brand promise

Virtually every major corporation today is facing the same challenge: how to create sustainable long-term growth. Over the last several years, companies have captured the "easy" earnings enhancements from operational improvements and cost reductions yet they remain under considerable pressure to increase earnings.Meanwhile, the business landscape is increasingly challenging due to increased commoditization of core products and service offerings, profound shifts of value from manufacturers to channels, fragmentation of customer segments and proliferation of brands, increasing costs to serve, reducing scale and adding complexity to execution.Amid this environment, companies are turning to marketing which they see as under-developed relative to the process rigor found in other functions and the key to organic growth. Consequently, many companies are launching major corporate initiatives to drive step-change function improvements in marketing and sales."Unlocking this growth potential requires a far greater integration of marketing into the main strategies, functions, and processes of the business, and even outside the business with channel partners and suppliers," says Tom French, head of the North American Marketing & Sales Practice. The best marketing organizations are focusing on four priority areas in order to take the marketing function to the next level.
Infusing customer insights into the businessGenerating customer insights has traditionally been the job of the market research unit, working mostly within the marketing group. “Marketing research groups need to move beyond serving just the marketing group, and get away from focusing primarily on process, to providing value-added answers to key strategic questions,” says John Forsyth, head of the global Customer Insights group. Further, marketing research groups should cast a far broader net to capture insights, collaborating with their channel partners, salesforces, call center managers and other third parties. lastly, and most importantly, companies need to redesign core business processes so that customer insights are incorporated, on a routine, operating basis, into strategic business decisions, and other key departments like R&D, operations and sales need to become more immersed in the insights process.
Integrating business and brand strategiesStrong brands historically have yielded faster growth and higher returns to shareholders. Accordingly, top marketers are applying three imperatives to brand strategy:

Delivering a differentiated brand promise. As companies lose the ability to differentiate their brands based on functional attributes, they must focus on process and relationship benefits, such as ease of ordering or responsiveness to customer requests. Thus, frontline employees must understand and deliver the right brand promise to the customer.
Identifying opportunities to leverage a brand into new markets. Great brand growers challenge their existing market definition to stimulate growth. Companies that look at the market in this broader sense can uncover much greater growth opportunities.
Managing product portfolios. In the view of Steve Carlotti, head of the Branding group, “Top performers coordinate their business strategies and marketing operations across the full portfolio of brands.” They also restructure their budgeting processes to allocate more resources to brands with the greatest future potential.
Go-to-market execution"Recently, large companies' go-to-market organizations have evolved beyond the sales force to encompass multiple channels and functions, inside and outside the corporation," according to Roland John, head of the Sales & Channel Management group. This network owns most of a company's customer touchpoints and data. To succeed, marketing executives must be far more involved in go-to-market activities, including sales force deployment, pricing strategy, and brand delivery at the front line.
End-to-end redesign of core commercial processesMarketing and sales functions need to become increasingly intertwined if companies are going to achieve the growth they require. In world class enterprise selling organizations, for instance, it is impossible to define where marketing ends and sales begins. Further, companies need to integrate the intertwined marketing and sales function into the day-to-day operations of the organization and apply the same rigor to defining commercial processes and systems that they have long applied to manufacturing and other operational processes and systems. This "commercial transformation" can take many forms and involves 1) a concerted, multi-year effort to substantially upgrade the effectiveness of a company’s marketing and sales processes, including aligning top management around a forceful transformation theme; 2) driving performance improvement programs around 2-3 carefully selected commercial levers and striving to lead the industry on these levers; and 3) embedding the change through a comprehensive commercial operating system, comprising not only processes and tools, but also IT systems and performance management.