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  • Sandra Bravo Ivorra 9:00 am on June 5, 2013 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , communication 2.0, ,   

    Active listening as a tool for continuous learning 

    Estimated reading time: 4 minutes

    The art of conversation is being replaced by personal broadcasting. I first heard that expression in a TED Talk by Julian Treasure on the importance of active listening, and I couldn’t agree more.

    We communicate constantly but we rarely listen. Listening goes beyond just lending an ear. Listening is investing time in others, changing the focus of attention to those that surround us.

    They are both the messages and interferences that we receive that are difficult to distinguish. It is demonstrated that we filter contents according to our culture and all this marks a difference between what we hear and what we pay attention to.

    Attitude and beliefs are key factors in communication. Our predisposition towards our interlocutors is an essential condition. Flexibility too, the ability to leave aside our ‘repertoire’ of beliefs to give way to new hypotheses.

    Active listening is the best tool for constant learning. If we don’t train that skill, we will end up shut away in our limiting tenets.

    Four basic aspects of active listening:

    1. Receiving, taking in what they tell us, paying attention
    2. Valuation, appreciating the words of our interloctors as something with an intrinsic value
    3. Recapitulating, we will only be capable of synthetizing something that we are willing to ‘receive’
    4. Asking, after assimilating information, this will generate doubts that will enable us to continue enrich ourselves

    Listening facilitates our daily lives. It’s economical, it saves us having to listen twice to the same message that we didn’t pay attention to in the first place. It’s practical, it will help us to discern what is really important. And it’s efficient, listening not only will be learn, but we will make others want to listen to us and learn about our points of view.

    Sandra Bravo (@Sandra_BI) is founding partner of BraveSpinDoctors, a strategic communication and political marketing consultancy.

    At Zyncro, we believe listening is fundamental for companies. We explain it in this whitepaper about the value of employees’ contributions for the company. In your organization, how do you listen to employees? At Zyncro we help you do it with an Enterprise Social Network. Try it.

     

     

  • Eduardo Zamora 9:00 am on June 4, 2013 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , communication 2.0, gamification, ,   

    Gamification: Another pillar in digital interaction between brands and consumers 

    Estimated reading time: 4 minutes

    One of the most attractive elements for human beings is the game. Applied to digital marketing how can a brand use game to engage its consumers?

    We’re talking about gamification. An interesting fact:

    People remember 20% of what they hear, 30% of what they see and hear, and 60% of what they play or interact with.

    How to develop an efficient gamification strategy?

    1. Define the milestones and scope of the strategy. What are the goals to be achieved and what do we want to gamify?

    2. Define who we want to have an impact on.

    • Dominant: They play specifically to compete and win.
    • Egocentric: They play to win recognition.
    • Socialites: They play to meet people.
    • Explorers: They play to discover possibilities and secrets.

    3. Intrinsic motivation of our target. What moves them? Entertainment, socialization, recognition, sharing?

    4. Research the habits and trends our consumer follows to create a good experience.

    5. Design our story, which will define the experience we want our users to live.

    6. Design the game system, elements of the scene that will surround it, and the tools for achieving victory.

    7. Look after the user experience. Find the balance so that the experience is good without falling into a level of difficult that doesn’t allow them to advance or is too simple that it doesn’t present any challenge.

    To finish, let’s look at a clear and very successful example of this trend: the case of Greenpeace, who with a gamification strategy managed to make the difference.

    Eduardo Zamora (@amudiel) is Strategic Director in the Mexican integrated communication agency ifahto. He has had the change to participate for more than 12 years in the creative and strategic concept of integrated marketing for mass consumption companies. The main achievements reached with the clients he was collaborated with are: meet sales goals, brand recollection, increase in market participation, creation of brand awareness in digital and traditional media, etc.

    At your companies, have you implemented gamification strategies? How did you do it and what has been the result? Tell us about it!


     

  • Jose Luis del Campo Villares 9:00 am on May 29, 2013 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , communication 2.0, , , , , ,   

    Enterprise Social Networks: Lineal Growth in People and Exponential Growth in Talent 

    Estimated reading time: 9 minutes

    One of the virtues that an organization can have when applying the right Enterprise Social Network (ESN) is it can make different people share knowledge and different points of view on an idea in a single space.

    Two members of an organization may have never shared ideas about something they are both working on in the organization, i.e. due to physical circumstances, for example, because the employees are located in different work centers with an extensive geographical distance between them, or due to time limits, as time zones mean that their working days never coincide.

