The following approach to brand auditing is based on a robust audit methodology that focuses on 7 key areas of marketing capability. This methodology is suited to the assessment of the marketing activities of all firms.

1. Do we have alignment – the visions, goals and objectives of the firm need to align across divisions, functions and permeate deep into the daily tactical of the firm. Where possible firms need to align with their suppliers and customers to maintain consistency of purpose.
2. Where is the value – what is it that makes you brand valuable in the hearts and minds of your customers, suppliers, investors and the local community. What do you stand for!
3. What coming next – firms that don’t innovate die, how are you managing the evolution of the customer experience? Remaining relevant and central to their hearts and minds is the central focus of any good CMO.
4. Managing insight – knowledge is a powerful asset, how do you gather and disseminate information to the areas of the business that needs it most. What are the current opportunities open to your marketing team, how are they integrated into the mix and who is best suited to help you succeed. How are you engaging your customers in the process of building management insight?
5. Engaging customers in the firm’s creative process – Ownership of the customer is everyone’s responsibility. Customers must be engaged in the creative and delivery processed of the business to maximize the experiential opportunities.
6. Telling the stories - The conversations that occur at all levels in the company need to be consistently aligned to the values and mission of the business. One of the biggest problems facing most firms is the confusion of stories that exist in the public arena.
7. Executing the plan – It is the role of the entire business to jointly create, support and deliver the plan. A good audit will review the processes for engaging and including the whole organisation in the marketing plan.

Develop a robust auditing approach will provide an excellent baseline against which significant improvement and enhancement of a firms marketing can be undertaken. By employing a more informed management approach to brand and marketing, your business will have the capacity to perform way above its current level. What would you say if some-one told you that you could have an additional 10% in your marketing budget, an audit has the potential to find that 10%.

An audit culture can help a company refine its business practices and improve its productivity and profitability, the investment required to conduct a thorough audit should be made with the understanding that most audits pay for themselves in the insight they uncover. It has been my experience that the inefficiencies and redundancies pointed out by the audit can be eliminated and savings should normally exceed the amount required to conduct the audit in the first place.

With generation Y and the newly defined iGeneration less likely to suffer in the economic downturn than the baby boomer and Gen X parents this trend towards global shopping may become a very important facet for governments and policy makers to consider as they try to turn around the titanic.

Participating in active relationships with consumers is a critical component of the journey to rapport 360. Building meaningful and active relationships requires creating experiences for customers that incorporate:

Feel – what are the issues or problems
Think – I think I have a solution
Know – educate the market
Do – Interact with the customer

Feel: Marketers need to engage the community of potential customers to identify what the key issues and problems they are facing today. Asking customers to become engaged means adapting a range of social networking technologies into the process of interaction.

Think: Engage the customers in the creation of the solution to the problem. That means bringing them in and talking to them either virtually or in person. Customer thinking will create a much deeper level of insight into the offer that is acceptable.

Know: What works and what doesn’t, who do the customers listen to for advice – who is leading the way in setting the trends in the market you want to target. When was the last time you took time to go and watch the customer in their environment.

Do: Use customers to help you tell the story and honestly seek to interact with them. Once you start on this part you must be committed to back it up, customers are very good at detecting falseness.

The Rapport 360 approach offers you the opportunity to walk through a participatory experiences where you review the opportunities for enhancing the participatory nature of you customer interactions.

• Climate Change
• Global Financial Crisis
• World Poverty
• Regional Trade Agreements

Why are these issues driving us towards a more collaborative mode of working? Let’s examine some of the common themes underpinning these key issues. Firstly, no one person, company or country holds the exclusive answer to the solution for any one or more of these issues. The solutions require the combined intellectual and financial capabilities and resources across a spectrum of individuals, organisations and governments. Secondly, acting individually will only exacerbate the problem, as these problems act like a water bed, when you push down on one problem you run the risk of another area of concern bubbling to the top. The third issue is the ease at which political leaders swing from one “hot” issue to the next, sometimes displaying very schizophrenic behaviour. A process of collaborative problem solving will ensure that a critical mass of focus is maintained on solving the issue. Finally, unless these items are managed in the context of a business opportunity, the necessary financial support required to implement the solutions will be difficult, if not impossible, to accumulate.

