AfricaNXT: High Performance Brands Masterclass

How to Build Brands for High
Performance and Sustainability
By Nkemdilim Uwaje Begho & Bella Ikeme
www.futuresoft-ng.com

1. Top Brand Challenges
2. Let’s Talk Brand Strategy
3. Building Brands for Sustainability
4. What’s Next?
Overview

1. Top Brand Challenges
Let’s explore top brand challenges brands
are dealing with

What are the most common brand challenges?
Strategy
- Lack of a defined brand strategy
- Brand strategy does not align to organisational goals
- Due to lack of collaboration the execution of a brand strategy is not
cohesive → poor stakeholder experience
Structure, Commitment & Collaboration
- Lack of collaboration and teamwork within various units across the
organisation
- No board oversight
- Lack of ownership and reporting structures
Brand Challenges

Brand:
- No Brand / Weak Brand / Visual only brand / Incomplete brand
positioning / Inconsistent brand and messaging
- ESG & DEI as checkboxes that exist outside of the brand - lack of
understanding on how to achieve a seamless integration
- Lack of governance structures → losing hold of your brand identity →
the brand is all over the place
- The brand seems outdated and lacklustre due to current focus not
being represented in the current branding or simply a lack of
creativity and innovation
CX:
- Poor customer experience → lack of data & insights, lack of focus
groups, lack of customer engagement, lack of focus on reducing
friction → customer not at the centre of the design
- Creating products without a brand foundation
Brand Challenges

Data / Reporting:
- Focus on the wrong (marketing) metrics and business drivers
- Not tracking success of campaigns, products etc.
Reputation:
- Reputational Damage
- Greenwashing / Bluewashing
- High Attrition rates - insufficient brand positioning to attract and
retain talent
Technology:
- Frictionless MarTech Stack → Interoperability
- MarTech Stack Dependencies that don’t allow easy migration of
systems and / or data
Brand Challenges

Budget:
- Lack of a defined marketing budget due to not prioritising brand
strategy
- Inadequate budget allocated to brand strategy and
implementation
- A decent budget allocated to the wrong things → poor ROI
Brand Challenges

How do you identify your biggest brand challenges
- Periodic Strategy Reviews and Brand Audits
- Ensure you have a baseline
- Scenario Planning and Risk Analysis
- Analyse Volume and type of customer support complaints
- Public brand sentiment / Social Listening
- Analytics across all customer touchpoints
- Tracking Consumer behaviour - focus on cross generational
patterns
- Competitor & market analysis
- Ask the right questions and ensure you have access to the right
information
- Review the metrics you are currently tracking and ask yourself if
they are the right ones
- Ask your stakeholders / Listen to your stakeholders
Brand Challenges

How do you mitigate / solve your biggest brand
challenges
- Be clear on your Purpose, Mission, Vision and Values and let them
guide your brand
- Have a brand strategy in place and continuously evolve this
brand strategy
- Have a proper governance framework in place
- Carry all internal stakeholders along to ensure everyone is on the
same page
- Build a solid foundation before you grow & scale
- Be open to rapid prototyping and brand sprints to test concepts
- Co-create with your stakeholders (customers, partners, employees,
competitors)
- Upskill your team / board / management
Brand Challenges

How do you mitigate / solve your biggest brand
challenges
- Use your data and the insights you can derive from it
- Understand success metrics and track them real time with board
oversight
- Reputation Tracking & Social Listening
- Listen to your customers & build for and with your customer
- Do what you say and stand for - don’t sugar coat things - don’t
create the wrong impression
- Focus on an inclusive and diverse workplace that fosters equity
and positive culture
Brand Challenges

