Inspiration is a management discipline, not a mood. Marc de Swaan Arons and Frank van den Driest call it the critical X-factor that pushes people beyond limiting beliefs, and put roughly 25 percent of extra energy and ideas up for grabs — the thinking employees do in the shower or stuck in traffic. Everyone likes to talk about motivating the team, and few leaders bother to pick this low-hanging fruit.
The evidence is what global brand leaders told the authors. At Orange, a finance manager who had sat through the challenger brand program asked why a self-declared challenger overcharged about 35 percent of its consumers every month; Orange became the first U.K. mobile operator to set monthly rate plans by actual call behavior. At AkzoNobel, Kerris Bright’s team rebuilt Dulux around a truth about homes and color, and an ambition to sell optimism rather than paint.
Key findings
- AkzoNobel dropped a policy of more than 40 brands with varying strategies in favor of fewer, bigger, better ideas, and named Dulux its number one global priority brand.
- Euro RSCG won the global Dulux pitch against a brief Russ Lidstone called ‘the best brief ever, and it just read one line: add color to people’s lives.’
- At the peak of the 2009 financial crisis, Aline Santos took her case for a Dirt is Good global conference straight to Unilever CEO Patrick Cescau, after the CFO insisted it should not go ahead.
- Internal audiences sort into Brand Builders, Brand Champions and Brand Supporters, and the authors insist internal engagement be planned and evaluated as diligently as an external campaign.
What makes creative work cut through
Cut-through starts with a purpose people can personalize, not with novelty. Inspiration begins with a universal insight and a real purpose that can both attract consumers and ignite the passion of the employees who work with the brand. Dulux found its insight in research across markets: our homes and surroundings shape how we think, feel and live, and changing them changes who we become. Selling tins of optimism rather than tins of paint states it so a marketer, an agency and a shopper can each hold it.
Constraint does the rest. Agreeing with local teams on what is fixed and what is potentially loose is itself a source of inspiration, in much the same way creative teams appreciate the possibilities a tight brief provides. Clarity is the lens through which everyone determines what to stop doing and what to step up, and it is the most underestimated part of persuading colleagues, because words mean different things in one country, let alone in several languages. Marc Mathieu, then at Coca-Cola, described the marketing leader of the future as the one ‘who leads and inspires with purpose.’
Creative courage and the air cover it needs
The clearest act of conviction is Aline Santos at Unilever. In 2009 almost no one would spend on global conferences, and word inside the company was that the CFO had personally insisted her Dirt is Good conference should not go ahead. She went to CEO Patrick Cescau and argued the company was penny-wise and pound-foolish: how could people from all over the world work as one team if they had never met even once? The event proceeded.
Air cover is a sequence of visible acts, not a stated permission. Kerris Bright opened the first Dulux global brand team meeting to inspire and empower the team, stayed away while it worked, and returned at the end to challenge, sharpen and sign off. A local chairman’s sign-off is the strongest way for others to see a positioning document as real, even when headquarters wrote it. Courage runs upward too: employee engagement programs gave that Orange finance manager the standing to challenge the billing, and the company changed how it calculated bills.
Momentum before the perfect plan
Organizations stall for familiar reasons: lack of time, lack of management will, lack of corporate focus, lack of leadership alignment, and above all a tendency to underestimate the up-for-grabs energy and ideas they already have. The specific failure mode is resourcing. Companies withhold the resources purpose and pride need and hand the work to a global team’s most junior members, and the result is internal stakeholders as skeptical about brand messages as external ones.
The remedy is structure rather than certainty: break the biggest, seemingly unachievable challenges into steps with timing and key performance indicators, then celebrate every successful step. Success is itself one of the biggest inspirations, and treating that as a chicken-and-egg problem is what stops many leaders from celebrating early wins. Annual marketing and brand planning processes embed new behavior best — convince the target group to weigh brand objectives alongside their own and, the authors claim, you have won 90 percent of the battle.
Scope and limitations
The pivotal Orange exchange is a story the authors were told years earlier, and they note plainly that they were not there and that the conversation evidently went something like the version they give.
The evidence is the experience of the global brand leaders interviewed and the authors’ own client work rather than measured outcomes, and the 25 percent figure is stated as a belief.
Source
This page summarises The Global Brand CEO: Building the Ultimate Marketing Machine, by Marc de Swaan Arons, Frank van den Driest, 2010.