made by EMC, purchasing decisions are often narrowly based on price, but for senior executives, any decision reflects broader considerations. Attempting to avoid the price wars that resulted from marketing to technically sophisticated buyers in IT departments, EMC instead tailored its promise for senior managers who could dictate purchasing decisions. In a series of advertisements in publications like the Wall Street Journal, EMC raised relevant issues for senior executives, such as the role of data storage in securing competitive advantage.

 

Delivering Brand promise

Determine what the company’s various business functions must do to make good on the promise of value. If the promise boils down to superior service and support, then those capabilities must be fully developed, maintained, and monitored. Service and support should also be built into technology offerings in the first place. That means you not only need a team of fully qualified service technicians for post-sale service but also web-based near real-time remote service capabilities. 

 

Remember while it is fashionable to refer to the relationship between the management – employees as ‘family’ and that between the company and vendors as “ecosystem or partnerships” they most often are not — because they don’t understand the common experience they need to deliver.  If the brand is understood internally, then employees, managers and partners work together to support the promise.

 

 

Rakesh Shukla, Chief Executive & Founder, TWB_ I The Agency for Technology Brands I www.twb.in

Rakesh Shukla, TWB_

Entrepreneur, TEDx speaker, Philanthropist, Rakesh Shukla is a 1996 MBA graduate and 1993 BTech. Rakesh Shukla is the Founder & CEO of TWB_ which is the partner for technology & business content for Fortune 500 leaders worldwide. A motivational speaker he speaks on creating success from professional and personal failure. He divides time between his 2 homes in Bangalore and is called the ‘dog-father’ for being papa to the 750 rescued dogs that live with him at the VOSD Dog Sanctuary. Rakesh has featured in 100+ interviews on the BBC, CNN, Al-Jazeera, CNN-IBN, NDTV, India’s national dailies, and at TEDx talks.

 

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7 Steps to Creating a Powerful Technology Brand - Branding for Technology Branding - by Rakesh Shukla, Chief Executive and Founder, TWB_
30 Dec

7 steps for creating a powerful technology brand: Branding for Technology (Part 3 of 5) by Rakesh Shukla

By TWB_ In Communication, Corporate Training, Leadership, Product Strategy, Strategic Marketing /  5 No Comments

Discussing branding for technology, we’ve seen earlier what makes a brand — the idea of brand promise and lessons from FMCG branding for technology branding. In this article, we elaborate on brand concepts and suggest some specific steps senior managers can take to move their companies from a product-centric to a promise-centric, brand-driven business.

Let’s consider how the buyers and sellers of technology participate in the sales cycle and perceive branding,

From a tech buyers perspective: When B2B consumers of technology especially information technology weigh the merits of a vendor’s bid, they weigh not just how well the vendor’s products and services complement their own business and technological environment but also how the purchase decision looks to others. They are just as concerned with the image of the product as they are with the technical merits. Therefore while it is meant to be a rational decision that maximizes value, it is based on objective or subjective data. That is where a technology brand comes in.

From a tech marketers perspective: Conversely managers in high-tech businesses find brand management concepts interesting but see no merit in moving from a product-centric to a brand-centric model. The common refrain is “it doesn’t apply here”. This argument is based on what they believe to be unique characteristics of high-tech products and markets, mainly fast-changing technology and high levels of uncertainty.

As we’ve seen in the previous 2 chapters it is precisely this expectation gap that a technology brand solves. Indeed when things change quickly, buyers face great uncertainty and they want to deal with a company they perceive has a vision of their needs.

Challenges in high-tech branding are the same as others businesses in formulating distinctive and credible promises of value. However, in high-tech markets, offering a distinctive value proposition is especially difficult since competitors match one another’s clearly defined performance characteristics. There isn’t a great deal of trust between customers and companies in high-tech markets simply because there are many and frequent new entrants, and most have not had the time or the wisdom to build a promise of value that goes beyond price-performance.