Optimise your CX & Product Design
- Fundamentals
- Update and optimise your Buyer Personas and Customer
Profiles → Have cross generational personas and profiles
- Invest in CX Strategy and an interconnected customer
journey → Think Omnichannel
- Invest in reliable data that can give you consumer insights
- Brand Sprints
- Using Design Thinking to create brand sprints
- Developing low fidelity prototypes that can be tested on real
customers / employees / vendors / stakeholders and can be
developed into MVPs / full fledged products / campaigns
using insights gained from the prototype testing
Other things you can do…

- Funnel Optimisation
- Align Lead Generation, Customer Acquisition & Retention
Goals with the different stages of the funnel, while addressing
buying objections and creating content, CTAs, touchpoints
and experiences to support each stage
- Constantly testing your CX, products and funnel will allow you
identify and eliminate friction
- Review customer support queries, online feedback and
feedback from direct engagement with customers
- Humanise your brand
- Humanise and Personalise your brand and your customer
experience as much as possible

- Innovation
- Constantly innovate around your customer experience → it
may be just the right time to hire a Chief Customer Experience
Officer
- Customer Support
- Weave in customer self-service solutions like chatbots, FAQs,
etc.
- Support customers proactively

Data, Personalisation, Automation & Reporting
Marketing can be measured, but you must know what to measure and
how to interpret the results.
Popular metrics such as customer satisfaction, acquisition, and retention
have turned out to be very poor indicators of customers’ true perceptions
of a brand or the success of marketing activities. For effective tracking
and reporting, you must:
1. Understand your business drivers: lead with a survey of the brand’s
business drivers and how to measure them correctly. Business drivers
that are critical in one company may be unimportant in another. Any
business driver that you want to attach a metric to must be one that is
useful to follow. Some metrics that are always indicative of brand
strength and tell a story are customer lifetime value and rate of
adoption of new products.

2. Have a pipeline of growth ideas: What do our customers want, and
how is our knowledge of their desires being translated into a pipeline of
innovations? The trends revealed by the main business drivers give you
insights about customers and revenue growth.
To keep customers, you have to delight them, exceed their
expectations. You must anticipate, discover, and fulfill their latent
needs. The board needs to be attuned to all the research around
market research tools.
Once or twice a year, marketing should review:
- How the customer base is segmented
- How the size and profitability of each segment is changing, and
- How the company’s products and services address the needs of
each segment

3. Branding and Marketing Talent
Your organisation need not to excel in all areas of marketing, just those
that support its main business drivers. The question it should be asking is
“Do we have the right marketing talent?” It’s easy to have the best
mass-marketing capability money can buy, but if it’s a customer-
service-driven firm with a pipeline of service innovations, what it really
needs are customer-relationship-management skills.
The board should expect a thorough appraisal of the company’s
marketing strategy and its inventory of marketing capabilities. A lot of
the time marketing needs and marketing skills are poorly aligned.
Once a year, the company’s talent or HR manager should provide the
board with a detailed review of the recruiting and people-
development plans that will address any gaps in the required
marketing skill set for its growth plans.

2. Let’s Talk
Brand Strategy
Setting the Scene: The How, The Why and
The What. Brand strategy as a driver for
high performance and sustainability

Let’s Talk Brand Strategy - A Roadmap to Success
Phase 1
Strategy
Change Management
Sustainability
Processes
Governance
Customer Exp.
People
Enhancing
Brand
Equity
Delivering
Change
Audit Strategy Optimisation Implementation Monitoring &
Evaluation
Identify Brand
Challenges:
Audit of
Digital Channels,
Brand Identity,
Strategy, People
and Processes
Strategy Workshop
Foundation
Building
Development
of Strategies
& Processes
Brand Sprints
& Prototyping
Optimisation &
Development of
Brand Identity,
Marketing
Channels and
Customer
Touchpoints
Implementation
of Strategies
Turn Data into
insights, Track,
Tweak
Phase 2 Phase 3
Repeat Cycle

