How Social Enables Brand Resilience and Why It Matters - Complete Set

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How social media enables brand resilience - customers & brand promise

Predicting brand resilience is no simple thing. When Qantas decided recently to ground its fleet worldwide, at zero notice, it was ob-

viously fully aware of the potential brand damage. Qantas made the decision as the lesser of evils in the unfolding and unrelenting contest between the unions and management. What followed next wasn’t quite so predictable as Qantas flew straight into a Twitter debacle which topped the 2011 PR Disaster List and many pundits predicted that the brand had suffered irreparable damage.

At that time, by deploying our social business intelli-gence, we found that the brand sentiment wasn’t in

good shape – by one measure the sentiment sur-rounding “Qantas” stood at 50% negative (16% positive and 34% neutral, measured over 7 days across all news, blogs and social media services worldwide). But surprisingly the brand hasn’t see-med to have suffered lasting damage, at least not yet in financial terms nor passenger-share terms, although damage was estimated to their brand va-lue. All-in-all it demonstrates how complicated brand resilience is to dissect and also it highlights how brands have to take a holistic approach to their social presence and reputation as part of their bu-siness strategy.

Social media can play a crucial role in brand re-silience (although ironically in the Qantas case it hasn’t). To know how we need to set up a model of brand resilience, and here is one (below) which is no doubt not perfect, but adequate. If you think of “customer experience strategy” then you think of a coherent blend of brand positioning, marketing, cus-tomer experience and employee experience. These

also all reflect on brand resilience, but brand resi-lience is more because it it effected by non-customer actions e.g. blunders by company’s social media or PR people.

In Part 1 we’ll explain the brand resilience model, in Part 2 the role of social media, and in Part 3 and 4 how to use the model in a brand crisis.

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The Brand Resilience Model

Brand Resilience is a lagging function of:

1. Brand Promise;2. Brand Experience;3. Brand Friction; and,4. Brand Stock.

Brand Promise

Brand Promise is that which satisfies an indivi-dual’s expectations when delivered. It closes the gap between “who and what brands say they are” and “what and how they delivered” – it’s about sa-tisfying the customer experience.

We usually think about it as “what pops into your head when I say Brand X?. For example, “Jetstar” = “cheap fares”. Sticking with airlines, take Porter Airlines from Canada, they say “flying refined” is their brand promise – that’s a challenge which they’ve largely met although some reviews are

mixed.

When I think of Qantas I can’t actually think of their Promise – but perhaps that’s just me. I’m aware of some key brand attributes e.g. safety, and “Spirit of Australia”, which have proven remarkably resilient despite, in my opinion, having no real connection with their extant brand values (not meaning their “brand value”). Qantas did run a marketing cam-paign with the theme “Qantas makes business tra-vel a breeze”. This used to pop into my head those endless times when arriving in Melbourne on the last nightly Qantas flight from Sydney and sitting there cooped up in the cabin waiting for 15 minutes while they tried to find ground staff to come to meet the aircraft to open the front door! Brand Promise –

#FAIL – yet another piece of marketing “creativity” which was detached from operational reality.

Traditionally, we think of the Promise being driven by marketing and advertising – “them” telling us what it will be. But perhaps counter-intuitively, gi-ven the amount of money spend on advertising, on launching a brand, or on “re-branding” exercises, brands can build their promise purely through the Brand Experience without spending money on pro-moting the promise per se. I say “per se” because a company may spend resources on promoting the Promise by relaying or amplifying positive customer feedback which reflects the Promise.

The customer experience alone, without advertising or PR, or even without an explicit Promise, can in fact create an Promise by reputation, by word of mouth and referral. This is especially so with res-pect to companies which pursue the “Breadth” part of Brand Experience (see below) through a social business strategy.

Brand Experience – Depth and Breadth

A marketing & advertising-led Promise is only PR until it is “operationalised” – which is the Brand Experience. The Promise creates expectations of future value delivery, whereas the Experience is realised value.

Brand Experience, is what some say IS the brand, that is, regardless of the Promise the reality of how the brand is experienced IS the brand. In which case customer experience deserves a lot of attention, and I think a new kind of framework. It’s mostly described in operational terms as transactional tou-chpoints. For example that includes buying an air-line ticket online, checking in at the airport, picking up luggage, or getting a refund. It’s also becoming more and more challenging with the advent of major outsourcing of many “low value add” operations

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across many industries. In fact some companies have re-insourced what they previously outsourced in order to regain control of aspects of the Brand Experience.

Brand Depth

Where the Brand Experience fails the Brand Pro-mise, or adversely reflects on the Brand or Brand Promise, we usually say that the organisation lacks Brand Depth. Brand Depth represents the collec-tive operational touch-points of the Experience. For example, we fly on a cut-price – cheap – airline, we accept the rather chaotic boarding process, we accept the lack of knowledge of the cabin crew be-cause they make up for it with youthful enthusiasm, and we accept the wait for our luggage – because we value we are seeking is cheap fares – Promise delivered!