For technology branding in the first place it important that before defining a brand for the company to define where it is and where it wants to go. In the first instance: what’s the brand promise? Google stands for discovery. Apple stands for quality and innovation. What’s yours? Aspiration? Trust? What should the customer feel each time they think about the company or use the product. This emotion is what needs to be built into the brand.

In the second place, the process involved in the development of a branding strategy requires us to review the purpose of the company, its reason to be. “Why we do what we do” is much more important than “what we do” and “how we do it”. What do customers, prospects, partners, investors, reporters, analysts, even competitors think? Bridging the gap between the two with messaging, positioning, and a visual language is the branding.

7 steps to creating a powerful technology brand

Price – Performance in branding

“Price” and “performance,” for example, may mean different things to different people. Does price mean initial cost or life cycle cost? Does performance mean microprocessor speed, the speed of delivery of services, the product’s ability to keep pace with the market? Does performance include presale and post-sale service and support? High-tech companies can make it clear exactly which aspects of their offerings’ price and performance benefit their customers through branding.

Developing the brand promise

The promise of value must be relevant to the people or businesses a company wants to have as its customers; no business can promise everything for everyone. But it is possible to tailor a promise to meet the desires of a specific subgroup of customers, as long as that promise can be kept and as long as it doesn’t confuse anyone. That’s why a company must consider its own capabilities and its target customer segments before developing its brand message. 

Branding on Benefits

Many high-tech managers are most comfortable a brand as a set of tangible, verifiable product characteristics. However, high-tech purchases involve not just technologists but also business managers and end users, who are far more interested in what a technology product does for them than in how it works. As high-tech managers come to understand this, many start changing the way they speak of their offerings. Instead of selling “products,” they sell “solutions” or “benefits.” Such a shift in thinking is not enough. A company needs to decide it wants to be in the space of product competition or brand competition. Competitors can continually match and leapfrog over one another by offering better and more features and by identifying the benefits of their products for customers.

Brand promises need to be enduring

While a brand needs to make an enduring promise. Making and keeping a promise, and keeping it consistently, can be a powerful source of competitive advantage. However making too many promises, or changing them frequently, raises uncertainty and erodes brand value. There’s a high probability that truly strong brands will continue to be leaders because they make and keep a promise of value over successive generations of technologies. True, newer technologies can eclipse older ones but an enduring promise of value can buy time for a brand in the face of new technology even the face of serious lapses in product quality.

Market share is not brand promise

Companies sometimes think that a leadership position in a market is a promise. However, market share, even overwhelming market share is not, a promise of value. Brand equity will distort customer perception of size and value very quickly and there is no way that a company can stay immune to if the competition focuses on it.

Brands provide emotional rewards

It is very difficult for many high-tech managers to acknowledge,  the idea that emotions can be so important to a company’s success. But goods and services that reside in that third level are indeed developed and positioned as a way of fulfilling a promise of value to selected customers, not simply as technologies in search of a market. How do customers feel when experiencing the benefits of the brand? Do they feel confident? Productive? Innovative? Caring? Responsible? Successful? 

Brands have personality

Brands have deeper values — such things as conservative values, family values, achievement-oriented values. These are characteristics the brand would have if it had human qualities: friendly, warm, caring, confident, decisive, aggressive, or the like. They attract a customer set they are focused on and are the differentiating characteristics of the brand. 

Brand Performance should be measured

Too often the only yardstick of performance is awards or 3rd party rankings – both of which may not be adequate -markers of brand performance. For high-tech companies, it is important to track how customers perceive the brand relative to its competition over time. It is also important to monitor the health of key dimensions of a brand’s promise of value. Even the most benchmarked aspect of customer satisfaction managers need to determine if satisfaction is leading to loyalty.

A company cannot expect to build broader acceptance simply by making a promise of value in advertising. It must first know what promise to make and to whom. That requires the ability to assess the potential of relevant technologies and to anticipate its customers’ current and future needs—even before customers can articulate those needs. It must also ensure that the promise of value is understood and fulfilled as the company manages complex networks of value-adding partners, ranging from consulting firms to systems integrators, from independent software vendors to resellers.