What you should remember:
Brand strategy must:
- Be aligned to the business goals of an organisation to ensure
prioritisation.
- Cut across visual branding, brand positioning, product, customer
experience and must function as a strategic driver
- Be driven by Purpose, Values, Mission, Vision and alignment with
chosen Sustainability pillars
- Have Board level oversight from a strategy & risk perspective
- Have a Governance Framework to ensure effectiveness
- Be seen as a strategic investment not as a cost centre
- Focus on Data Driven Decision Making, Tracking the right metrics for
performance
- Be developed through continuous training & capacity development
across board
Let’s Talk Brand Strategy - Key Takeaways

3. Building Brands for
Sustainability
Let’s talk ESG, Stakeholder Management,
Inclusive Marketing and all that good stuff

Strategic Approach to ESG

What is ESG: Environmental, Social and Governance
ESG is a set of standards measuring a business's impact on society, the
environment, and how transparent and accountable it is. It has the
potential to grow your business while benefiting the environment and
community, as two-thirds of investors consider ESG factors when
investing in a business.
An ESG strategy could demonstrate that a company is reducing risks
such as adapting manufacturing processes to meet future
environmental legislation which could make the business a good bet
for longer-term growth.
With ESG as an essential component for business growth, there is
tremendous value in understanding what ESG is, where your business
can adopt its principles and approaches, and how it can benefit your
organisation.

Things you should consider when thinking ESG & brand
- Entrench sustainability into your core values so it translates
efficiently across the entire business. Work internally as well as
externally with other organisations in the ecosystem to address
larger ESG problems.
- ESG - the African perspective - there is no need to copy - we can
create unique approaches. Chosen strategy must be nuanced to
reflect current realities.
- Align strategy with sustainability, so you can start wherever you
are and build traction
- Build a strategy and roadmap for wider stakeholder commitment
to sustainability
- Integrate ESG into brand with people and social at the centre of
the conversation.
- The board must be engaged as well as other stakeholder groups,
as with sustainability - collaboration is critical.

- Address compliance - Understand the regulation in your industry
for compliance
- Communicate this compliance to stakeholders transparently. From
matters of pollution and energy efficiency to human rights and
employee/ labour responsibility
- Educate your vendors - Ensure vendors and all parts of your supply
chain are ESG compliant
- Nudge customer behaviour: We are in this together and the buck
does not stop at us getting our products into the hands of
customers. What they do with the products is just as important as
the sale. Customer awareness and education are a big part of
integrating ESG into your brand.
- Quantify - Include a business case for sustainability efforts so there
is more motivation to adopt asides simply for compliance

- Be proactive - anticipate areas of improvement and build into
your strategy before it becomes a problem.
- Be honest - don’t sugarcoat the reality or portray your brand as
something you are not
- Be clear on the risks - greenwashing, bluewashing, reputational
risk, customer loyalty etc.
- Integrate ESG into your products, customer experience and
marketing & communication: Your ESG efforts should not be
hidden in your Sustainability report or be a feature on your website
or a weekly post on social - your brand must eat, breathe and live
ESG / sustainability by infusing elements into the overall customer
experience.
- ESG & Content Marketing: Brands can use content marketing to
drive awareness across stakeholder groups, educate vendors and
consumers alike, position as thought leaders within their industry
and become known for being a brand with heart,

What is a Stakeholder?
A stakeholder is a party that has an interest in an organisation and can
either affect or be affected by the business.
- Primary stakeholders are employees, leadership, investors,
customers, vendors and suppliers. As you begin to actively
incorporate sustainability, stakeholders would include
communities, governments, regulatory agencies, trade
associations and the public.
- Internal Stakeholders - their interest in the entity would be through
a direct relationship, such as employment, ownership, or
investment.
- External Stakeholders - their interest is not through directly working
with the organisation but are affected in some ways by the
actions and outcomes of the business.
Stakeholder Management

Stakeholder Alignment Should Be Values Driven
A common problem that arises for companies with numerous
stakeholders is that the various stakeholder interests may not align. In
fact, the interests may be in direct conflict.
The most efficient companies successfully manage the interests and
expectations of all their stakeholders. Most times it boils down to having
the same values.
Any organisation that wants to get or be serious about sustainability
must first of all ensure that it attracts and is only attracted to potential
stakeholders with aligned interests.