However, when your wait for your baggage turns into lost baggage, and when you finally find someone to ask and they give you a number to call, and the call centre doesn’t really know what’s going on and cannot make even vague promises, you begin to hate the fact that you choose price over service. The Promise remains true, but the collateral damage caused by a lack of Brand Depth negatively effects Brand Resilience.

Brand Breadth

Brand Breadth is a new idea which encompasses all the non-operational touch-points, and especially so-cial media. This concept of Breadth is crucially im-portant today for brands, because it has a significant impact on Brand Resilience.

In fact Brand Breadth, in today’s world, will build stronger Resilience than Depth, even though Depth is the core delivery engagement with the customers. This is because the operational experience, the Depth, can be very much commoditised – cheap

airline versus cheap airline – whereas the customer relationship can be greatly enhanced through the Breadth, thus significantly adding to Resilience.

Having an investment in Brand Breadth provides a potential platform for not only product and service improvement, value creation, and brand extension, but it is an underlying asset to be used in times of crisis and operational difficulties as we’ll discuss in Parts 3 and 4.

Brand Experience – Depth and Breadth – contributes to both Brand Resilience and Brand Friction. And in fact Depth informs further orthogonal reinforce-ment of Resilience and Friction via the mechanism of Brand Breadth. In other words, a good or bad customer experience in Depth can be amplified or mitigated by behaviours and actions in Breadth – which in turn influences brand loyalty.

But here’s an important point. Brands that systemi-cally or repeatably fail in the Depth aspect of Brand Experience almost certainly lack the capability to recover those failings through their actions in Brand Breadth. Why? Because the systemic failings are likely a symptom of a lack of staff clarity and trai-ning about the brand identity and brand promise, and also of a potential lack of alignment between what management say they want and what they do e.g. focusing on “cost efficiency and effectiveness” at the expense of brand values on the front line.

Illustration: The brand promise of Southwest Airlines is “Dedication to the highest quality of Customer Service delivered with a sense of warmth, friendliness, individual pride, and Company Spirit”. Every single employee of the company is aligned with this brand promise, and SWA is renown for a staff morale is excep-tionally high. As a result they deliver strong Brand Depth and they have a firm basis for a social strategy expanding their Brand Breadth,

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and every likelihood of it succeeding. Most other airlines do not have this foundation.

The bottom line? Building a social strategy to expand Brand Breadth is no panacea for an organisation which is dysfunctional in delivering Brand Depth.

It’s commonly observed that even after repeated bad experiences – a broken Promise, or lack of Brand Depth – that some customers are stickier than others. It can also depend on the industry. This is Brand Friction.

Brand Friction

Brand Friction is best illustrated by the airline Fre-quent Flyer programs – a marketing masterstroke by American Airlines in 1981, universally copied, to make customers think twice before switching air-lines. Loyalty Cards are there for the same purpose, although oddly enough many offer precious little value to the consumer and simply act to collect enor-mously valuable data for the retailer – yet people wil-lingly use them e.g. Woolworths Everyday Rewards.

For airlines, the customer contact details harvested through their frequent flyer programs have created multi-billion dollar assets in their own right, which some have sold off to finance their airline opera-tions. That’s also interesting – these airlines have taken all our personal information and sold it to a

3rd party, and we have no voice and no consent nee-ded, and no additional value accrues to “members”, and all this while there is dispute about who actually “owns” those frequent flyer miles.

Anyway the point is that we are all very familiar with schemes to lock-in customers “loyalty”. And the key point is that although companies often have extensive personal data about individuals in these lock-in-schemes they almost universally do little with it except direct mailing, dunning and applying marketing techniques from the Soviet era.

In order to execute Brand Breadth, in a social stra-tegy, the customer base beholden to Brand Friction is a very particular asset. It needs to be analysed, seg-mented, understood and then plans put in place for different scenarios with respect to different forms of communication and relationship building. ONLY in that way will it add constructively to Brand Re-silience, rather than in the simple traditional way of “GOTCHA” so what do we care?

Of course locking people in does have advantages – it means you can operate the organisation in brain-dead mode. But eventually, even for the most locked-in customers, that will run our of steam, and it will be almost invisible until it happens and then things can happen quickly. It’s a run-away bus. What will help give a clue as to how far locked-in customers and loyal customers can be pushed is Brand Stock.

Brand Stock

Brand Stock is simply a reflection of accumula-ted and reflected goodwill. There are many potential measures or combinations of measures, and with social business intelligence we can add some more – perhaps more complete and more timely. It’s not just about what your customers think, but about what potential customers think. “Reputation” could be a component of Brand Stock, as might comments and opinions by 3rd parties with “reputation”. It’s an inexact science but what’s important is the trend

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over time, and Brand Stock guides actions which might impact on Brand Resilience.

If you’re wondering how this concept of Brand Stock relates to say Interbrand’s brand value then consi-der their role essentially the same. The underlying differences is only in the timing – they measure the same concept. Interbrand’s brand value is a lag indicator on a long trailing cycle, and Brand Stock can be used much more regularly and compiled internally to inform operational and organisational decisions.

