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Economic disruptions produced by the ongoing technological revolution, rising uncertainty in global markets, and crises of complexity generated by social media all make this an exceptionally challenging time for organizations seeking to create or refine their brand identities.

Explored in what follows are critical issues to address in assembling a comprehensive branding program, based on challenges and opportunities that we at Siegelvision consistently encounter with clients.

The Inside-Out Approach

Henry Ford is often quoted as having said, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” Whether the words were his or not, they reflect what we call the “outside-in” approach — trusting customers to provide critical insights to help define a brand identity. But relying on customer feedback alone is akin to treating symptoms rather than the underlying illness.

While customers may be able to pinpoint certain problems they would like to see addressed, they rarely have enough information to understand the organization in sufficient detail.

An “inside-out” approach, on the other hand, helps achieve a distinctive and credible branding program by tapping insights that emerge from within the organization itself — a process largely contingent upon leadership support.

Validation research is then conducted, bringing employees and outside audiences together to react to concrete ideas, and helping ensure that the resulting strategy will be clear, compelling, and relevant.

Driving Brand Identity Through a Clearly Defined Purpose

Most organizations spend months devising predictable, and often garbled, mission or vision statements that employees ignore and that fail to guide decision-making in both day-to-day management and big-picture strategic planning.

An effective purpose statement defines your reason for being in business, the calling your organization aims to answer in the marketplace, and the problems you strive to solve.

Moreover, defining a clear and concise purpose statement creates coherence for your employees — coherence about what your company stands for and what inspires its work, beyond just the pursuit of money. Effectively crafted, it should be the driving force behind strategic decisions, investments, and other critical matters.

The Urban Institute, a think tank based in Washington, D.C., was established by President Lyndon Johnson in 1968 to “help solve the problem” of inner-city poverty. Over the years, it’s become a respected source for intelligent, accessible analyses of economic and social policies. But despite the institute’s admirable aims, its impact was long undermined by a verbose and confusing mission statement, which read:

“The Urban Institute gathers data, conducts research, evaluates programs, offers technical assistance overseas, and educates Americans on social and economic issues — to foster sound public policy and effective government.

The Urban Institute builds knowledge about the nation’s social and fiscal challenges, practicing open-minded, evidence-based research to diagnose problems and figure out which policies and programs work best for whom, and how.”

The Urban Institute certainly does all of those things, but, as we learned during our immersive branding project, they do not comprise the organization’s core purpose. We replaced the institute’s lengthy and impractical mission statement with a powerful three-word purpose statement:

“ELEVATE THE DEBATE.”

The Urban Institute’s cogent new expression of its purpose — its essence — resonated deeply with all stakeholders. Defining the organization’s role in simple, concrete terms provides a strong guide for decision-making and acts as a beacon for employees at every level.

Creating Bold, Action-Driving Positioning

Americans are daily bombarded by vague, generic taglines that masquerade as brand positioning. Such identity imprecision appears everywhere, including among institutions of higher education.

“Fierce Advocates for Justice,” the highly effective positioning that Siegelvision developed for the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City, provided the touchstone for an aggressive campaign to change the public’s perception of the school as a “cop college” into a view of it as a comprehensive educational institution, one that boasts a liberal arts curriculum coupled with world-class criminal justice courses for undergraduate and graduate students alike.

In a 2012 conversation, Jeremy Travis, the college’s current president, told me that the “Fierce Advocates for Justice” positioning “has allowed every member of our community to see a place for his or her interests in the brand of the college. The language we now use … [reflects] who they are and want to be. When we first put up [signage with our new tagline,] a student told me: ‘That wakes me up when I come to school every morning, to remind myself that I’m here because I’m a fierce advocate for justice.'”

Defining and Implementing Your Brand Voice

We define “brand voice” as the distinctive tone and style of an organization’s communications, which should reflect its personality and positioning and provide coherence for its brand across all communications platforms.

I find that these voices can be fragmented, driven to a large degree by advertising and public relations, direct-response mailings, and the uncoordinated management of financial and internal communications.

In recent years, corporations have strived to unify their diverse communications, but the internet has proven disruptive to such efforts. The production of corporate communications has now gone from being a professional operation to a free-for-all in which everyone, at all levels, communicates internally and externally via email, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and other platforms. Brand voice is becoming increasingly decentralized and social; the most successful organizations understand how to engage audiences and leverage the voices of employees and consumers effectively.

As digital platforms become more sophisticated and audiences grow more distinctly delineated, organizations must keep up by embracing experiential and personal communications that harness opportunities for consumers to engage with them.

Finally, the information immediacy that now so powerfully defines our lives means that messages are spread far and wide very quickly, a fact that underscores the importance of having an organized and unified brand voice.

Our work with The College Board provides valuable insight into the process of developing an effective voice that enhances and reinforces brand messaging. Driven by the College Board’s dynamic purpose statement, “Challenging All Students to Own Their Future,” we defined its voice as:

• Refreshingly clear
• Credible
• Supportive
• Galvanizing
• Forward-thinking

Each of these terms was then defined to reflect the College Board’s messaging and public persona. To describe its most distinctive quality — galvanizing — we recommended the following: “We make things happen. We challenge students to persevere and make the most of their education. We rally our member organizations to challenge the status quo and extend the promise of education to all. We are motivating and collaborative, not confrontational.”