 

Rakesh Shukla, Chief Executive & Founder, TWB_ I The Agency for Technology Brands I www.twb.in

Rakesh Shukla, TWB_

Entrepreneur, TEDx speaker, Philanthropist, Rakesh Shukla is a 1996 MBA graduate and 1993 BTech. Rakesh Shukla is the Founder & CEO of TWB_ which is the partner for technology & business content for Fortune 500 leaders worldwide. A motivational speaker he speaks on creating success from professional and personal failure. He divides time between his 2 homes in Bangalore and is called the ‘dog-father’ for being papa to the 750 rescued dogs that live with him at the VOSD Dog Sanctuary. Rakesh has featured in 100+ interviews on the BBC, CNN, Al-Jazeera, CNN-IBN, NDTV, India’s national dailies, and at TEDx talks.

 

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Storytelling for Business - by Rakesh Shukla, Chief Executive and Founder, TWB_
30 Dec

Great storytelling for business leadership: What makes listeners connect?

By TWB_ In Communication, Corporate Training, Leadership /  10 No Comments

How many of your management team are true leaders — those who can inspire the organization, set a vision, teach important lessons, define culture and explain what the organization. Of those who are, how many are great communicators? Turns out some of the leadership and all of the communication are learnt skills. The easiest and the most powerful communication skill is telling great stories or ‘storytelling’.

Storytelling is critical for management and leadership because very often nothing else works. Graphs will leave listeners untouched. Conversation and dialogue can be too didactic. But the same listener can be moved with a great story. Storytelling in the business context translates abstract numbers into compelling statements of a leader’s goals —  by drawing the listener(s) into the story. Though business cases are made of hard numbers, stories make them spring to life because storytelling can show causal relationships. The question, therefore, is not about telling or not but rather to tell them unwittingly and clumsily or intelligently and skillfully. Storytelling can be learned by anyone who wants to be a leader — CXOs, Senior and Middle management.

Why is storytelling important?

In a  meeting or a talk in a short time-span, a leader can communicate maybe only 1 or 2 powerful ideas. Storytelling, however, allows for multi-layered complex ideas to be told since they are not sequential but interwoven. It is this association that and sharing of complex ideas that can allow leaders to – spark change, transmitting values, share knowledge and lead people into the future.

Leaders establish credibility through telling stories. The audience can feel and respond immediately and deeply. Stories can communicate complex ideas, break status quo, generate interaction & transformation. Rather than merely advocating and counter-advocating positions through constructed and business focussed meetings, talks, emails and other such communication a  story, especially a personal one, breaks through the acceptance barrier. Communication becomes empowering – even as the leader comes across as more vulnerable – yet someone who is still a leader because (s)he has persevered.  

Why is storytelling so powerful?

Storytelling draws in the listener and draws on the active, participation of individuals as against conventional management focuses on lifeless elements  – mission statements,  strategies, processes, budgets and assets. Stories make people discover a degree of coherence that is otherwise very difficult to achieve — something that has been an underlying principle of psychotherapy.

When a listener hears a story that touches him or her they feel their lives have a meaning.  This feeling eventually vaporises and the listener inevitably falls back into an everyday pattern — but with the difference that a radical shift in their lives have taken place and their motivation and behavior are primed for change.

What makes a good story and a good story-teller?

First and foremost the story needs to be personal and it needs to imply values. People make deep associations with leaders that have the courage to tell a strong personal story, and where the story implies certain values. The second is that the audience associates with people with a ‘consistent’ self‐image. For a leader, it is important to have a clear view of a personal life‐story that is aligned that is the thrust what you want the audience to see.

The leader tells a story to show people who they are. Their identity as an individual doesn’t lie in their roles, it is in the one‐of‐a‐kind person they have become as a result of the experiences they’ve had. The leader must tell stories interactively and model it on a conversation — that creates a relationship between the leader and the listener that is symmetrical — such that the listener could speak next. It is this feeling with the listener of being in an open conversation that the leader is vulnerable that the listener is drawn ‘into’ the story.

