ITSMA In the News: Reprint

Branding: Building More Than Awareness

By David Munn and Robert Leavitt
Service Chain Connections, March 2000

You can’t escape them. Racing through airports. Scanning the Wall Street Journal. Opening your e-mail. Watching the Super Bowl. The fight for brand awareness in IT and e-business professional services is red-hot, and the billboards, banner ads, TV commercials and e-mail enticements are coming fast and furious. Every week, it seems, we read about another huge branding initiative in the IT services space. As firms jockey for position, the sense of urgency is palpable.

But branding is a long-term game. Not withstanding the new rhetoric about "branding at warp speed," there remain some fundamental realities about building brand equity that cannot be short-circuited by all the wonders of the Internet economy. Can basic awareness be developed much more quickly in the digital age? Absolutely yes, just look at Amazon.com, eBay, or Red Hat. But brand awareness does not equal brand equity.

Awareness is step one. If they don’t know you exist, they certainly won’t consider you for their next project. But it’s a long road from simple awareness – they’ve heard of you – through favorability, preference and actual purchase to the formation of a long-term client relationship.

Loyalty: The Ultimate Goal

For e-business professional services firms, the most critical measure of brand equity is customer loyalty. How loyal are your customers? Do they come back to you for the next job without even looking at the competition? Can you rely on them for excellent references – the single most important source of information for your prospective clients? Do they independently spread the word about your great performance?

The ultimate goal of branding is to create loyal customers. With loyal customers, marketing is easier, selling is faster, premium pricing is more acceptable, repeat business is extremely high and positive word of mouth helps generate new business. Creating loyal customers can happen more quickly with the Internet. By definition, however, loyalty comes through experience and time.

Building brand loyalty is not simply a matter of customer satisfaction. That’s the starting point. With the Internet, information about competitors is just a click away, and switching becomes much easier. Many "satisfied" customers move right on to the next provider. Brand loyalty comes from meeting and shaping customer expectations through experience over time. You always deliver top quality services. You can be counted on. You anticipate their needs. You demonstrate loyalty to them.

From this perspective, it should not be surprising that the e-business consulting and professional services space remains wide open. It is too new and undergoing too much change to be otherwise. No one owns this space, and the competition remains in an early phase. According to the latest research from the Information Technology Services Marketing Association (ITSMA), potential customers are only just beginning to recognize which companies are even providing e-business professional services. Prospective clients still have little understanding of what those services firms are doing.

Unaided Brand Awareness is Extremely Low

In its newly completed Winter 2000 Brand Awareness Study, ITSMA surveyed 300 key decision makers from Fortune 1000 companies, government entities and health care institutions to determine the brand strength and positioning of the industry’s leading e-business professional services providers.

ITSMA’s findings are not encouraging. As Figure 1 demonstrates, unaided awareness is extremely low among the people most centrally involved in buying e-business services. Only IBM Global Services even cracked double digits, scoring 31% on the buyer-awareness scale. IBM has "bought" mindshare with its massive advertising campaign, but has in no way cornered the market.

Figure 1: Unaided Awareness of E-Business Professional Services Firms

Survey respondents’ unaided rankings of e-business professional services firms.
Note: Multiple responses allowed.
Source: ITSMA, Professional Services and E-Business Solutions Brand Awareness Study, Winter 2000

Microsoft, Andersen Consulting, EDS and Oracle scored between 5% and 7%, with the rest posting even lower scores. And many of the hot new e-business consultancies barely registered on the awareness scale. In fact, few respondents knew about the newcomers even when they were cited by name. Close to half of the decision-makers named firms that fell into the "other" category-i.e., companies named by only one or two respondents. These firms included many prominent consulting and IT professional services firms. Nearly one-third of the study respondents was unable to name, unprompted, Web-based technology and e-commerce solutions professional services firms.

Aided Awareness Remains Limited

A number of the firms scored much higher on the recognition scale once respondents were prompted with specific firm names. In the ITSMA study, most of the executives and managers were aware of such companies as Sun, Oracle, IBM Global Services, Compaq, Hewlett-Packard, Andersen Consulting, and PricewaterhouseCoopers.

Awareness, however, is not enough. Positive market positioning requires some understanding among prospects of your firm’s core competencies, value propositions, key marketing messages, and even corporate personality. The dot-coms spending half their annual marketing budgets on Super Bowl ads, unfortunately, seemed often to miss this point. "Memorable" advertisements do little for a company’s brand if core attributes and messages don’t come through, and if the systems and processes to ensure performance are not in place.