Clearly if a company’s Brand Stock is low, then it needs to think carefully about a whole range of potential impacts of changes, strikes, lock-outs, or social media marketing campaigns. For example Apple at this time can afford – brand-wise – to take many more risks than say Nokia because Apple’s Brand Stock is sky-high and Nokia’s is trashed.

Qantas had a social media campaign which backfi-red at the very time that it’s Brand Stock was being battered due to the worldwide passenger lockout and union lockout. Knowledge of our brand model may have prevented this from happening, or at least highlighted the risk for open consideration.

Low Brand Stock means that a coordinated mul-ti-functional review and effort is needed, along with Marketing, PR, Advertising and Operational plans, and to determine the role of Brand Breadth in helping raise Brand Stock. It’s that role of Brand Breadth, along with others, that we’ll discuss in Part 2.

In summary, Brand Resilience is a function of Brand Promise + Brand Experience (Depth & Breadth) + Brand Friction + Brand Stock and a social strategy focused on Brand Breadth can play a major role in increasing Resilience.

Having explained the brand model, in Part 2 we’ll explain the role of social media, and in Parts 3 and 4 how to use the model in a brand crisis.

What is your interpretation of “brand promise”?

What experiences of brand depth succeeding or fai-ling do you have?

What aspects of brand resilience might our model have missed?

Please comment below.

WalterA Follow @adamson http://xeeme.com/walter

Tweet to @igo2

PS: So how about brand value, brand values, brand attributes, brand equity, brand valuation? A: Glad you asked! They are all connnected to each other and brand resilience, but not the subject of this post.

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Brand Resilience 2 - social strategy and brand breadth

In Part 1 of three four posts on how social strategy enables Brand Resilience we outlined the “brand resilience model” which included the notion that

Brand Experience comprised two components – Depth, and Breadth.

In this post we illustrate how Brand Breadth can be used to enhance Brand Resilience, including examples of how it could have been used in recent brand dramas. Resilience is the ability of a brand to withstand shocks and to maintain its value and customer loyalty during and after adversity. These days, having a strong social strategy is a key element of the ability to build resilience, whereas in the past it was necessary to rely on mainstream media Mar-keting and PR. McKinsey said recently, that “Push” marketing “has been subsumed by a complicated two-way relationship that begins well before a product is ever purchased and then continues indefinitely“. We add that Brand Experience has been subsumed by a complicated multi-way relationship that begins well before a brand is experiences and then conti-nues indefinitely! This is why Brand Breadth is a necessary new part of the equation.

In Parts 3 and 4 we’ll explain how to use the Brand Resilience model in a brand crisis.

Recap the Brand Resilience model

Brand Resilience is a function of Brand Promise + Brand Experience (Depth & Breadth) + Brand Fric-tion + Brand Stock.

We define Brand Experience as containing two components – Depth and Breadth. A marketing & advertising-led Brand Promise is only PR until it is “operationalised” – which is the Brand Expe-

rience. The Promise creates expectations of future value delivery, whereas the Experience is realised value. Where the Brand Experience fails the Brand Promise, or adversely reflects on the Brand or Brand Promise, we usually say that the organisation lacks Brand Depth (examples are given in Part 1).

Brand Depth represents the collective operatio-nal touch-points of the Experience. Brand Breadth is a new idea which embraces all the “non-opera-tional” touch-points, and especially social media. This concept of Breadth is crucially important today for brands, because it has a significant impact on Brand Resilience.

Definition of Brand Breadth

Brand Depth is transactional. Depth represents the core delivery engagement with the customers, such as booking an airline ticket, travelling, collecting luggage, altering a booking, finding lost luggage etc. Depth is essentially transactional. But the concept of Breadth is focused on structural engagement not transactions.

Brand Breadth is structural. It encompasses all the social contact points with customers, and all their social contact points, and the level of engagement – think about an “engagement score” – which has been built up with those customers. It embraces the roles of social strategy, social architecture, and social governance, and ultimately social CRM and the socialization of internal systems and processes. In a nutshell Brand Breadth is enabled by the trans-formation to a social business.

A key component of ultimate Brand Breadth, but perhaps an overlooked one, is the ability to commu-

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nicate with customers in the channels and times and formats – perhaps what we used to call the “proto-cols” – which they expect, nominate and are present. After all, for straight old-fashioned marketing we used to ask whether customers had a preference for email, fax or SMS, and in what order. We now need to know that about social. Knowing that, and using it wisely, will enable the ultimate delivery of Breadth.

Resilience and Brand Breadth Example - Retaining brand value when the brand

promise changes

When a brand promise changes, how do you retain the strength of the previous Brand Promise? How do you manage the risk of diluting both the old promise and the new promise and delivering on neither?