    In this scenario, employees in the same organization who could share knowledge with a personal and professional benefit for the company may never come into contact or exchange ideas.

    This is one of the key points where an Enterprise Social Network implemented in an organization plays a fundamental role, as the lineal sum of people with determined knowledge (talent) can mean exponential growth in talent in the organization.

    When we decide to implement an ESN in our organizations, one of its key objectives must be to act as a virtual collaboration space in which different professionals who work on a product can share their experiences and ideas, which will benefit not only professionals in the same area who are working on that product in other work centers, but also other professionals who work on that product from other areas.

    It seems to be more complex than it really is, so let’s take an example where we can see how growth can be exponential for the organization.

    Taking an organization with work centers in different parts of the planet, such as Europe, North America and Asia. They sell a range of products, and in this example, let’s focus on the product A. We design an ESN that creates a contact area with different professionals from different departments, for example, heads of different areas.

    When the head of design in Asia of that product A enters to share his experience on end users who acquire the product, the heads of design in Europe and North America acquire knowledge that enables them to work on the product to make possible modifications that could benefit their end clients. However, if in that meeting place, the heads of marketing also participate, they can see what the strong points for convincing the end client in each part of the world (support marketing) in order for them to purchase product A. What’s more, if the heads of Finance also participate, they can see how to apply the different product prices according to the possible competitors in each part of the world.

    With this simple example, we can see how the talent of one of the members in the organization shared in an open collaborative space not only causes lineal growth, but also exponential growth in the talent, which will reverberate on global improvement in the organization at different scales and as a whole. And that is something that is difficult to achieve with a traditional organization system where, with luck, the different departments meet at an annual convention in order to share ideas.

    The ESN implemented needs to have four indispensible points in order for it to be a true source of collective knowledge:
    • Open: i.e. all members of the organization, regardless of their work area but with the same hierarchical responsibility level, can access at any time to contribute an idea, knowledge… something that may be of interest to any other department and any part of the organization.
    • Collaborative: it must be the meeting point for debate or sharing contents, not a social network. In other words, implementing a network means its participants must comply with some basic rules of behavior.
    • Timeless: Any member can access it when they want to share something and it is clearly defined for other members so that when they decide to access, they know where the issue can go and this way know how to share, debate or extend the knowledge already left there by other members of the organization.
    • Hierarchical: the ESN implemented opens different meeting points in which different employees can participate based on their different levels of responsibility within the organization.
    How do I focus my approach if I’m responsible for implementing an ESN in my organization?

    Firstly, analyze the activities and departments making up your organization. Then, analyze the hierarchical level of your staff. Finally, establish criteria that enable you to create different meeting points in the organization, both in terms of parallel and transversal competences. i.e.

    • Meeting points for sharing knowledge for those responsible for finance, marketing, etc. in different work centers (parallel competences).
    • Meeting points for sharing knowledge for the same hierarchical levels in one work center in the organization (intra-center transversal competences).
    • Meeting points for sharing knowledge for the same hierarchical levels in different work centers (inter-center transversal competences).

    Each member who participates in the ESN is responsible for sharing their knowledge in one or more centers implemented according to whom it may be of interest.

    Obviously, this means training participants first, but undoubtedly, once the system and the ESN are implemented, the growth of talent within the organization will be exponential and not lineal like in organizations 1.0.

    Jose Luis del Campo Villares (@JoseLdelCampo) is a faciliator, trainer and coach. He cares about people and their lives within organizations; for that reason, he is a social media consultant and CEO of Socialmedia Network.

     

     

  • Jeroen Sangers 9:00 am on May 16, 2013 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , , communication 2.0, , , , ,   

    Working out loud 

    Estimated reading time: 5 minutes

    I’m a freelancer working from home. A large part of my day, I don’t have anyone near, but I don’t work alone. On a daily basis, I’m in contact with my clients, my providers, and my partners with whom I collaborate on various projects.

    However, at times I miss the office’s coffee machine, where I could comment the latest news and laugh with my co-workers. These co-workers were also a major source of feedback related to my work.

    But there are also things that I don’t miss, like weekly meetings to discuss the status of projects.

    Now I only have my partner to have coffee with and comment the news. The rest of my communication has gone digital.