The ITSMA study documented very low levels of understanding of the leading e-business professional services brands. When asked directly, "Would you say that Andersen Consulting (or EDS, Sapient, et al) is an e-business solutions provider," something that all of these companies have aggressively promoted, the business decision-makers most commonly answered "I don’t know" – again with the exception of IBM Global Services. The "I don’t knows" often comprised two thirds of the responses.

What’s Critical to Buyers

ITSMA also asked the business buyers to rate the importance of selected attributes for professional services providers (Figure 2). On a five-point scale (with 5 being "very important"), the two most important firm attributes were:

• Delivers on promises (4.8 out of 5.0)
• Has industry expertise (4.6 out of 5.0)

Other important attributes include the ability to transfer knowledge to the client, a collaborative work style, and ease of doing business. Price competitiveness, though important, ranks ninth.

Buyers of professional services are looking most for technically savvy industry experts who share their knowledge, and are flexible and "easy to do business with." Further, they want their E-business professional services providers to have good references, do user research, find innovative approaches, and possess a proven track record of delivering solutions fast. These buyers want professional services firms to focus on the business benefits of what they can deliver, not the technical or service features.

Figure 2: Importance of Professional Service Firm's Attributes

Survey respondents’ rankings of the importance of specific attributes of professional services firms.
Note: Ratings based on a five-point scale, in which 1=not at all important and 5=very important.
Source: ITSMA, Professional Services and E-Business Solutions Brand Awareness Study, Winter 2000

Sources of Information One final point offers additional insight into the requirements for successful brand building. According to the ITSMA study, buyers of these services obtain most of the information they need to select services firms from recommendations, references and word of mouth (Figure 3). This is especially true for business executives, but MIS executives also rank these sources about equal with the Web, and far higher than the rest. The Web is also an important secondary information source for the business executives. Other sources, such as the business and trade press, conferences and seminars, and the RFP process are much less important for both groups.

Figure3: Sources of Information About E-Business Professional Service Providers

How buyers of e-business professional services find out about firms.
Source: ITSMA, Professional Services and E-Business Solutions Brand Awareness Study, Winter 2000

Building Brand Loyalty: What Works

The intensity of competition and the pace of change make building a durable e-business brand extremely difficult, but also that much more important. Brands are a shortcut to decision making. The confidence and trust engendered in a strong brand eliminates several steps in the purchasing process for anxious buyers. If I "know" that CSC or EDS or Hewlett-Packard or Oracle will do a great job, I don’t have to spend time researching alternatives, checking references and comparing RFPs.

The ITSMA research suggests six lessons for e-business professional services brand builders.

1. The most effective branding activities you can undertake are those that ensure client satisfaction and loyalty and promote positive word of mouth and success stories. Look again at the attributes that the buyers value most highly: "delivers on promises," "has industry expertise," "transfers knowledge to client," "works collaboratively."
   
   Clients and prospects are looking for partnerships of real value, commitment, and dedication to their success. Can you improve service delivery? Are your training programs first class? Can you guarantee business results? Synet Service Corporation, an e-business consulting firm in Minneapolis, has built an excellent reputation among clients by guaranteeing results and putting a third or more of its fees at risk if the results are not achieved.
   
2. Brand from the Top. Branding works best when top management drives it. The CEO, ideally, is the brand manager and most aggressive brand champion, and works to infuse brand messages, values and vision throughout the organization. Brand from the top also means branding the firm, not specific service offerings or business units.
   
   In e-business professional services, branding is much more about people and processes than offerings and features. You’re really branding the services and reliability that your clients will experience. You want your customers buying your company and trusting that you will deliver the right features to them. They don’t care which internal unit the service comes from. At the same time, the pace of change is such that branding specific services, or even service units within the company, is increasingly risky. It can necessitate a lot of re-branding as those services necessarily change or disappear.
   
3. Research and Measure Everything. Harry Beckwith, author of Selling the Invisible, says "your position is a place, and someone else puts you there: your prospects." Branding must begin, continue and end with research. You’ve got to know where you stand with your clients, your prospects, your own employees and all the other influencers in the market - competitors, press, analysts, and so on. What are your strengths and weaknesses? Where do you stand vis-a-vis competitors? How is your whole industry perceived? What’s the latest buzz on your new offering?
   