Think of Jetstar, the low-cost carrier of Qantas. When Qantas started Jetstar its advertising and messaging was all about low cost. No doubt, the costs were much lower than Qantas fares, and Jetstar not only grabbed a good share of that segment but helped expand the segment. The operational customer ex-perience was OK. It was erratic and unpredictable at times, and at all points you were left in no uncertain terms by the staff that you were flying cheaply so get used to it, but the money saved generally made up for the supercilious service. In other words – Jetstar delivered on their brand promise.

Some time ago I noticed Jetstar ads started saying “Where low prices are just the beginning…” wait, no! that was Bunnings wasn’t it – Jetstar said “Low fares, good times” and a bit of blah about exceptio-nal service etc.

Now think that through:

1. Nothing has changed in the operational chain, has it? All that’s apparently happened is a brainstorming exercise with our “crea-tive” friends;

2. The TV ads illustrate “Good times” as being the good times to be had at the destination, but Jetstar has no control over those;

3. Brand Promise is now mixed, or could we say diluted, or perhaps more charitably “enhanced” – but with nothing but PR and advertising to back it up;

4. The collective operational touch-points of Brand Depth haven’t changed, in fact they’ve probably suffered because Jetstar staff have recently been striking in protest against management demands;

5. So, the Jetstar staff aren’t having any “good times”, and in the service business that almost guarantees that the customers are not either.

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In fact, the “good times” may be a delusion. A quick bit of social research shows that over the last 6 months, in News, Blogs and Forums, the negative sentiment around Jetstar is quite strong – sitting at 27%.

If however, Jetstar had build on the idea of Brand Breadth from day 1, to develop a social strategy, a social architecture, a solid set of relationship-orien-ted engagements with its passengers and then used that to solicit brand extensions which aligned with the customer experience, then imagine the different outcome which may have been achieved. Perhaps they would not have even chosen the “good times” theme.

Here are some clues:

1. It could have engaged with customers to learn of their perception of what extra attri-butes or value Jetstar was delivering beyond “cheap fares” – no “creatives” needed, just facts;

2. It could have engaged with key influencers in the customer base to prototype, test, give feedback and spread the word about any brand extension; and,

3. In fact it could have used the Brand Breadth that it might have nurtured to help mitigate the negative Brand Depth consequences from the staff industrial action.

Extensions of Brand Promise can place Brand Resi-lience at risk, and effect Brand Breadth can mitigate that risk.

More Examples – in Brief

Here are some general examples of how Brand Breadth can support Brand Resilience:

• If a brand with a strong national flavor, which it has used in its branding themes, moves manufacturing offshore then exis-tence of social touchpoints, and an alig-ned social strategy, would help get out the rationale, monitor the reactions, and help to underwrite the brand value;

• If an organisation was facing a change of majority shareholder and the acquiring group was viewed negatively, hence poten-tially impacting on Brand Resilience, then an enterprise with a strong Brand Breadth would be able to gauge the resistance, the emotion, the issues, how that was being pro-pagated, who was doing the propagation of positive and negative messages and be able to communicate with all stakeholders inclu-ding staff to clarify the future prospects and brand position;

• If an organisation had suffered some shocks in the market e.g. strikes, lockouts, Chapter 11, and IF it had effective Brand Breadth in place, it would be able to reach out to a wide range of opinions, facts, sentiment, custo-mers, partners, influencers etc in order to judge the optimum channels, timing and campaigns it might want to run in support of the brand. Doing this, for example, would avoid the string of “Bashtag disasters” we have seen recently.

• Perhaps even Zappos, rightly a poster child of social business, could have done better in using their Brand Breadth to manage their recent hacking incident as opinion among

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some well credentialed folk is mixed about how well it was handled – some complimen-tary although not all the comments, and some less so. Mind you, that’s no small task when you have a customer list of 24 million, so some forward planning in crisis manage-ment is needed.

Having an investment in Brand Breadth provides a potential platform for not only product and service improvement, value creation, and brand extension, it is an underlying asset to be used in times of crisis and operational difficulties as we’ll discuss in Part 3.

Brand Experience – Depth and Breadth – contributes to both Brand Resilience and Brand Friction. And in fact through the actions of Depth it provides a platform for further complementary reinforcement of Resilience and Friction via the influence and ou-treach of Brand Breadth.

What’s your take on the concept of Brand Breadth – how useful?

What is your most striking example of how Brand Breadth many have helped Brand Resilience?

How do you see organisations embracing Brand Breadth – what are the key challenges?

Please comment below.

WalterA Follow @adamson http://xeeme.com/walter

Tweet to @igo2

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Why building Brand Breadth important for Crisis Management

In previous posts we introduced and explained the how social strategy enables Brand Resilience and how Resilience incorporated several brand ele-

ments including Brand Depth and “Brand Breadth” and in particular how Brand Breadth can be used to enhance Brand Resilience. The theme of these posts is Brand Resilience, and how that aids during a brand crisis – the subject of this third post in the series (the final one is the “How To”). There are two keys to how Brand Breadth helps in a crisis, the first is in pre-engagement - with customers and beyond in social media. The second is in triaging or segmenting the pre-engaged customer base and and the social media presence and working with those segments pro-actively in different ways, with different strategies, to achieve a common goal of restoration of brand trust.