Types of storytelling

  • Style: The leader should tell the story as if it were being told to a single individual. The story should be kept simple, focused and clear with no alternate points of view. 
  • Don’t argue the truth: The leader should offer listeners an unobstructed view of the truth and listeners will see it and recognize it for what it is — that any reasonable person would have to agree.
  • Practice ease: Only 7% of the meaning of a communication came from the content of the words spoken 93% comes from nonverbal communication. The leader should seem spontaneous. They should choose the shape of the story and stick to it. Practice ease. 

Points of action

The story needs to have an end in mind — what do you want the listener to do when the story is over? These could include:

  • Sparking action: The story describes how a successful change was implemented in the past, but allows listeners to imagine how it might work in their situation. Communicating who they are – provides audience‐engaging drama and reveals some strength and vulnerability from the leaders past.
  • Transmitting values: The leader uses believable characters and situations and ensures the story is consistent about values and actions.  This feels familiar to the audience and will prompt discussion about why they can’t follow the same values/ action too!
  • Sharing knowledge: Leaders focus on problems and shows, in some detail, how they were corrected and why the solution worked and solicits alternative – and possibly better – solutions.
  • Leading people into the future: The leader evokes the future they want to create without providing excessive detail that will prove to be wrong.

No matter how compelling the numbers of sheets, charts or infographics if they require people to act in unfamiliar ways that is unlikely to happen. But effective storytelling often does. Storytelling can inspire people to act in unfamiliar ways. And remember storytelling not only gets the message across effectively, its incremental cost is zero. 

 

Rakesh Shukla, Chief Executive & Founder, TWB_ I The Agency for Technology Brands I www.twb.in

Rakesh Shukla, TWB_

Entrepreneur, TEDx speaker, Philanthropist, Rakesh Shukla is a 1996 MBA graduate and 1993 BTech. Rakesh Shukla is the Founder & CEO of TWB_ which is the partner for technology & business content for Fortune 500 leaders worldwide. A motivational speaker he speaks on creating success from professional and personal failure. He divides time between his 2 homes in Bangalore and is called the ‘dog-father’ for being papa to the 750 rescued dogs that live with him at the VOSD Dog Sanctuary. Rakesh has featured in 100+ interviews on the BBC, CNN, Al-Jazeera, CNN-IBN, NDTV, India’s national dailies, and at TEDx talks.

 

 

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Lessons from FMCG branding for Technology Branding - by Rakesh Shukla, Chief Executive and Founder, TWB_
30 Dec

Lessons from FMCG branding: Branding for Technology (Part 2 of 5) by Rakesh Shukla

By TWB_ In Communication, Corporate Training, Leadership, Marketing Content, Product Strategy, Strategic Marketing /  9 No Comments

Because the brand concept evolved in the consumer goods markets it is no reason to reject it in business-to-business technology markets. But neither can it be used as is. In this article, we understand the branding gap, draw lessons, and understand the differences, from an industry that creates enduring brands – the FMCG businesses.

A great deal of our knowledge about branding and brand strategies comes from the accumulated experience of consumer-packaged-goods companies (FMCG) such as Unilever,  Procter & Gamble and Nestlé. They practically invented brand management and have created a wealth of enduring and highly profitable brands. We’ve seen in Part I how for a large part of the high-technology businesses identity is seen as a logo or trademark and branding, where does that thinking come from and why. That is the major gap in how enduring the technology is in the market-place.

High-tech markets are often more segmented, focused, and granular. Marketing high-tech products and services, especially to the enterprise, costs less than marketing consumer packaged goods. An individual’s decision to buy a certain brand of soap may be more emotional than that of a company’s decision to go with a certain line of networking equipment, but the line between a high-tech product and a consumer product is becoming increasingly fuzzy. Parallel motives exist even in business-to-business high-tech purchases. Therefore there is a great deal to learn from the FMCG business on bridging the technology branding gap.