   Brand research involves developing a clear baseline, taking into account as many factors as possible, and then continuing the research and tracking on an ongoing basis. Are you talking regularly with all your stakeholders? What attributes are your prospects most concerned with? What are you NOT providing your clients that they really want? Are you documenting client retention rates, repeat business, and numbers of sole source contracts?
   
4. Keep One Step Ahead. Changes in e-business are happening so quickly that thought leadership has become a requirement for professional services leaders. If you can help your clients and prospects cut through all the data and hype to focus on what’s really important for their business, you’ve got a major advantage. More and more, your clients don’t even know what they need. The uncertainty and the options are too great.
   
   You must convince them that you understand their market and their needs better than they do. And you’ve got to have the goods. Industry leaders are investing heavily in thought leadership, with dedicated staffs, partnerships with academic and industry experts, extensive research programs, and substantial marketing initiatives to highlight their findings.
   
5. Rally the Troops. The best branding comes from the top, but is infused throughout the company. Branding today is not just about advertising, external marketing, great service and thought leadership. Internal marketing makes it possible to keep the promises you make. Because every employee represents the brand, your brand is only as strong as its weakest advocate. Best practices firms are investing heavily in brand champions throughout every division and practice. Their job is to monitor and support the infusion of consistent brand messages and values throughout every aspect of service design, delivery and communication.
   
   Rallying the troops extends outside the firm as well, in two critical directions. First, as the war for talent rages in e-business professional services, your brand must be directed to prospective employees as well, and include clear messages about why your firm is a great place to work. Second, the proliferation of partnerships and alliances means that now your partners are part of your brand as well. If they slip, it reflects poorly on you. This creates a new premium on "co-branding," working hard to ensure not only that your brand messages shine clearly in partnership initiatives, but that service performance remains equally strong.
   
6. Work the Web. Without doubt the Web is the world’s greatest direct marketing tool. But working the Web to build brand loyalty is critical as well for at least three reasons. First, your web site, increasingly, is your firm’s calling card--the first entry point for clients, prospects and everyone else. Building a first class site to show off the breadth and depth of your experience and successes, and to offer useful interactivity and service delivery, is no longer just an option.
   
   Second, the sheer breadth of Internet-based marketing vehicles, from e-mail and web sites, to chat rooms and portals, to trading exchanges and personal services, makes it vital to get more active online. Even if you are not using all these vehicles, your clients and competitors probably are. What’s the latest gossip about your firm, about pending mergers in your industry, about competitive new service offerings? Have you checked? Are you engaged in those discussions to help steer them in a favorable direction?

Finally, it’s becoming more difficult for professional services firms to get away with "Do as I say, not as I do." Clients quickly see through companies that haven’t practiced the e-business transformation they are preaching.

Adopting New Wisdom

The new world of e-business professional services has certainly thrown some wrinkles into the old conventional wisdom about branding. That wisdom, drawn mainly from the consumer products world, held that branding was largely equivalent to advertising, that branding was mainly a matter of connecting emotional inferences to physical products and that numerous brand managers could function autonomously within a single company. The new wisdom holds that branding is a holistic, comprehensive process; that performance and experience are central to the brand; and that branding the company is better than branding individual products or services.

So we finish where we began. Branding is a long-term game. It is not a one-time campaign, it is not something that can be "handled" just by the marketing department, and it is certainly not something that can be done without a lot of careful planning and management. The best branding efforts start from the top, they involve executives from across the organization, and they are permanent.

One final note. Although it certainly doesn’t hurt to have $100 million or so to invest in your e-business services brand, the discipline and the approach are more important than the money. Advertising is expensive. But championing the brand from the top, rallying the troops, infusing consistency of message and values across the organization, and guaranteeing excellent service, relatively speaking, are not. Indeed, failure on these fronts will prove far more expensive in the end.

-- Reprinted with permission --

For more information on Professional Services and E-Business Solutions Brand Awareness Study, Winter 2000 [click here].

About ITSMA
ITSMA specializes in helping companies market and sell services and solutions more effectively. As a membership organization, we provide research, consulting, and training to the world's leading technology, communications, and professional services providers to generate increased demand, strengthen customer relationships, and improve brand differentiation. ITSMA is based near Boston, and has offices in London and Tokyo. Learn more at www.itsma.com.