But before we get to those two key activities, it’s im-portant to understand how social assets and crisis management are linked, and how the risks and exposures in social can be developed as positive assets to be used in the times of a brand crisis.

Firstly let’s be clear about what we mean by a brand crisis. We don’t mean a flood or a earthquake but rather the type of events which led to Qantas being awarded 3 places in the Top Ten Biggest PR Disasters of the Year (in Australia) – #1 for the grounding of its world-wide fleet at zero notice, #2 for the Qantas Luxury “bashtag” debacle, and #5 for the “golliwog” social media promo. There are a multitude of others and in fact SimplyZesty seems to run a weekly roun-dup, and the infamous Domino’s YouTube event epitomises the potential brand damage. These are events which are initiated in social media by a com-pany, its employees, or the public.

We’ll just review what Brand Resilience is, and for the fuller definition take a quick look back at Brand Resilience 2 – social strategy and brand breadth.

Recap the Brand Resilience model

Brand Resilience is a function of Brand Promise + Brand Experience (Depth & Breadth) + Brand Fric-tion + Brand Stock.

We define Brand Experience as containing two components – Depth and Breadth. A marketing & advertising-led Brand Promise is only PR until it is “operationalised” – which is the Brand Experience. The Promise creates expectations of future value delivery, whereas the Experience is realised value. Where the Brand Experience fails the Brand Pro-mise, or adversely reflects on the Brand or Brand Promise, we usually say that the organisation lacks Brand Depth (examples are given in Part 1).

Brand Depth represents the collective operational touch-points of the Experience. Brand Breadth is a new idea which embraces all the “non-operatio-nal” touch-points, and especially social media and the “social presence” of a brand. This concept of Breadth is crucially important today for brands, because it has a significant impact on Brand Resi-lience. One of the pillars of Breadth is social, but it is not about social media marketing, rather it’s about extending the power of social business, as a business strategy, into brand protection.

How a crisis plays out in the media

When such a crisis occurs it develops in a predic-table way – as insightfully researched and laid out by Australian PR consultant and author Jane Jor-

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dan-Meier in her book, “The Four Highly Effective Stages of Crisis Management: How to manage the media in the digital age”. There are clearly defined, identifiable stages that the media, both old and new, report a crisis:

• Stage 1, where the spotlight is beaming squarely on the incident – the “breaking news” stage where people want to know more about the event itself;

• Stage 2, where the beam broadens from the event to the “victims” and the response – how could this have happened, how is the organisation responding, who is respon-ding, who is the perpetrator? As Jordan-Meier explains it:

This stage is key. This is the make it or break it stage, the reputation forming stage, the stage where the rallying on social media sites, both negative and positive, becomes a focal point. The spotlight, with widening and growing in-tensity, points at the organization and persons who appear to be at the center of the storm. It will roam around and catch whoever will talk about what’s just happened. Experts start to appear on CNN, victims start talking in-depth about their experiences, and the organization starts to give its side of the story.

• Stage 3, is the blame and finger pointing stage, with the key focus being “why”, and everyone has an opinion. The spotlight has become a floodlight and your crisis is bea-med everywhere in every channel by the informed and the uninformed;

• Stage 4, the spotlight begins to dim as you’ve reached the fallout / resolution stage. The caveat being that your “sin” is forever recorded and discoverable – you can’t take it back and a crisis might flare anew again if you slip up.

That’s the predictable pattern, and the good news is that you can prepare for it. The bad news is that it now happens at lightning speed, which means that you need to prepare ahead and to sow some fertile ground – which is one of the key elements in “preparation” and Brand Breadth. We’ve seen that many brand crises are where social media mar-keting has backfired – clearly in the case of social media marketing a Crisis Management review stage can easily be incorporated into the planning stage.

Brand Breadth and social presence

Being advocates of social business as a business strategy we’re using “social presence” to mean something in that context, and relatively prosaic. Firstly we mean the assets comprising your visibility, currency, reach and influence in the social media – what we’d call your social architecture. Add into that activity, relevance, content, people, coordina-tion, consistency and you generate a social presence value, which is a core element of Brand Breadth.

In other words you can build a social presence, but to elevate it into social presence value and hence Brand Breadth you have to be able to do something with that social presence relative to your business objectives and relevant business strategy. That means that it is not just “engagement” per se, for the sake of it. And it also means that the internal processes, people and platforms have to be suitable, synced and aligned in order to make use of the social presence value.

The combination of social presence value and the internal social business strategy and processes is the infrastructure of Brand Breadth.

We’re building on these ideas in order to be able to demonstrate how they are used in a brand crisis so bear with us and check the next post.

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Why building Brand Breadth important for Crisis Management

Expanding the assets you bring to bear in a crisis

Traditionally in a brand crisis you have just your internal organisational assets and capabilities to bring to bear. The manner in which you are able to effectively marshal external assets and resources to assist depends on planning, preparation and prac-tice, and relationships and their strength and value are part of that. Today you need to be able to use social media and social business practices as assets and get beyond the fears and doubts, otherwise they will surface as liabilities, particularly in Stage 2 of a crisis.