    Collaboration 2.0

    Nowadays, there are many tools to collaborate without needing to be in the same location, from email and Twitter—I still remember the interface at the beginning that went: “What are you doing?”—to complete platforms like Zyncro.

    When partners and co-workers aren’t in the same location, internal communication becomes even more important to generate results.

    Whenever I collaborate in projects remotely, I apply two habits that Bryce Williams identified in his post When will we Work Out Loud? Soon!

    Working out loud = Observable work + Narrating your work

    Observable Work

    This concept simply implies that the intermediate result of my work can be accessed by my co-workers. Instead of saving the document I’m writing in the folder My Documents on my computer, I use online platforms where my partners can see and comment on the progress and even edit the document.

    Based on this feedback, I can correct the focus of my work as soon as possible, and get better results in a shorter time.

    Modern collaboration platforms display in real time what each member of the team is working on. Each time I edit a document, my colleagues can see a notification in the system, even a summary with the changes made. What’s more, all the material is centralized and indexed in order to find the required information quickly.

    Narrate Your Work

    Similarly, I keep a public diary (blog or micro-blog) where I explain openly what I’m doing, what problems I encounter, what solutions I have found, and how I feel. I also share relevant articles I have found and obviously there is space for a joke once in a while.

    Finally, when working on a big project, I try to communicate each day at least these points:

    1. What I have done today
    2. What I have been unable to do
    3. What are the risks I have identified that will affect the project planning
    4. What my plans are for tomorrow

    During the day I keep a document open where I gradually answer these points. At the end of the day, I just have to publish it.

    If everyone in the team narrated their work openly, we wouldn’t need any meetings to assess project status and we would gain a lot of time.

    People who are already familiar with collaboration tools perfectly understand the benefits of working out loud. Others simply need to try it for a while to learn that they can collaborate efficiently remotely.

    Jeroen Sangers (@JeroenSangers) is personal productivity consultant and author of the blog El Canasto. He specializes in modern techniques to manage time, actions and attention, and provides training, consulting, and keynotes on a more intelligent way to work and live.

    If you want to enjoy the benefits that collaborating has for your productivity too, why not try Zyncro free?


     

  • Virginio Gallardo 9:00 am on May 13, 2013 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: communication 2.0, , , ,   

    Conversations 2.0: the new way of managing talent 

    Estimated reading time: 5 minutes

    Quality communication is not unidirectional, it’s the conversation that enables us to listen. Quality knowledge is not explicit, that we try to encourage through training, it’s tacit, transmitted through conversations. Innovative culture like any other type of culture is conversations that need to be guided by a new type of leader.

    Now the conversations through social technologies are promoted in organizations, in what we have called conversations 2.0. In Barcelona and Madrid, we held two events that we have called #conversaciones20 because we think we are experiencing a special moment in which reflection on some of the best business experiences of our times is needed.

    After listening to 24 participants, I’d like to share with you five trends that summarize what I have heard.

    Five trends on new ways of managing talent in new organizations:

    1. Tacit knowledge gains prominence over explicit knowledge: Information training is becoming more important than formal training, packeted contents in the form of courses and workshops loses importance to social training. Practice communities and communication generate more knowledge than ever through conversations, a knowledge that can be extremely valuable for businesses. The major issues are how to ensure quality in these new ways of generating tacit knowledge.

    2. Leadership and “trojans” driving new values: The change towards organizations 2.0. is not a technological change, it’s a cultural change. The new values and new ways of managing require both transforming leadership at top management and the complicity of informal leaders, of intra-entrepreneurs, of trojans… The drive of these new values is what transforms organizations into organizations 2.0.

    3. More social, liquid and open organizations: There is an enormous consensus that we are going towards more social organizations where the hierarchy and the functional order lose importance to communities, new more liquid organizational ways that require new ways of managing talent. But what’s more, the organizational border is broken down and the organizations are more open towards the outside: customers, suppliers, innovation managers, citizens…

    4. Talent management serving business and innovation: The new ways of managing talent and the new social technologies are at the service of efficiency, greater productivity, better customer/citizen service, sales efficiency…. The commitment, creativity, flexibility, talent are at the service of improvement and innovation focused on the business from a more strategic perspective.

    5. Digital rupture, the new organizations are the future, but the future is already here. We can already find excellent examples of organizations with best practices, whatever the size, and the sector is becoming increasingly less important, although the best practices are located in sectors where technology has more importance. However for most, this disruption is happening too fast and many companies and professionals find themselves lost, faced with new roles and organizational implications of these new technologies.

