Differentiating your company from your competitors and creating a competitive advantage requires that everyone within your organization is in sync and in agreement to uphold your brand promise (value proposition). To transform a brand promise from something employees merely talk about into something that occurs in each and every customer experience will require your marketing department to make new friends within your organization … specifically within the human resources department.

As you know, in the normal course of business marketing people tend to hangout with sales people, finance and accounting people tend to hangout with operations people, and IT people pretty much hangout by themselves. In an asset-based, integrative approach to business and marketing planning, responsibility for actively “living” the company’s value proposition is decentralized and should reside within the standards and tactical work for every position description. All of which means that as odd at it might appear, your marketing and HR departments need to become as inseparable as Tara and Bella.

For example, if your brand promise is to be “your trusted local healthcare resource”, 100% of your position descriptions should contain specific responsibilities and standards related to creating trusting relationships (consistent brand experiences) and specific actions every executive, manager and employee will do toward increasing their knowledge and value as a healthcare resource. As you can imagine, successfully incorporating those items into position descriptions and effectively communicating these changes to employees will require collaboration, cooperation and creation of a deep bond between HR and marketing.

So encourage the people within your HR and marketing departments to look past what might appear to be their immense differences, and search out new and different ways they can work together toward strengthening your brand and your brand promise. And if the going gets tough simply watch this video again. Like the man said – if Tara and Bella harbor no fears or secrets of one another, what’s our excuse?

P.S.
Watch for my new book, BUSINESS LESSONS FROM NATURE, available soon on-line and in book stores nationwide!

This entry was posted on Friday, April 17th, 2009 at 4:25 pm and is filed under Marketing News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.