Building Brand Breadth requires planning, prepa-ration and practice across the organisation and in developing the social presence, more specifically the social presence value. That’s because the latter comes down to people to people connections – and that is not done overnight, and it’s not something that you can do without having practiced it in social media.

Think of it this way – a business has customers, and a crisis potentially impacts on Customer Life-time Value. Typically a firm with a brand crisis will communicate through the old mainstream media, through emails to customers, and by using social as (just) another channel for the same form of com-munication, the latter possibly tailored to specific issues raised or posted in social media. If things get particularly grim the business might also email its shareholders a soothing story.

Now, in this era of social, customers and sharehol-ders form just two subsets out of a wide spectrum of stakeholders and even “pseudo” stakeholders – the latter being those who hijack any media hyperac-tivity to promote either the general rage or their own cause (call them professional social media protestors). All these groups need to be dealt with in real-time, transparently and with the knowledge

that what’s said to any one group will be spread to all other groups, whereupon any inconsistencies will be amplified yet again. This extended stake-holder community is potentially both an asset and a liability.

Having effective Brand Breadth turns it into a po-sitive asset, and minimizes the liability, which is the whole point of this series of posts.

Summary

Regarding your social assets and connections as a positive force in crisis management – and planning for them to support that objective – is an essential step in moving towards Brand Resilience, which in turn utilizes Brand Breadth (Resilience = Brand Promise + Brand Experience (Depth & Breadth) + Brand Friction + Brand Stock, remember). The good news is that if you are on track with a social business strategy then you already have this positive view of social, so your cultural journey is easier. If not, it’s a little more of a rocky road.

In the next, and final post, we’ll explain in precise detail how to build that Brand Resilience, with re-ferences back to the stages of a crisis.

How have you seen brand crisis play out – how consis-tent with the Four Stage model?

How does your organisation plan, build and monitor it’s total social presence value?

Please comment below.

WalterA Follow @adamson http://xeeme.com/walter Tweet to @igo2

Here’s a quick link to “The Four Stages of Highly Effective Crisis Management: How to Manage the Media in the Digital Age” on Amazon.

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Why building Brand Breadth important for Crisis Management

Quick link to Post #1 How social media enables brand resilience

Quick link to Post #2 Brand Resilience 2 – social strategy and brand breadth

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Brand Breadth, how to build it for crisis and brand management

In the last post we explained how Brand Breadth helps crisis management, and promised the “how to”. In this post, we’ll explain in precise detail

how to build that Brand Resilience, with references back to the stages of a crisis. In previous posts we introduced and explained the how social strategy enables Brand Resilience and how Resilience incor-porated several brand elements including Brand Depth and “Brand Breadth” and in particular how Brand Breadth can be used to enhance Brand Re-silience. The theme of these four posts is Brand Re-silience, and how that aids during a brand crisis – the “doing part” of which we explain now in this last post in the series.

We summarised the last post as follows: regarding your social assets and connections as a positive force in crisis management – and planning for them to support that objective – is an essential step in moving towards Brand Resilience, which in turn utilizes Brand Breadth (Resilience = Brand Promise + Brand Experience (Depth & Breadth) + Brand Friction + Brand Stock).  For the fuller definition take a quick look back at Brand Resilience 2 – social strategy and brand breadth.

Recap Brand Breadth and Social Presence

Brand Resilience is a function of Brand Promise + Brand Experience (Depth & Breadth) + Brand Friction  +  Brand  Stock. We  define  Brand  Expe-rience as containing two components – Depth and Breadth. Brand Breadth is an idea which embraces all the “non-operational” touch-points, and espe-cially social media and the “social presence” of a brand. This concept of Breadth is crucially impor-tant today for brands, because it has a significant impact on Brand Resilience. One of the pillars of

Breadth is social, but it is not about social media marketing, rather it’s about extending the power of social business.

By social presence we mean the assets compri-sing your visibility, currency, reach and influence in the social media – what we’d call your social ar-chitecture. Add into that activity, relevance, content, people, coordination, consistency and you generate a social presence value, which is a core element of Brand Breadth. To elevate social presence into social presence value and hence Brand Breadth you have to be able to do something with that social presence relative to your business objectives and business strategies. The combination of social presence va-lue and the internal social business strategy and processes is the infrastructure of Brand Breadth.

The core tasks – pre-engagement and segmentation

Today you need to be able to use social media and social business practices as assets, otherwise they will surface as liabilities, particularly in Stage 2. Building Brand Breadth requires planning, prepa-ration and practice across the organisation and in developing the social presence, more specifically the social presence value. That’s because the latter comes down to people to people connections – and that is not done overnight, and it’s not something that you can do without having practiced it in social media.

There are two keys to how Brand Breadth helps in a crisis, the first is in pre-engagement – with custo-mers and beyond in social media. The second is in triaging or segmenting the pre-engaged customer base and and the social media presence and wor-

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Brand Breadth, how to build it for crisis and brand management

king with those segments pro-actively in different ways, with different business strategies, to achieve a common goal of restoration of brand trust.

