Insight
Why do brands need to be co-created?
(Written by: Lee Kwok Wing / Honorary Advisor, Process Pro Brand Taiwan)
Is your team "Three monks without water?" or "Three cobblers are better than one?"
When running a company, entrepreneurs often use the five corporate pillars of "production, marketing, human resources, development, and finance" as a structure (or even six to eight pillars as time progresses). Through these key resources and activities, they can find out how to differentiate themselves from their competitors and put forward value propositions that have a "high degree of relevance" to customers in order to pursue success in the marketplace.
However, the problem is that the ideal is very beautiful, but the reality is very cruel; the classic sentence in Jin Yong's "The Smiling Proud Wanderer": "As long as there are people, there will be grudges, and when there are grudges, there will be a rivers and lakes, and the people are the rivers and lakes. It is often seen that the departmental localism, because of the different positions and conflicts, coupled with the professional division of labor and hierarchical responsibility of the silo effect, it is likely that the vision and goals of the boss are ultimately reduced to slogans, and can not be effectively pushed forward.
I always say that a corporate branding project is like a psychological counseling project. When it comes to a family business, it becomes family therapy, and many of the inherent views, beliefs, and emotions that are not in line with the future development of the brand need to be seen and accepted before they can be dealt with and moved forward. The divergence of opinions among team members stems from the fact that each person joined the company at a different point in time, has experienced different glory and sorrow, and therefore has a different vision of the future of the company's brand development; in addition, each department has a different function, and therefore the priority of the task is also changing.
In fact, if we consider the brand operated by an enterprise as a whole, each person and each department has a piece of the puzzle in their hands, and they need to work together in order to put together a complete puzzle and produce a comprehensive effect. For example, the large-scale robot in the "Pacific Rim" movie requires 2-3 people to coordinate with each other, and in the "Saints" animation, the five lions have to be united in order to generate the maximum power; dragon boat rowing requires 21 people to work together, act in unison, and have a tacit understanding of the matching speeds in order to row fast and win.
But how?
Enterprises often look to brand consultants for answers, and to paraphrase what business owners often say, "Aren't consultants just hired to ask questions? It's only natural to expect answers from consultants, but as mentioned above.
“Pro believes in the collective wisdom of the team, the only way to participate in the co-creation, each colleague and relationship will have a high degree of recognition of the results produced, the implementation of more concentricity and unity, to eliminate the silo effect.”
The brand can only be effectively promoted and the presentation will be much more effective.
Guided Consulting Leads the team to establish core brand values, facilitates connections and raises recognition.
Taking the core value of creating a brand as an example, Pro used a guided approach to lead a strategic consensus meeting by asking everyone in the team to interview each other in pairs: "Please think back to a time in your life when you felt you were at the "top of your game" after joining this company? and "Please recall a time when you were at your "peak" after joining this company. We took turns to be the reporter and the interviewee. I remember that in one of the interviews, one of the members "reported" the peak moment of another member: "I had never traveled abroad before joining the company, and my English was not good either. The company decided to expand into the international market and sent me overseas to introduce its products to customers. I was scared, but I treasured the opportunity, so I practiced English every day after work for several months before the trip and gritted my teeth and took a flight to the destination alone, and finally succeeded in winning the business!
During the process, not only did we let our colleagues, who were not familiar with each other, "tell" and "listen" to each other's stories, but we also extracted the "personal values" from them, and presented them to all team members, so that we could decide together which ones were suitable to be the brand's core values. With personal values, and listening to each other's stories, the team was able to create core values that the team could identify with.
We work with our colleagues to create brands and build core team values.
When corporate team members come together with tolerance for individual differences, genuine respect for each other, and a sense of discovery, Pro can guide the team through the discovery process with a clear purpose, encourage multiple perspectives and listening and understanding, and ask honest probing questions, designing conversations with breadth and depth, helping the team to discuss and reflect, fostering a sense of connection and engagement, and ultimately empowering the team to plan and act together. The ultimate goal is to empower the team to plan and act together.
According to the iceberg theory, about 10% is visible, while the rest is hidden under the water. Before brand consultants guide us, we can see the inconsistency of each mountain on the surface of the water; however, through professional and systematic guidance, we can see each other's conflicts and the root causes, and then we can think about the improvement or optimization actions from the perspective of the whole body.
Puro has extensive cross-industry experience in designing processes to help companies focus on issues, understand context, and guide individual, group, and collective thinking to map, organize, and name ideas to generate consensus and power to move forward.