    The general impression of this conference is that many have already decided to move towards these types of new organizations and those that have already done it, despite the short journey, not only believe that organizations 2.0 are possible, but are inevitable as the only way of facing the future.

    Virginio Gallardo (@virginiog) is Director of Humannova, a HR consultancy specialized in helping lead innovation in companies and manage the organizational transformation. He is author of the book “Liderazgo transformacional” and coordinator of Liderazgo e Innovación 2.0. This post was published originally on his blog “Supervivencia Directiva”, where you can follow his thoughts.

     

     

  • Javier Velilla 9:00 am on April 17, 2013 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , , , communication 2.0,   

    The role of the brand in organizations in the cloud 

    Estimated reading time: 4 minutes

    The networked enterprise is a knowledge-intensive, decentralized organizational model with data exchange processes, with a global and local presence, with talent connected inside and outside the strict limits of the enterprise. The networked enterprise is defined by its capacity to adopt ICTs thanks to a profound cultural and organizational transformation when faced with a complex and demanding market.

    It is a phenomenon that grows in all advanced economies and that has been described in many books and articles by Manuel Castells. Along the same lines, Juan Freire and Antoni Gutierrez-Rubí state in point 1 of Manifiesto Crowd that “markets are relationships.”

    The networked organization means decentralizing: networks of semiautonomous units or strategic alliances between companies. The advantages of this model include adaptability, flexibility and coordination of objectives, knowledge and innovation in both a local and regional perspective, as well as a global one.

    In short, this type of enterprise does not express itself by the inside-out, near-far or top-bottom. They missed that episode on Sesame Street, or they have just forgotten it. The search for greater competitiveness encourages them to adopt this type of logic, which are accompanied obviously by the support of cloud media.

    Competitiveness moves with a click: with new distances and behavior. This logic is based on the concept of the network, which describes structures comprising people and organizations connected by one or several types of relationship. Technology has made great advances in this aspect, however from a brand perspective, some very important questions have been raised. Most are to do with balance among consistency (control, cohesion, uniqueness, homogeneity…) and dispersion (cloud, node, link, diversity, network…) Many companies are moving on these variables and their impact on the management of their brand is evident.

    A brand must be the glue holding these nodes and connections together. A brand defines the horizon for the organization and acts as unifying force because it establishes the meaning, the value proposal, and the facts and behavior that sustain it. When any company is cloud-based, the brand must act as a guiding element to give consistency to all points of contact (marketing, HR, innovation, etc.) and to ensure a shared focus (objectives, corporate culture, stories, etc.)

    Brands set out a journey, a reality that invites each individual to travel along through different supports, contexts and stories. Faced with a dynamic, experiencial and bi-directional reality, the brand behaves as a facilitator. More is expressed as a brand territory (an open mental space equipped with different realities) than those mythical USPs (unique selling propositions).

    A tip for managing a brand in a cloud environment: everything is periferal, the brand must be the center. It is the best way to generate a memorable mental frame (that sets the brand apart from the noise), it helps the consumer to buy (guarantee and trust), and aligns the entire organization with a inspiring viewpoint.

    Javier Velilla (@javiervelilla) is founding partner and director of the strategic communication consultancy company Comuniza. He is an expert in brand management, planning and social networks. He is also a professor at higher education centers, businesses and institutions, as well as an academic researcher and author of a book on branding.

     

     

  • Cristina Aced 9:00 am on April 9, 2013 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , communication 2.0, , , Public Relations 2.0, ,   

    Public Relations 2.0: 6 principles that remain current and 4 new ideas 

    Estimated reading time: 5 minutes

    Editor’s note: Today we welcome as author on our blog Cristina Aced (@blogocorp), who will discuss communication 2.0 and social media. We are delighted to have her join us. Thanks, Cristina!

    There are six principles that any communication manager must obey:

    1. Tell the truth.
    2. Prove it with action.
    3. Listen to the customer.
    4. Manage for tomorrow.
    5. Conduct PR activities as if the whole company depends on it.
    6. Remain calm, patient and good-humored.

    In fact, these tips are not mine, they are from Arthur W. Page, who was vice-president of public relations for the American Telegraph and Telephone (AT&T) and contributed to the development of modern public relations. Page was one of the first to join a company as an officer of communications, a usual practice nowadays.