Lessons from FMCG branding

While the High-Technology industry is crowded and thrives on discontinuous change, marketing hardly ever focuses on benefits. The FMCG industry (as a surrogate for other industries with mature marketing practices) on the other hand has a much slower rate of change but articulates great continuity in branding! They very successfully make a promise of value is critical for a company to differentiate itself from its competitors and stake a solid claim in its intended market sometimes for decades.

But if FMCG industries are great in branding then why don’t tech companies just run with it? Why doesn’t the high-technology industry leverage FMCG (say) marketing? In the first place, each is defined by the contours of its industry. The channels are not the same. The customer is not the same. The buying decision is not exactly the same. Understanding the differences allows us to highlight how to fill the branding gap in high-technology. Here are some high-technology branding aspects and how they are different from their FMCG counterparts.

Promise of Value

A fast pace of change renders all technology product brands obsolete quickly. Customer criteria and expectations change rapidly. The overall expectation of experience that a customer has with the brand that is it’s purchase-use- feedback-repurchase is the something that the FMCG business likes to tightly control even though the product travels through long-chain channels for delivery and renewal. On the other hand technology businesses have fewer degrees of separation from the actual consumer to where the product originates but the high-tech businesses seldom actually completely articulate their promise of value which is core to building a brand.

Product Longevity

In the FMCG industry, technology is not fast changing and there is a greater emphasis on emotional messaging and building a connection with the consumer. The relationship between a brand and its consumer forms the basis of loyalty and companies build a brand with a horizon that is years if not many decades. In high-tech businesses, not many brands attempt to establish that connection with the consumer primarily because even the best B2B product life cycle is seen as 3-4 yrs.

Communication Asks

The purpose of branding is different in both.  FMCG branding builds a communication cycle to build recall or induce purchase. FMCG brands focus on the ‘touch’ points where the consumer will experience it to induce an interaction. For high-tech businesses, a large part of their business may be with B2B customers, and advertising is a less important ingredient of the promotion mix than more cost-effective ways of approaching customers such as trade shows, the Internet, and user groups.

High-tech users look for solutions to problems — they are invariably looking to ease a pain point or make life easier and they often start by searching for an answer. In high-tech branding, therefore, it is utilized communications that reach customers at the exact moments and places where they seek to engage to solve problems.  

Articulating Benefits

The most key lesson that FMCG brings to branding is the focus on benefits. Most high-tech branding talks about features and not benefits. There is a lot of engineering stuff narrated in high-tech branding whereas  FMCG branding has been able to convert those features into a consumer benefit that in turn focuses on a single promise of value.

Perceived Risk

FMCG products typically carry relatively small perceived risk. Unit prices are low. Time to repurchase is short. Demand for user behaviour change is low. High-Tech products, on the other hand, have much steeper learning curves and most of the time a multi-year purchase lock-in. High-Tech branding message needs to address this risk and manage it through the adoption curve.

Purchase Cycles

FMCG purchase decisions are made quickly and most often by lone consumers based on few criteria and purchases often characterized by impulse buying. High-Tech purchase decisions are more B2B decisions and are made by groups or committees over long evaluation cycles based on many criteria followed by extended negotiations. The high-tech brand, therefore, should be used to set and influence decision-making criteria as well as defend pricing and terms.

Availability, Distribution & Time to Experience

FMCG products typically have deep vertical supply chains for delivery direct to consumer at the time of purchase. Consumer enjoys immediate gratification. In the technology business multiple vendor components ‘assemble’ the product experience. Delivery to the customer includes partners, resellers or multiple third parties such as integrators. Implementation and operation trail purchase by weeks or months. High-Tech branding, therefore, has a large role to play to assure buyers of user experience, risk avoidance, and return on investment.

