Employees
“Your assets go up in the elevator in the morning, and ride down at night.” – Jack Welch, former CEO of GE
Most businesses rely on employees to plan, organize, control, measure and execute its corporate mission and yearly strategic plans. From the c-suite executive to the receptionist (who either projects a good or a bad impression of the company), your employees’ willingness and ability to effectively perform will make or break your business.
So why isn’t a large section of your company’s strategic plan devoted to identifying in detail how every employee’s position is tied to the mission, objectives and value propositions of the organization?
Why isn’t ongoing monitoring of employee attitudes, opinions and beliefs a priority?
Why aren’t internal communications, employee enrichment, orientations, trainings, performance reviews, compensation/incentives and “customer experience” standards directly linked to customer and corporate branding initiatives?
Here’s why:
It is a complicated and time consuming process. Even if a company recognizes the value of this concept, it lacks the internal knowledge and practical training to develop and implement a comprehensive, integrated and coordinated program.
The key to building the financial value of any business lies in correctly identifying what is “causing” or driving its success. Asset-Based Marketing will help maximize the contributions made by employees—the asset that causes the biggest effect in your firm’s profit and loss statement.
Customers-Vendors
“Every company’s greatest assets are its customers because without customers there is no company.” – Michael Leboeuf, American Researcher, Consultant, Author
“Finding vendors that will work with you, provide consultative guidance, and recognize the need for brand loyalty while presenting options that meet your goals is paramount to success.” – Multi-Systems, Inc.
Can you imagine your company without customers? Of course not – creating and serving the needs of customers is what business is all about!
Can you imagine a business where 25-30 percent of its customers quit doing business with the company year after year? (As alarming as it sounds, this is the typical customer turnover rate in wireless companies.) Now take your business: what if 10 percent of your most profitable clients left? How would that affect your business and your financial statements?
With so much of the success of a business riding on customer satisfaction, loyalty and perception of value, you’d think all businesses would recognize customers as one of their most important assets. You’d also think integrating and coordinating customer service and branding efforts … and aligning both with customers’ needs would be commonplace. But it seems that hardly anybody in today’s environment is protecting, growing and harvesting this valuable asset.
Even rarer is the company that views its vendors as an important asset to be developed. Vendor Relationship Management (VRM) is a new area of business practice that helps companies gain a competitive advantage by proactively engaging and cultivating vendor’s resources and market knowledge that will result in a win-win for everyone.
You won’t find “customer-vendor relationships” as a line item on your balance sheet. But customers and vendors are among the most important assets your company possesses.
Brand
“Brand, next to people, is the most important asset your company owns. Yes, it is intangible. No, it is not on the balance sheet, as it is in the United Kingdom, Hong Kong and Australia. However, to ultimately manage brand as a profit driver, you have to rethink your management approach.” – Scott M. Davis, Managing Partner, Prophet’s, a global consultancy specializing in branding, marketing and innovation
Your brand resides in your customers’ minds. Your brand is the combination of everything that is said, heard, read, written or seen regarding your company its products or services. This means branding is really a process of managing customer experiences.
The most important brand experiences are delivered through your employees. But how many companies incorporate “living the company brand” in their employee performance reviews? We believe the answer is less than 1 percent. Measurement or monitoring of how well employees deliver on your company’s brand promise, brand personality and brand values isn’t happening within a majority of businesses. Since you can’t manage what you don’t measure, this statistic means that most businesses are unconsciously damaging their brand.
Your company’s brand needs to be woven into the fabric of your organization. Brand threads need to run through employee education and training, company celebrations, employee and customer communications, customer segmentation strategies and all other aspects of employee and customer relations. This requires hard work and enormous discipline. But companies that have fully integrated their brand into employee and customer asset management practices soon realize levels of success unprecedented by any other change efforts.
If your firm is committed to working for these positive results, Asset-Based Marketing will lead you through the process of integrating your brand into every detail of your employees’ growth and customers’ experience.