What Is Branding?The term "branding" instantly conjures up images of the Nike swoosh, McDonald's golden arches, the Coca-Cola label, and the Starbucks paper cup. Yet, branding is much more than logos, advertising, and public relations. Successful branding is a holistic and comprehensive management issue. It requires a clear articulation of what the brand promises to deliver combined with a consistent customer experience of that brand promise. Maintaining the customer experience, even while facing the exigencies of a recession, builds long-term financial and emotional value for an organization.
The origin of branding as a widespread management practice is often tied to gasoline companies who sought to differentiate their services for an essentially indistinguishable commodity product.
Many of today's leading brands, such as Starbucks and Nike, have successfully differentiated products that are easily substitutable.
Like other products that may be substitutable, public school districts can and should be intentionally branded. In the absence of a deliberate branding program, districts and schools run the risk of allowing other sources to define them. The media can positively or negatively affect a district or school's brand with a single headline. Districts, individual schools, and programs within schools face branding every time you hear the following questions: "Does that town have a good school system?", "Did my high school make the top 100 list?", "Are you in the Advanced Math Program?"
Rather than passively accepting a branding defined by others, brand management forces the district to enact change preemptively. School districts' management challenges often reflect a common theme: how do I shift my agenda away from responding to the demands of others and toward creating and driving the agenda myself? Brand management strategy and tactics present a robust approach to addressing this struggle.
The District Management Council has long focused on the importance of branding for public school districts. DMC has worked with member school districts, including Boston Public Schools, Cambridge Public Schools, and Dallas ISD, among others, to help apply brand management theory to district operations.
"People often mistake the position of power to be that of the speaker. The power to control the agenda lies with the person asking the questions. For us to become less reactive, we need to become the questioner. Brand management forces us to ask the questions first." - Joseph Scherer, The District Management Council
The goal of brand management is to generate quantifiable and intangible benefits, known in summary as "brand equity." The value of brand equity, while different for a school district than for a private sector company, is nonetheless measurable and is likely to yield significant long-term value. For a school district, the many benefits of branding can materialize in such forms as increases in student enrollment, voter support in bond referenda and board elections, greater facility in attracting and retaining employees, and higher real estate values.
Customer choice is the basic driver behind the power of brands. In public education, key customers might be any one of a broad variety of stakeholders within the district: students, parents, staff, community members, board members, and more. The choice the customers exercise could range from a student's decision to participate in an after-school activity to a parent's selection between a district and charter school.
Two fundamental components of a brand inform a customer's choice. The first is the brand "promise" or mission. The brand promise is a clear articulation of what the brand intends to deliver to its customers. This promise is conveyed by myriad external communications like PR, media, advertising, and signage. The other component of a customer's decision is the brand "experience," which includes educational outcomes as well as the experience of the student in the classroom and the experience of parents' interaction with teachers and staff on a day-to-day level.
The biggest challenge of creating a successful brand is connecting these two pieces -the brand promise and the brand experience. In previous communications efforts, many school districts have prioritized the brand promise side of the equation while ignoring its bond to the actual brand experience.
Problems arise when the promise does not accurately reflect the reality that district stakeholders experience on a daily basis. To a parent, how consistent is a garbage-strewn drop-off area or a rude front desk staff member with a lofty mission statement that promises to create "global citizens of the 21st century"? Small fixes can buy a lot of goodwill. The brand promise needs to underpin all aspects of the organization's operations. Alignment throughout the organization is necessary to link the brand experience to the brand promise.
The cycle of brand management strives to ensure that the brand experience is delivering on the brand promise.
The first step in the cycle shown below is market research. The district should conduct a customer experience audit with a focused approach of seeking out actionable information that district leadership can use to improve services. The audit should ask penetrating questions to gauge the clarity and value of the brand promise, the extent to which employees behave in a way that meets customer expectations and delivers the brand promise, and whether products and services are differentiated to yield value to target customers. All too often, satisfaction studies are designed to affirm current district management practices rather than to discover opportunities to serve stakeholders better.
Once the audit process has collected and distilled data and insights, the focus needs to shift to internal issues.
With the information from the audit, a district should create or modify its brand platform. This is a complex process for districts, which are usually a portfolio of brands rather than a single product. The district functions as an "umbrella" brand that comprises differentiated school-level and program-level sub-brands. Once a district has taken a full inventory of its layers of brands, it must manage the multiple brands as a reinforcing set of assets. It must consider how to position each sub-brand with clarity and precision, and how to enable the sub-brands to work together to support the overall district promise. Examples may include such major decisions as combining overlapping programs or such minor ones as changing a logo to more accurately signal a service offering.
A modified brand platform will allow for a sharpening of the customer experience. Carefully reviewing the people delivering the services, the processes enabling them, and the services themselves, a district should reevaluate and tweak where necessary to improve the consistency of service delivery. District leadership should inform, train, and align every person in the organization to act as a "brand agent" and to consciously communicate and deliver the brand promise.
Organizations often make the mistake of jumping the gun and publicizing changes externally before the organization is ready to deliver on its new promises. Worse than simply being ineffective, premature announcement can seriously damage brand equity and will take significant time and investment to repair. The district must first continue the internal work. It must guarantee that all employees understand the brand promise, its target, and the target's expectations. Managers must be prepared to lead the brand with their own commitment, and must develop training that equips other staff members with the knowledge, attitude, and skills to deliver on the brand promise.
Only after the district completes the first four steps in the brand management cycle can it ask how best to convey the brand to its intended audiences and to begin communicating externally.
To drive the type of brand management activities that will lead to a more productive relationship with district stakeholders requires a rethinking of the skill sets that are necessary in a brand manager.
To the extent that brand management exists in school districts today, responsibilities are for the most part diffuse and uncoordinated. Based on DMC's observations, brand management responsibilities fall largely on the superintendent and some key staff.
In the private sector, meanwhile, a Chief Marketing Officer or VP of Marketing typically has broad-reaching responsibilities and acts as a clearinghouse for all things marketing and branding-related. This person is the focal point within the organization to align the brand promise with the brand experience.
For a school district, the duties of a private sector marketing officer hold a particularly cogent lesson. The management structure of the school district should include a clear place for brand management responsibilities. The superintendent can handle these responsibilities as a "portfolio manager," or can delegate them to a new position with consolidated responsibility for brand management activities, including PR, communications, and market research.
Many member districts have successfully used DMC's member support services to help reorganize and reprioritize district "brand management" activities, including rethinking strategic communications activities, reorganizing key staff roles and responsibilities, and augmenting investment in brand management staff and skill development.
The District Management Council actively engages with its member districts on these and other management-related topics by helping develop and implement relevant strategies and tactics.
DMC is a member-driven organization, and will continue to research and deliver brand management insights on an ongoing basis. To learn more about how the council and membership can advance your district's agenda, please contact us at 877.DMC.3500 (toll free) or email us.
Dr. Joseph Scherer, Managing Director
Nicholas Morgan, Managing Consultant