    He established these basic principles at the start of the 20th century, although they could have been written today. It is a good example that shows the bases of corporate communication are still the same and illustrates the need to know the past in order to understand the present (and the future).

    In public relations, there are aspects that are still applicable from their origins, but there are also others that change (as I explain in my book Relaciones públicas 2.0. Cómo gestionar la comunicación corporativa en el entorno digital). Undoubtedly, the Internet and social media draw a new communication scenario, characterized by:

    • Conversation. Nowadays, the roles of emitter and recipient interchange constantly. Companies have to stop seeing themselves as simply emitters of contents and start to listen actively to their audiences on the Internet.
    • Open collaboration. As Pierre Lévy says, “no one knows it all, but everyone knows something”, and the new digital platforms facilitate this exchange of knowledge. Zyncro lets you create enterprise social networks that encourage collaborative work.
    • Economy in our attention. We live surrounded by an excess of information. For example, every minute 72 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube. The difficulty lies not in having a presence on the Internet, but capturing users’ attention.
    • New intermediaries. Social media lets you reach the audience directly (fantastic for the communicator!) However, new gatekeepers have appeared: social tools. As Eli Pariser explains, we live in a filter bubble. Both Google and Facebook apply filters to the contents we receive and often we are unaware of them. For example, in Facebook we see the updates of the people we have “liked” the most before those with whom we have never interacted.

    As we can see, the social web offers new communication opportunities, and public relations professionals need to be ready to take advantage of them. Yet without forgetting the basic principles of a good communicator: honesty, truthfulness, empathy… As Arthur W. Page established at the beginning of the 20th century.

    Cristina Aced (@blogocorp) is a journalist and communication and public relations consultant. She has specialized in the digital area and has published several books on the topic. Her most recent one is Relaciones públicas 2.0. Cómo gestionar la comunicación corporativa en el entorno digital (Editorial UOC). She collaborates as a lecturer at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra, the Open University of Catalonia, and at the Universitat Abat Oliba, among others. Since 2006 she has been writing at Blog-o-corp.

     

     

  • Marta Carrió 9:00 am on March 4, 2013 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: communication 2.0, , , , ,   

    7 trends in corporate reputation for 2013 

    Estimated reading time: 5 minutes

    Some weeks ago, Leslie Gaines-Ross, Chief Reputation Strategist at Weber Shandwick, presented in the The Huffington Post the latest trends in corporate reputation to remember this year.

    These trends highlighted the special importance that internal reputation will have for brands and companies, and for that reason, I though it would be interesting to look at them here. When it comes down to it, the trends that I mention below only reinforce the idea that companies need to look after their internal communication as the key to their reputation among employees.

    It is there where Enterprise Social Networks can be extremely useful for organizations that opt for innovation and implement collaborative and knowlege management tools

    Let’s look at those 7 key trends:

    1. CEOs are the main guardians of corporate reputation. According to research, which we commented on recently in this blog, nearly a half of a company’s reputation remains attributable to its CEO. Given that the odds that a company will undergo a crisis at some stage are high, “a timely, sensible and forthright response” from the CEO will inspire confidence and credibility.

    2. Internal reputation will be fundamental. Employees help to build a positive reputation when they are committed and satisfied with the organization, and this happens when there is two-way communication with the company. Work on these areas is becoming more and more important, especially given the impact that it has on the main business indicators.

    3. Reputational crises cannot be overlooked. As Gaines-Ross points out, normally companies think that their reputation has been infairly damaged. However, most crises are caused by the company itself and could have been averted if it were in tune with the early warning signs. For this reason, this year more companies will take advantage of the latest technologies in order to build better systems for managing and mitigating reputational risks, as well as for identifying vulnerabilities.

    4. Quantification of reputation will have greater weight. Companies will seek more formulas for measuring their reputation objectively. However, preoccupation with metrics may not provide a full view of a multidimensional asset such as reputation, which is based on perceptions.

    5. Corporate and brand reputation will be inseparable. Almost 9 of every 10 executives believe that a strong corporate reputation is as important as a strong product/service brand. Finding the right balance will be a priority for companies this 2013.

    6. Reputation will be reshapen according to social and political changes.We are starting to see how company reputation is being reshaped by what is happening in civil society and the political arena. Socio-political and organizational concerns are merging and cannot be overlooked in building and maintaining corporate reputation.