Tech Branding Lessons from FMCG

High-Tech companies often focus too heavily on the product that they’re selling, rather than telling the story behind it. Technology decisions, especially B2B purchases, are expensive especially when they impact an entire organization. These costs are both direct and indirect (maintenance, training, etc). As against FMCG where risk is low, gratification is immediate and cost of purchase is simple. To induce buyers to buy a high-tech brand must sell a vision, not just a product. A customers’ emotional response to high-tech branding has far more influence in their purchasing decision, even a B2B product, than the actual product itself. High-Tech branding requires continual reinvestment to ensure users engage with the product and develop a strong loyalty to the brand.  High-Technology products reach a threshold of functional breadth and depth quickly which then delivers diminishing marginal returns to customers. Only companies which have developed a brand preference, over more temporary ‘product’ preference, insulate themselves from commoditization and set themselves apart for continued growth.

 

Rakesh Shukla, Chief Executive & Founder, TWB_ I The Agency for Technology Brands I www.twb.in

Rakesh Shukla, TWB_

Entrepreneur, TEDx speaker, Philanthropist, Rakesh Shukla is a 1996 MBA graduate and 1993 BTech. Rakesh Shukla is the Founder & CEO of TWB_ which is the partner for technology & business content for Fortune 500 leaders worldwide. A motivational speaker he speaks on creating success from professional and personal failure. He divides time between his 2 homes in Bangalore and is called the ‘dog-father’ for being papa to the 750 rescued dogs that live with him at the VOSD Dog Sanctuary. Rakesh has featured in 100+ interviews on the BBC, CNN, Al-Jazeera, CNN-IBN, NDTV, India’s national dailies, and at TEDx talks.

 

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The Essential of Branding for Technology - by Rakesh Shukla, Chief Executive and Founder, TWB_
29 Dec

Essentials of Technology Branding: Branding for High-Tech (Part I of 5) by Rakesh Shukla

By TWB_ In Communication, Content, Corporate Training, Marketing Content, Strategic Marketing /  8 No Comments

A high-tech company’s brand is not the product name, not the logo, not the tagline, nor brand colours. All these are associated with the brand – but they do not form the brand itself.  It is the name of its business. In this part 1 of 5 parts, we examine what are the drivers & characteristics of high-tech branding, how the models for FMCG branding don’t work for high-tech and what does. 

TWB_ works with the worlds leading high-tech companies, whose solution is so brilliant that significant business growth has been achieved through inbound marketing. The company and its marketing believe that if a new technology is as good as it says it is then the product can sell by itself. In the short term it may be true but in the long term, it leaves the company vulnerable to attack. The fence is the brand. 

Strong brands are forged out of an emotional connection with customers. Branding forces marketing to ask what is the number one emotion each time the customer engages with the brand. Customers experience through when they read your blog, visit your website, retweet a tweet, visit a store, call customer care or watch a product video. Building a brand, therefore, forces the company to revisit what it really is, because as we’ll see, brands are promises that deliver an experience.

Why do you need branding?

High-tech companies tend to forgo a true branding strategy in place of focusing on improving the technology on offer chiefly delivering additional features. The fast-changing pace of technology means that, although the solution might very well be the best on the market today, tomorrow, another company could bring out something that’s even better – and there is an infinite release cycle to catch up. Brand building is a strategy that looks to the long-term, with the ultimate purpose of gaining a sustainable competitive advantage, here’s how:

Branding creates differentiation

In a world of marketing plagiarism, branding is what demonstrates a company’s competitive advantage by highlighting the company’s purpose. A brand is the identity of a company. And identity is everything. Without branding, there is no differentiation.

Branding is a cushion

For a technology business to maintain its altitude over the long-term,  branding is just as important – perhaps even more important – than the technology itself. Branding – which is the branding of the company as opposed to the actual product – is what give the business a chance of long-term growth and survival.

Branding lowers perceived risk, but highlights innovation

High-Tech industries live in high uncertainty environments. Uncertainty is both about innovation (disruptive products and competitors) and markets (how quickly will the market shift?). Customers, strangely, live in a paradox — innovation is seen as a great motivator to choose a product but anything that is too disruptive and discontinuous is easy to reject, on the other hand.