Culture Trumps Strategy Every Time

Employees will thrive and become powerful brand ambassadors if their organization’s culture embraces a set of values that resonate deeply and authentically. Building an atmosphere in which this happens depends on what you do, not just on what you say.

Wells Fargo, today a textbook case of poor corporate culture, communicates a vision and values that are shockingly discordant with its recent behavior. Even now, in the wake of its management scandals, Wells Fargo continues to speak of “integrity,” “principled performance,” and a tireless commitment to valuing “what’s right for our customers in everything we do.”

In an extensive 2015 document, “The Vision and Values of Wells Fargo,” CEO John Stumpf (who was fired the following year) defined the bank’s vision as being “about building lifelong relationships one customer at a time,” with the promise to “never put the stagecoach ahead of the horses.” What comedy.

A positive, top-down culture is crucial to the success of your organization and the people who work for it. This is powerfully demonstrated in the 2014 book “Any Wednesday” by Keith Reinhard, chairman emeritus of the global advertising firm DDB Worldwide. The title stems from the brief, encouraging memos he sent to everyone in the agency on Wednesdays to help them finish the week with optimism.

Even from his seat at the head of the table, Reinhard did not forget the importance of connecting creatively and personally with all employees. His memos show a person who has served at all levels in an organization and who understands better than most that there is no substitute for an inspiring and inclusive work culture. Here’s one of our favorites:

“When I first became head of the agency, I gave board members small potted plants with a note saying I expected each one of them to cause his or her plant to grow. It was a simple — perhaps simplistic — reminder that talent, like the plant, must be nurtured. Neither plants nor talented people can be instructed or commanded to grow.”

Impact

Ultimately, the best test of an organization’s voice is its impact on the market. ROI (Return on Investment), a conventional measure of impact, may work well in measuring tangible outcomes but does little to predict the effect of a product or program on an intended audience. We recast this formula as Relevance, Originality, Impact. The omission of any of these three elements can spell disaster for a branding program; by contrast, the most successful rebrands embrace each one with care and authenticity.

Our work for John Jay College exemplifies the importance of this ROI and its effectiveness in the marketplace. “Fierce Advocates for Justice” was a call to action to the younger generation to respond to the social injustices troubling our nation.

The motto was a stirring expression of purpose that made waves in the higher education community and inspired other schools to follow suit. And it was accompanied by a comprehensive campaign — aimed at having maximum impact on the targeted demographics — that included striking subway advertisements and geofencing around high school campuses to help attract prospective students — achieving relevance, originality, and impact.

Various metrics were developed to gauge the campaign’s reach, including measurements of awareness, familiarity, and reputation, as well as a willingness to provide financial support. “Fierce Advocates for Justice” generated highly impressive results: the number of alumni donors has increased by 35% since 2013; and the Justice Campaign — a comprehensive digital and subway ad initiative than ran in the fourth quarter of 2016 — has sparked an increase in applications of more than 40%. As a result, for the first time in its 52-year history, the John Jay College of Criminal Justice has a waiting list for enrollment.

Clarity Above All

Building a brand for the 21st century is no easy task. The advent of social media has provided podiums for customers and employees to voice their criticisms of once-impervious brands. Rather than fight this pervasive change, organizations would do well to evolve toward more transparent and authentic identities.

Siegelvision’s own mantra is “Clarity Above All,” which means clarity of purpose, expression, and experience. It is only getting easier today to identify organizations that fail to practice what they preach. Therefore, it is in the interests of everyone in your organization that you define and deeply believe in your purpose and positioning, express your voice coherently and empathetically, and promote an internal culture that eschews disingenuousness and places a premium on authenticity.

If you’re familiar with the HubSpot Academy, then you know it offers online certifications and free tools to help people all over the world learn how to market, sell, and grow an inbound business.

Recently, HubSpot Academy launched its Education Partner Program, which helps college and university professors teach inbound marketing, sales, and provides guidance on using the HubSpot Marketing Software and Customer Relationship Management (CRM). The mission of the program is to bring the theory and practice of running and growing a business into the classroom — and to give students the hands-on experience they need to launch their careers right out of school.

But when it came time to drive even more value for this program, there was much more we could for students. The program already provided educators with the software, resources, community and support to build leading marketing classes. We wanted to do even better at providing students with valuable, market-ready skills — by way of certification.

Here’s what happened when we challenged 11 marketing students to get their HubSpot certifications in one semester — and build an inbound strategy for a real company in the process.

How HubSpot Certifications Helped Build an Inbound Strategy

The Hypothesis and Objective

The Certification

HubSpot Academy certifications are designed to help marketers stay up-to-date on the latest marketing and sales techniques, while also boosting their resumes. They allow users to take their inbound skills to the next level, with a confirmed completion of a qualifying exams.

When we looked at which certifications were being assigned by Education Partner Program professors — and which ones students were receiving — the HubSpot Marketing Software Certification (HSMC) was missing. But we didn’t despair at that finding. Rather, we looked at how we could address those barriers to adoption.