Communication and Transparency is Key
The stakeholder engagement process is continuous and interactive, so
it’s essential to keep channels of communication open at all times.
The best way to communicate with your stakeholders is to send out
updates regularly. It will ensure that they catch up with all the updates
on the latest developments in the process and will also help to build
and maintain a good relationship with them.
- Be clear and concise in your communications
- Be transparent: When you are communicating with stakeholders,
be honest and upfront about your business. Share both the good
and the bad news.
- Follow through on your commitments to build trust and credibility
with your stakeholders.
- Be responsive to stakeholder inquiries.
- Use different channels of communication: It’s important to use
communication channels and content formats that are most
effective for your stakeholder group.
- Keep your stakeholder informed

Setting the stage…a few definitions
DEI - Diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) is a term used to describe
policies and programs that promote the representation and
participation of different groups of individuals, including people of
different ages, races and ethnicities, abilities and disabilities, genders,
religions, cultures and sexual orientations. This also covers people with
diverse backgrounds, experiences, skills and expertise.
Inclusive Marketing is marketing with the goal of speaking to a diverse
community, bearing in mind differences in age, ethnicity, gender
identity, socio economic status, religion, orientation and physical and
mental ability
Inclusive Marketing & Communications

How to Make Your Brand Marketing Inclusive
Any business, any size and in any industry can implement inclusive
marketing strategies by:
- Reviewing your current Brand Strategy and Brand Assets
- Understanding your audience / stakeholders and what matters to
them as well as how they perceive your brand
- Making inclusive marketing an everlasting part of your brand
through your messaging, brand visuals, language, sound,
multimedia, content, communications channels etc. and by
avoiding stereotyping
- Testing your DEI brand marketing campaigns on focus groups that
represent your actual audience / stakeholders
- Ensuring all your Digital assets, ads and products are digital
accessibility compliant
- Ensuring you have sufficient diversity on your team

How to Make Your Brand Marketing Inclusive
Any business, any size and in any industry can implement inclusive
marketing strategies by:
- Being intentional
- Having a DEI baseline, DEI success metrics and DEI goals in place
that are actively being tracked and reported at board level
- Identify and eliminate bias in your ads, products and date
- Diversifying your social proof

4. What’s Next?
2023 is here…how is your brand going to
evolve?

2023 is here…how is your brand going to evolve?
This is what you should be asking yourself:
- Have we audited our brand?
- Do we have a brand strategy?
- Is our brand strategy part of our organisational fabric / DNA?
- Do we know what our brand’s biggest challenges are and how to
solve them?
- Do we have clarity on our stakeholders, integrating ESG or DEI into
our brand strategy and optimising our overall customer
experience?
- How are we using data, what can we automate and how do
humanise our brand and communications?
- Does our branding team, marketing team, board and
management have the right skills and knowledge?
What’s Next?

Let us be your Brand
Strategy Partner…
● Brand Audit
● Brand Strategy
● Brand Optimization
● Brand Sprints
● Integrated Marketing Communications
● Digital Marketing
● Corporate Branding
● Go-to Market Strategy
● Executive Training
Email us on: nkem@futuresoft-ng.com and
bella@futuresoft-ng.com

Info@futuresoft-ng.com
Contact Us:
Thank You!
Got Questions?

AfricaNXT: High Performance Brands Masterclass

Recomendados

Recomendados

Mais conteúdo relacionado

Semelhante a AfricaNXT: High Performance Brands Masterclass

Semelhante a AfricaNXT: High Performance Brands Masterclass (20)

Último

Último (20)

AfricaNXT: High Performance Brands Masterclass