  • Scepticism is inherent to innovation because new technologies tend to suffer from a liability of newness, that is, they do not have a history of past performance. Consequence there is uncertainty about technology being immature and unstable. A powerful brand can straddle this and communicate the promise.
  • Innovative products elevate perceived risk because consumer familiarity and experience is limited. The perceived risk of a new product purchase may exceed the individual’s acceptable level of risk affecting even if they are early adopters and the financial risk is with the company. Again brands provide a continuity of ‘experience’ even in times of change for both early and late adopters. 

Brands forge company identities & relationships

Brands can create growing base of employees after founders and early employees get outnumbered by new hires. Brands accelerate the depth of an ecosystem of partners. Powerful brands help attract and keep customers. It can also be a strong foundation from which to launch new products, improve relationships with channel partners, foster good communication among employees within and across business functions, and help a company better focus its resources.

Bridging the Technology-Branding gap

But if brands work so well, why don’t more high-tech companies brand more effectively? It’s because Tech managers assume that brands and brand images are relevant only when purchase decisions are “irrational” or “emotional” and seen to be the case appropriate for detergents, automobiles, and fashion. However, the evidence is totally on the contrary on performance data of markets populated by highly sophisticated and experienced customers. High ticket high-tech purchase decision as made on much the same beliefs and decision-making processes. So how do we bridge the gap and create world-class technology brands?

Product-Centric thinking: Why Tech-Managers stall branding

Most technically trained managers won’t  easily buy the idea that their businesses should be focused on brands. The first stop in having effective brand management is well your management.  Here’s why:

  1. “Why does a great tech company need brand management?” The bias is simply because managers who have grown up through the technical side of the business do not truly understand what good brand management involves and what it can do for their company. Most tech-managers think of marketing as selling, and branding as an advertising campaign or a slogan for them these are both costly and difficult to assess. For most tech-managers, the idea of developing and maintaining a strong brand simply does not resonate.
  2. “That’s what marketing does, doesn’t it?” Without C level or even Business or Product Management commitment brand management is mostly left to the marketing or sales departments. So it’s not central to the technical direction of the company. A brand remains a  logo, a trademark, a slogan, or a campaign — and marketing is supposed to handle those things.
  3. While the tech-managers don’t understand marketing, the marketing managers don’t understand technology.

The market share myth of Product-Centric thinking 

Product-Centric thinking is when managers in high-tech companies think that high-tech products and services will succeed as long as they perform as promised. A good product will satisfy customers’ needs, and develop a large install base.

  • Product-centric thinking is dangerous because customers do not necessarily experience a company’s promise of value just because its products enjoy wide acceptance.
  • Technology Managers are taught to think that market success depends primarily on the price-performance ratio and a product’s success is ensured once a large installed base is secured. It is assumed there is a customer lock in as switching costs pose a barrier to buying from other suppliers. However, monopoly power built on an overwhelming market share is not, in the end, a promise of value.

Short term – vs – Long term planning

High technology companies struggle between what they perceive as a choice: short-term product marketing versus long term brand building. Mature technology companies strike a balance as they understand the competitive advantages derived from powerful brands. Others dilute or forego branding in favor of more tactical technology evolution, new product feature sets, increased flexibility or improved price-performance. This short term focus results in a product marketing emphasis, which renders the marketing spend and message obsolete as the technology continually advances.

What then should a brand be?

A brand is the way in which customers perceive this personality. A tech company’s brand is the way in which users experience the product and service at all levels. It is the brand to which customers stay loyal to in a market where there are plenty of other similar solutions. In later parts, we’ll examine the framework of creating a technology brand and how a company develops a ‘promise of value’ for its customers.

