One of the most prominent characteristics of any successful company in the world is that it puts its money where its mouth is. In a world wherein advertisement seems to have reached its peak, and everyone is promising something or the other, the only real differentiator that remains is your actions. Aligning your activities to your promises is all that strategic alignment is about. Broadcasting one’s purpose is one thing, and pursuing it is another. Your company can make as many claims and promises as it likes, but as long as it doesn’t take any action on them, it’s all going to be treated as nothing more than just hype.
This may eventually harm your brand image, as people may start associating your establishment with one that makes false promises. You must avoid creating such an image with the help of a brand consultancy agency before it starts hurting your brand. Strategic alignment refers to this deliberate connection between your brand’s vision, its overarching purpose and promise, and its actual business outcomes. With great strategic alignment, you won’t need to spend so much on advertising at all; your results will speak for themselves as people start looking at your brand as a trustworthy establishment. Keeping branding and strategizing as separate divisions isn’t strictly positive for your establishment. Through this article, let’s dive deep into how your brand can talk the talk and walk the walk.
Connecting Purpose and Performance Through Strategic Alignment
- Bridge Brand Vision to Strategic Pillars
Your brand vision should align with your strategies. Or rather, your strategies should align with your brand pillars. It is easier said than done when you consider that an organization usually has a multitude of departments under it and that each department handles a different task altogether. Understanding the strategic role of quantitative segmentations and coordinating each department and calibrating their pace of work may be a challenge in itself. But still, everyone’s efforts bring forth the best output only if they are aligned with the company’s broader objectives. So, inform each of your departments about a few key strategic pillars; these are norms or goals that each department has to adhere to, and correct them whenever they go astray from them.
- Align Internal Culture with External Promise
Every company has a work ethic. It makes each company unique in its own right. Surely, your organization has that one thing that distinguishes it from all the rest. Aligning the promises that you make to your customers, i.e., your external promises, to your internal work culture will bring a sense of originality to your brand image. This will propel your brand and attract loyal customers towards it. Effectively, this could include things such as hiring for brand-fit values, leadership modeling brand behaviors, reward systems tied to both performance and cultural contributions, and an onboarding routine that embeds brand narrative and purpose.
- Integrate Brand Metrics into Business KPIs
Let’s say you aligned your organization’s brand image to its strategy and vice versa. What now? Simply declaring that you’re trustworthy won’t be enough; you need to exhibit your merit with adequate proof, which is where quantifying your performance comes in. When you show that the KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) of your business align with your promises and objectives, you substantiate your claims with relevant data. It places your brand in a different category entirely as people start to realize that you and your brand are more than just talk.
- Enable Cross-Functioning Collaboration Around Shared Goals
Strategic alignment often fails to bear fruit because of ill-planned initiatives. One of the most common rookie mistakes is placing the entire onus of strategic alignment on one particular department of your organization. This overburdens that department and often leads to disappointment. Make sure that each department of your organization is equally involved in achieving your promise to the customers. A lackadaisical approach in any one department tends to spread about like a disease. Distributing the workload across departments ensures that no employee is overworked and that all resources are utilized.
- Use Brand as a Decision-Making Filter
In today’s complex, high-velocity markets, the top leadership team is often faced with a plethora of decisions. Each decision may bring its own set of challenges and problems as you struggle to decide which way to go forward is best. At such junctions, take a moment to realize your current brand image. Understand your perception in the industry; use it as a filter or guide to help you in decision-making. That is not to say that you shouldn’t do things that are unorthodox or unlike your record. But going against your brand values and strategic pillars is rarely a good idea.
End Note
Your brand image comprises much more than you’d think. But perhaps the most important part is your outputs. Align the two to create a brand image that is consistent with what you do and wish to achieve. Bridging brand vision to strategic pillars, aligning internal culture with external promise, integrating brand metrics into business KPIs, enabling cross-functional collaboration, and using brand as a decision-making filter, you can thrive in a competitive market.
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