The upside is that a number of critical enabling tools are now evolving to enable us to address these issues in a global manner. The evolution of “Web 2.0? or “the collaborative web” is providing a platform for aglobal response to these issues. The new tools available are radpily shrinking the world, allowing groups of interested parties to come together and create solutions to the global issues challenging the human race today. New economic models built around e commerce and some time soon true mobile commerce allow the rice farmer in Burma and Masai tribe in Kenya to move their product into the market and get rewarded for it. The “Long Tail” by Chris Anderson our recommended reading this week, examines the way in which the web has broken the back of the hit based economy, providing greater choice and accessibility to products for consumers. The second key tool, is the opportunity to rapidly intellectualise and share knowledge across a greater sector of the global community. What’s to stop GM placing all their business data online and asking business consultants to work on finding a solution to their problems, nothing only a fear of collaboration and misguided perception that 1. they can find the answers them selves and 2. their data has some kind of commercial value, if they go broke that value will be zero, and if it is underused or misused then the value will be not much more than zero. GM should open up the door to anyone who has an idea about solving their financial/business difficulties and reward those who provide a valuable contribution towards their reinvention.

So, where does this leave us? If you still think businesses is about heirarchy and tightly managed bureaucracy you might be wrong. It is time to re-examine your businesses and find ways in which you can capture the value of collaboration and drive change into your organisation that is forward looking and meaningful. Our Rapport 360 approach has been created to help you examine your business and find ways in which you can modernise your approach to business. Time to engage, and we would like to show you how.

 Time to change your mind-set: When the economy goes into a tailspin like it did in 2008. You have two options: either stick your head in the ground and hope it passes you by or innovate and emerge stronger than you were when the economy took the hit. Hiding and saving will not start you on your way to greatness but you can innovate your way there. Here are three simple principles that’ll help you focus on rekindling the spirit of innovation.

 Take a Reality Check – Relish the recessions. Firstly make sure your core business is strong you must protect your core business because a healthy business gives you the capacity to innovate.

 Don’t Go It Alone – Innovation is not the about the crazy genius, alone in their tool shed devising the idea of the century. Innovation is actually much more complex, its the integration of technology, business models and processes, all wrapped together. Successfull innovation is difficult to do alone, find the right partners and work together. Gather a group of diverse thinkers around a table to create a creative storm of ideas.

 Play To Your Strengths -A recession is an especially good time for innovators to build great relationships with loyal followers, becauise your competitors even if they are often good at community building, will be distracted during a downturn. However when the economy recovers, it will be open season on those customer but if you already own it, that gives you a tremendous advantage.

 Now lets look at the 5 Steps to Innovation that you should adopt.

 1. Apply Rigor – According to management consulting firm McKinsey & Co., 36 percent of top managers say they govern innovation in an ad hoc manner. Throwing people in a room and asking them to brainstorm, is the standard process of innovation. Yes, they’ll generate ideas, but ideas don’t have legs by which to leap off the white board. To be more hit than miss, establish a companywide process to brainstorm, test and implement ideas.

 2. Go Where Consumers Go – Get out in the marketplace be that offline or online and see what your customers are experiencing dealing with you, and your competitors, that is good and bad; find out what is not being solved or provided that is critical to them. Now you have a starting point to think about innovation.

 3. Learn From Other Industries – If you want to improve your interaction with customers, your after sales service, enhance your delivery processes, go and see how industry leaders are doing it, and use that knowlegde to focus your innovative efforts.

 4. Test Your Idea – Take the experts counsel: Long before you fall in love with your idea, show it to consumers to see if they love it too. Markets with money p[ressures don’t suffer bad ideas gladly, a period of decline with its intense selection pressures is a great time to test ideas.

 5. Get A Leading Edge - According to Boston Consulting Group, leaders who successfully cultivate innovation have the ability to change, tolerate ambiguity, assess and be comfortable with risk, balance passion and objectivity, and command respect. If you don’t fit that description, appoint someone who does.

Why is Rapport 360 a different approach to traditional competitive strategy?

In the not too distant past gaining a competitive edge was a much less complex building process than the one faced by today’s business leaders. Many organisations built competitive advantages that were sustainable for an extended period of time, based on one of the following dimensions: (i) their prowess at product and technology innovation; (ii) their ability to offer better customer service; (iii) or by being operationally better than every-one else in the market place. In fact you can see the remnants of these competitive strategies in many of the world’s top corporations. An examination of the marketing offers of many competing firms when taken at face value, proves very difficult to distinguish the differences between or indeed the benefit of one offering over another.

In a global economy with a heartbeat that is nothing more than a series of ones and zeros; the ability to create a substantial differentiating characteristic is rapidly disappearing. As many competing companies embrace the same technology platforms and support services as the core operational management tools of their businesses, the sameness of offering drives a very bland view of their brand. The opportunity to “customise” their business offering has all but disappeared. This homogenisation of the operational paradigm quickly erases the opportunity for the operational differentiation that once existed. Combine this with rapidly changing technological and operational environment that result in a continually moving playing field, requires business leaders to constantly redefine the business paradigm. The question arises how do we, as business leaders keep our brands relevant for the people who matter most. Synnovate’s Rapport 360 is one approach which you should we would like you to. If you would like to know more about Rapport 360 please contact us today.