To say that the HMSC is “difficult” is a tremendous understatement. It involves an exam, a mastery of the Inbound Methodology, a practicum component, and a proven ability to achieve results using the HubSpot Marketing Software.

Having this certification can help a marketer stand out during a job search — especially a recent graduate.

The prospect of more students receiving their HMSC was a mutually beneficial goal for instructors, students, and their respective institutions. We wanted to show that students could get their HSMC within a single semester, so we created an experiment to do that, with the mentality that if it was successful, we could roll it out across the entire Education Partner Program community.

The Framework

The biggest HSMC adoption barrier for students seemed to be the practicum component, which requires users to carry out actual inbound marketing activities using HubSpot Marketing Software — and achieve tangible results. That meant we would need a real business to agree to let these students use its HubSpot portal to complete these tasks, while working toward the HSMC.

But a barrier to adoption didn’t have to be a deal-breaker. In fact, it turned out to be quite the opposite — in addition to building an experiment to show that students could get their HSMC within a single semester, our objective would now also require them to complete real-world marketing work on behalf of an actual business. Around here, we call that a “win-win.”

Using those factors as a foundation, we determined our hypothesis: Students will be able to earn their HubSpot Marketing Software Certifications within a single semester.

The Experiment

What We Did

To test the hypothesis, we first pitched the experiment to Randy Harrison, a senior member of the affiliated faculty at Emerson College’s Department of Marketing Communication. He had previously spoken of his desire for his students to become certified, and was eager to give them the real-world experience that came with completing the HSMC.

Since HubSpot has roughly 30,000 customers, we (optimistically) figured that at least one of them would be willing to let a classroom of eager students do free marketing work on behalf of the company. The idea was that the customer would add the students as users in its HubSpot portal, who would then work to complete the practicum requirements of the HSMC by way of the aforementioned marketing work.

But Professor Harrison was already way ahead of us. After we approached him with the experiment he convinced one of his business contacts to not only become a new HubSpot customer — but also, allow his students to carry out the marketing work for their HSMC.

Before jumping right in, we established some guardrails. If the experiment was successful, we wanted it to be designed to scale — and more seamlessly replicable by other educators in the future:

• Every student should become certified.
• The class would visit the HubSpot office at least once.
• A member of the HubSpot team would visit the class at least once.
• Professor Harrison would work with a member of the Education Partner Program team to design the course.
• Professor Harrison would document this experience and allow it to be used publicly.

How We Would Measure Success

Success would be measured according to the following metrics:

• Every student meets the practicum component of the certification.
• 80% of the students complete the HSMC in its entirety.

The Spring 2017 semester began — and we were ready to get to work.

The Results

All in all, the experiment was a success.

Every student completed the practicum component with flying colors — which meant they were able to accomplish the objective of applying the Inbound Methodology to build and execute an inbound strategy for a real business.

Meanwhile, 66% of the students passed the entirety of the HSMC — which meant they both completed the practicum and passed the certification exam. And while we didn’t reach the 80% metric we originally established, the benchmark was high enough for us to take the experiment out of beta, tweak it to even better set up students for success, and replicate for the following semester.

And finally, here’s our favorite part: The company that became a customer for this experiment hired four of the students before they even graduated.

Where We Go From Here

Next Steps

As we mentioned previously, following the success of the experiment, we structured it in a way that has allowed it to become an official offering of the Education Partner Program. Working with our Customer Success team, we have established a system to match professors who want their students to obtain the HSMC with HubSpot customers, using criteria like product fit and shared expectations.

How Marketers Can Use What We Learned

When we carried out this project, we didn’t just learn more about Education Partners — we also learned some valuable lessons about experimentation in general.

Go Big

Pick experiments that, if they’re successful, will produce significant results. Design them with impact and scale in mind — for many, time is the most valuable resource, so don’t let it go to waste on an experiment that will only have minimal impact.

In our case, we needed a way to dramatically increase the value of the Education Partner Program for participating schools, professors, and students, and knowing whether the students could become HSMC in one semester was crucial to that. Even if our hypothesis was proven wrong, we would know to look for a different potential value source.

Recycle When Possible

Unless your company was founded yesterday, you likely have a wealth of resources to draw upon for your experiments — things like previous experiments, marketing collateral, fellow employees, and historical data.

Notice that we didn’t actually create any net-new assets to conduct this experiment — the only investment was sweat equity and time. Additionally, the other major stakeholder in the experiment, Professor Harrison, agreed to document the experiment, regardless of the outcomes. That meant we would be creating a new value point for the program, as we paved the way for other professors to get their students certified … or cautioned educators on what we learned, had it failed.

And About That Documentation

Document everything like your life depends on it. Use the scientific method, and be sure to debrief when it concludes — remember, if it succeeds you’ll be repeating it, and regardless of the outcome, you want to discuss ways to improve upon it.

And remember this: Many times, an experiment is more valuable if it fails. For that, we use this famous quote from Thomas Edison — “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”

What are some of the ways you’ve used HubSpot Academy certifications? Let us know about your best experiment in the comments — and hey, we might even feature it on our blog.