    7. Managing reputation in social networks will gain more importance. Companies that are truly social, that engage their executives, employees, customers and partners in authentic conversations in the social networks will be recognized as the new business leaders. The figure of the social CEO will be the next new thing. For now, the starting point leaves a lot to be desired: an IBM study (2012) among CEOs from 64 countries and across 18 sectors showed that only 16 percent of them particiapted in social media.

    Marta Carrió is Doctor in Corporate Reputation (UPF). She is also partner of Plan, consultancy specialized in corporate reputation measurement, analysis and management.

     

     

  • Javier Velilla 9:00 am on January 18, 2013 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , communication 2.0   

    How could a strong brand help your business? 

    Estimated reading time: 3 minutes

    Editor’s note: Today we welcome a new Zyncro Author: Javier Velilla, founding partner and director of the strategic communication consultancy company Comuniza. He is an expert in brand management, planning and social networks. He is also a professor at higher education centers, businesses and institutions, as well as an academic researcher and author of a book on branding. Thanks for joining the Zyncrommunity, Javier :-)

    Strong brands target consumers. They must do so from within, but outwardly. More or less introspective proposals, focused on, say, the product or on quality, are not enough. For example, in the kitchen manifesto of elBulli, the subject of quality lies second out of the 23 declarations: “The use of products of maximum quality, and knowledge of the technique to prepare them, goes without saying”. This culinary synthesis defines a style, and for years was behind the performance of this mythical restaurant. In short, quality is not enough and competitive branding needs more.

    More what? Performance of brand management has been discussed at length. In times of crisis when efficiency is a mantra, is there any return on brand management? Does branding make sense? And what sort of sense?

    Yes, (of course) it makes sense. Brand equity is dependent on a large number of factors we will thresh out in later posts, but the impact of these factors affects brand value, an intangible but vitally important reality (the same as other realities such as know-how). For accounting purposes, brand value can be calculated as an intangible asset or goodwill, but the aim of this post is to look outside this dimension (which makes sense, particularly when a company has to be valued for a corporate operation).

    The valuation of a brand is based on three simultaneous analyses: legal, financial and performance. Looking at the indicators which, although not set in concrete do offer a very revealing perspective, we perceive that a correct branding for an organization strengthens its market position, acting as an entrance barrier to new competitors, making copying more difficult, facilitating the incorporation of better talent, making access to financing easier, building memorable relations, orienting the sense of the organization as a shared culture…

    The key to understanding the value of a brand is knowing to what extent it contributes to the success of the business (and, to do so, focus must be on this objective).

    Essentially, managing a brand efficiently could help to accelerate your business at least from the point of view of four aspects:

    1. Defining the competitive field you operate in.

      It establishes the competitive arena, the rules of the game and relative differences. The brain’s function is, mainly, to discriminate constant sound and the thousands of impacts we receive each day. In this regard, the brand is a symbolic exercise that unifies, categorizes and organizes a large amount of information.
      In time frames (remember G. Lakoff and his elephant), a brand helps because it provides a very economical solution to conveying a large amount of information. Starbucks isn’t only coffee, it’s a “third place”; Volvo is safety on wheels; Estrella Damm is the Mediterranean; Duracell adopts the logic of superheroes… This exercise allows, in the terms of W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne, blue oceans to be created where the competition is nothing less than irrelevant.

    2. Defining who the brand exists for (in other words, the target).

      The proposal must mean something to someone, which is often manifested by profiles based on behavior. A brand is a proposal aimed at someone in particular. Séneca said that “there is no fair wind for a boat that doesn’t know where it’s headed”. Defining a target means choosing, and choosing requires ruling out. Strong brands are capable of conveying a proposal of value to specific people (or groups which share very specific motivations). For this point, segmentation is increasingly more to do with responding to insights, in other words, understanding that people have goals and that the way of discovering how to meet them is essential.

    3. Defining the vision of the world, the brand goal that synthesizes its mission, vision and values.

      This goal comes in the form of a promise that balances a combination of rational, emotional and relational elements. A business is an organization of people, therefore the collective sense (the goal, the dream, the challenge) should be inspiring and the cornerstone of the people who work there.

    4. Defining and extracting value from the main trends to align the business with cross-cutting elements that give the brand depth and speed.

      The world is changing and markets are becoming more and more dynamic. Brands that connect more closely to trends are capable of taking more value from the market and assuring they are competitive.

    And this is the secret. There are few approaches that are more powerful for a brand than working on these four aspects.

     

     

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