 

Rakesh Shukla, Chief Executive & Founder, TWB_ I The Agency for Technology Brands I www.twb.in

Rakesh Shukla, TWB_

Entrepreneur, TEDx speaker, Philanthropist, Rakesh Shukla is a 1996 MBA graduate and 1993 BTech. Rakesh Shukla is the Founder & CEO of TWB_ which is the partner for technology & business content for Fortune 500 leaders worldwide. A motivational speaker he speaks on creating success from professional and personal failure. He divides time between his 2 homes in Bangalore and is called the ‘dog-father’ for being papa to the 750 rescued dogs that live with him at the VOSD Dog Sanctuary. Rakesh has featured in 100+ interviews on the BBC, CNN, Al-Jazeera, CNN-IBN, NDTV, India’s national dailies, and at TEDx talks.

 

Are you looking to create or improve your technology brand?

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TWB_ (formerly TWB) is the world leader in Technology Content and the Strategic + Creative + Technology Agency for Technology Brands I www.twb.in
29 Dec

Where can HR leverage AI? And what are the biggest challenges

By TWB_ In Corporate Training /  3 No Comments

TWB_ (formerly TWB) in Sept 2017 organized AutomationShift_  — India’s first CXO Conference on Artificial Intelligence. The talks and discussions included that actual on-the-ground reality of AI in engineering, analytics, sales, marketing, HR and other functions across industries. There were excellent perspectives from the senior management of Microsoft, SalesForce, Dimension Data and a host of others on how AI is being leveraged. There are several Indian startups already offering AI based recruitment solutions. It is clear that as with all others AI will reshape how companies manage their workforce and make HR plans to increase productivity and employee engagement in general. Here’s a quick look at what really is the impact of AI on HR?

Automation impacts efficiency & decision making

AI will impact the entire HR value chain from the CV to promotions and the actual experience of being an employee.

Hiring

The bane of a lot of the HR work is the grunt work – hauling information and sifting through it. When that is automated it’s not just the time, but a lot of other benefits that can be drawn through AI:

  • Talent Acquisition: The stressful and monotonous part of talent acquisition which is to scan, read, and evaluate applicants can be automated by as much as 75%. HR can dramatically improve hiring decisions with recruiters spending more time evaluating only eligible candidates.
  • Shortlisting: So far at the most software could do was search through vast amounts of resumes and applicant data by keyword, education, location and years of experience. However, search results are no determination of relevance. Machine learning allows HR to build teaching sets about who the top current employees are, build models around top existing performers and their backgrounds and career paths. This results in matches are made on desired traits on deep background assessment and fitment with current employees.
  • Determining Fitment: How do you engage with 1000s of candidates asking questions that are not there in the job description? Chatbots can help prospective job seekers get the information conversationally, for instance, if they take a job or how flexible an employer is, before they even apply for a role at a company.
  • Eliminating Interview Bias: Interviewer’s “gut” or intuition is not always objective and AI can eliminate that at least at screening levels. For instance, video interviewing technology can help an employer rank an interviewees comfort, level of honesty, even grade the quality of the answers.


Onboarding

New employees demand a lot of attention and it is often impossible to dedicate enough time to each one of them and this causes employee churn. AI is helping customize onboarding procedures for each individual position so the interventions are specific and connected with the entire recruitment experience. 

Training

AI makes possible to determine what specific training intervention is required for a specific employee and then custom delivering that training. AI is also helping build organize, and schedule training programs. 

Performance Management

AI makes a more agile deterministic model of individual and group performance using smaller increments available. Working this way allows constant course correction to keep an optimum engagement to improve productivity and detect team members who show lack of engagement continuously.

Employee Retention

It has been difficult so far to determine individual affinities, manager relationships, satisfaction with raises and life-work balance that determine employees individual satisfaction. With the ability of a large amount of data that can deliver patterns of behaviour AI will make it possible for HR professionals to be proactive work on specific interventions to maintain employee retention.

What is the largest challenges in leveraging AI in HR?

  1. Data: HR data is not managed effectively by most companies. A company may have 5-6 different systems of record and applying an algorithm against any one data set is not possible. The first challenge is to get people-related data into one place so it can be analyzed.
  2. Policy: While most employees agree to their company having access to data when they join, ensuring that insights into individual employees are ‘safe’ is a key determinant for acceptance. 

 

What Next?

 

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