How can Brand Breadth helps and how you build it

To use Brand Breadth in a crisis you have to first have it! If you don’t have it then you cannot use it. Here are the core steps of how to built it:

•  Hygiene Step #1 – You know all the basic so-cial touch points of your customers. You’re collecting this right, just like you collect their emails and phone numbers?

•  Hygiene Step #2 – You understand which of your customers are Social VIPs – for the sake of this hygiene step you can define that simply, as you wish.

•  Hygiene Step #3 – You are able to coordi-nate and integrate social interactions with your customers with your overall objectives and other customer engagement objectives. You do have social engagement with your customers, right?

•  Hygiene Step #4 – You have a social archi-tecture which is aligned with your social strategy which in turn aligned with business strategy. You do know where you are pre-sent in social, and why, and who is interac-ting in those places and how, and how well they are performing in terms of engagement and communication with all other relevant parts of the business?

•  Hygiene Step #5 – You know how the whole digital online world perceives you at any point in time and you integrate this into your business decisions and communi-cations actions. You do monitor, analyse and measure sentiment, brand mentions, competitor activity and relevant risk across social media?

If you have all the above in place then you have the social business process and communications systems linked with business objectives and social presence – giving you a basis for building Brand Breadth.

You can next ensure that you have some of the basic things in place, those that go beyond the elementary listed as “hygiene” above – meaning that if you don’t have the hygiene steps then you best go back and set them up. There are no shortcuts to effective Brand Breadth. Here are the next set of foundation steps:

•  Basic Step #1 – You have triaged, segmen-ted, sliced & diced, your customer base, into relevant whatever segments – marketing, behavioural, life-stage, next event, CLV, implied NPS, at risk, price sensitive, vanity, loyalty etc. You do have a quality segmenta-tion of your customer base?

•  Basic Step #2 – You know the social presence of your customers and their social presence value (as compared to their basic social touch points in “Hygiene Step #1). You are measuring the authoritative bloggers, those running influential forums, and those with massive twitter reach?

•  Basic Step #3 – You know, from all corners of your social presence, those within it which have influence, authority, reach and stan-ding and who are not current customers. They are not current customers but you know what they do, and have engaged with them in a way, and because, it is relevant to your business objectives and brand mana-gement strategy.

•  Basic Step #4 – You know how to use all of the above in a cross-functional cross-bu-siness-unit coordinated way accurately, completely and aligned with current bu-siness initiatives. You understand that this is not about social media marketing?

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Brand Breadth, how to build it for crisis and brand management

With those steps in place you have a nice foundation of Brand Breadth, which you now need to activate and shore up.

•  Activation Step #1 – You are listening, networking, contributing, participating in the social realms of your customers in a style and manner which adds value accor-ding to their identified segmented custo-mers needs (review Basic Step #1). That is, you are pre-engaged; which is one of the key elements of “preparation” – you’ve made it!

•  Activation Step #2 – You are doing the same as above across your entire non-customer social presence, which means having rele-vant coordinated content and real people each of whom has their own real social media presence – another key component of preparation.

•  Activation Step #3 – You understand not only the social presence value of each of your key customers and key social contacts (as per Basic Steps #2 & #3) but also how that maps into business strategies, plans and potential actions, for example, how this maps on to the scenario of a brand crisis? Do you see where we are heading?

•  Activation Step #4 – You have content ready, social business training done, protection plans in place, risk management unders-tood, crisis management trained for, and communication plans for all stakeholder and social media groups in place, operating, and where appropriate rehearsed.

Congratulations – you have a new asset – Brand Breadth, which will you will be able to effectively deploy to help mitigate the damage from a brand crisis.

Do you really need Brand Breadth?

Well it depends on how much you need to transform into a social business, and how much social media could potentially damage your brand and equity value through an unforeseen crisis. Without Brand Breadth, it’s hard to manage the risk, with it, there is a important part it plays in your risk management processes. But of course, it’s value also extends far beyond risk management and a brand crisis, and that’s where the business strategy question comes in of how much you need to be a social business in order to succeed in the future.

To achieve Brand Breadth appears to be a massive amount of work, and it is at face value. You have to have clear business objectives, and the brand elements form just one business strategy of those serving those objectives. The strategy of transfor-ming to a social business is also delivering to those business objectives, and not an objective in its own right. However it you transform to a social business then the related additional work to develop effective Brand Breadth and Brand Resilience is a margi-nal but non-trivial addition to your people, processes and platforms - that’s the key point.

Brand Breadth outside the context of a social bu-siness transformation is meaningless, just as so-cial business outside of clear business objectives is meaningless.

Example of using Brand Breadth

How would having an effective Brand Breadth work in practice – in a brand crisis? Let’s think of a ge-neric “Qantas” brand crisis, along the lines of any of those that they had last year. What happened in those events was that Qantas went into crisis mana-gement mode as those crises evolved exactly along the lines of the Four Stages. They had a fire hose of activity to deal with on Twitter and then had to deal with Facebook and all that overwhelmed their

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Brand Breadth, how to build it for crisis and brand management

small social media team, who at face value seemed to be the only people handing the social presence, the social storm.

Each of those “PR disasters” was pre-planned – they were premeditated actions with unexpected conse-quences. The one big event that wasn’t pre-planned was an engine exploding on an A380 over Indonesia and the aircraft having to return to Singapore en-during dire systems problems, but landing safely. Qantas ran that event up the social media flagpole and saluted it as a great success, an opinion not universally shared.

While the planned events offer the chance of using Brand Breadth for prior analysis and communica-tions planning, the unplanned events also totally benefit from it by way of the role that Brand Breadth plays in an organisation and the preparation and practice which is a routine occurrence.

This how a planned event, e.g. a social media mar-keting campaign, would utilize Brand Breadth as part of risk management and mitigation:

• Pre-Event Step #1 – Understand the mood and sentiment of your customers and non-customers in social throughout your social presence. If you have a past history of “behaving badly” and you are the likely contender for the “perpetrator” title in the current crisis (Stage 3), you need to know it, and to think super carefully about your planned event and any potential adverse reactions – this idea is encapsulated in our

Brand Resilience formula = Brand Promise + Brand Experience (Depth & Breadth) + Brand Friction + Brand Stock. The fabulous thing about social media is that you can get this “Brand Stock” reading from your social presence network – loud and clear.

•  Pre-Event Step #2 – Understand across your entire customer and non-customer social presence which people are likely to be strong advocates, advocates, neutral, detrac-tors, and strong detractors. In particular understand this for each segment of your segmented customer base – now you are getting into the realms of big data and more importantly the meaningful analysis of big data.

•  Pre-Event Step #3 – Select or prepare content for each of the groups above, and for each of the segments in your segmen-ted customer base, and select and train the people who will be dealing with those different groups in social according to the findings of steps #1 & 2 above. You have to be prepared for the mood of the reaction according to your analysis of your Brand Stock.

•  Pre-Event Step #4 – “Test market” the plan-ned actions with different groups in social, through the selected people, and assess feedback. Forget focus groups, that’s looking backwards.

•  Pre-Event Step #5 – Map the different “reac-tion” scenarios to the resources needed to engage through your current social pre-sence with the various identified segments, and to cope with any extra levels of engage-ment which might erupt.

•  Pre-Event Step #6 – Review and make sure that your cross-functional and cross-bu-siness unit coordination, escalation, com-munication and decision-making processes are in place and work.

Then push the button!

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Brand Breadth, how to build it for crisis and brand management

In the event of an unforeseen brand crisis you can now activate the operational plan built upon your established Brand Breadth:

•  Operational Action #1 – Listen, analyse, un-derstand and reflect on the social feedback.

•  Operational Action #2 – Categorise the fee-dback in to your customer segmentation and social analysis of them and your non-customers. Are there any new influencers and authorities who are participating, and why, and what are they saying and what are their possible objectives?

•  Operational Action #3 – This is the core of the value of Brand Breadth in this crisis – utilise the specific communications and en-gagement plans (a la Pre-Event Step #3) for each of the customer segment groups and the breakdown of the non-customer social presence, and in particular focus additional resources on those who you have identified as potential advocates. Additional re-sources will be required for this latter group as the approaches have to be by people and personal – that takes time and effort and people!

•  Operational Action #4 – Once the crisis hits it is going to move very quickly into Stage 2, and this includes the “reputation repair” process. This needs careful attention, and monitoring – the role of listening out for, lis-tening to, and nurturing those in your custo-mer base and those in your social presence with authority, influence, and reach be-comes critical. If you have effective Brand Breadth you will be able to focus resources on those key groups, and be less distracted by other groups, and stand the maximum chance of managing any brand damage.

Summary

The nub of a Brand Breadth plan for a brand crisis is this – you need know your customers’ social world, and that of the people which you reach through your

effective social presence, and you need to be orga-nisationally capable of utilising that information effectively, selectively and personally when a crisis hits. The value of that extended resource in defen-ding and protecting your brand is what will reduce the risk of brand damage and hence increase its resilience, along with the other factors of Resilience – Promise, Breadth, Friction and Stock.

What might you do differently in harnessing social assets in a brand crisis?

How much value does the concept of Brand Breadth add to your approach to managing brand value as a business strategy?

Please comment below.

WalterA Follow @adamson http://xeeme.com/walter Tweet to @igo2

Here’s a quick link to “The Four Stages of Highly Effective Crisis Management: How to Manage the Media in the Digital Age” on Amazon.

Quick link to Post #1 How social media enables brand resilience

Quick link to Post #2 Brand Resilience 2 – social strategy and brand breadth

Quick link to Post #3 Why building Brand Breadth is important for Crisis Management

Here is the COMPLETE SET of this post and the three previous posts on Scribd as a PDF.

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