As the business world grows, businesses and consumers become more competitive. With competition comes an increasing drive for success. Aligning the brand to the strategy comes from narrowing the brand focus, great leadership, dedicated and valued employees, customer loyalty and a strategic plan.

The reality is that if the managers want to create a strong brand, it is the leader’s responsibility to keep the brand promise. Brand value and customer loyalty come from the smart and disciplined leaders who implement brand strategy and model branding in everyday action. Integrated branding is the process of revealing the brand promise, then aligning the entire organization to deliver that promise.

Living the integrated brand is the road to long-term business success and sustainability. A company’s brand is what a satisfied customer remembers and relates to the positive or negative experiences.

Branding is not just marketing or corporate identity function, it is something that lives in every experience a customer has with the company. The goal of integrated branding is to create a company that consistently and carefully orchestrates and delivers to the consumers the initial brand promise.

Training every employee in the proper way to treat a customer is one of the first steps in integrating the brand. If the company has integrated its brand, every employee from the top to the bottom knows what its company is good at, its personality and its key promise to the consumers.

When employees are living and integrated brand, they can make decisions smarter and faster, consistently act in a way that customers appreciate. They can design products and services that emphasize the company’s key promise and consistently act to increase the company’s differentiation.

They can hire the type of people and create a work environment that reflects the company’s key values; budget the company’s money in a way that builds the brand and reinforces key brand attributes.

Loyal customers are the key to a successful business. The goal of the integrated branding process is to create unbreakable customer relationships, not just to gain the customers attention.

Comparison with deeply rooted life themes, such as personal freedom, helping in the accomplishment of life projects such as college graduation or parenting, resolution of current concerns, such as getting enough vitamins creates an emotional tie with a brand.

These triggers can occur through the customer’s personal relationships with the brand — resulting in the customer seeing the brand as a friend or partner becoming a significant part of the customer’s life.

The brand built on the company’s actual strengths rather than a painted on mask. Integrated branding is the chance for organizations to put their goals in to practice and achieve their vision. The integrated branding process has three key steps; brand clarity; company activity alignment; and communications.

In order to establish brand clarity, the manager has to know who they are. They have to do research. Ask customers, prospects, employees, partners, analysts, and vendors. In addition, sort through research to discover the brand assets of the company. The full benefit of integrated branding achieved only when all employees are living it.

Company activity alignment focuses on creating a company filled with leaders leading from the brand and employees executingit. This requires leaders becoming brand evangelists as well as setting up employee compensation systems rewarding brand based behavior, hiring based on branding, organizing company processes and designing products and services to reflect the brand.

Effective communication of the brand will help promote the company’s marketing efforts, proving that the brand message is true, effective and consistent. A brand stands for the relationship that an organization has with its employees, as well as the relationship it has with its customers through its products and services.

For a brand to really appeal to a customer, the organization seeks internalalignment to deliver the brand promise through the organization’s culture, reward systems, key success activities and structure. Employees must live the brand values in their day-to-day interactions.

Four critical success factors that will help achieve the alignment of the organization to the brand promise. Senior Management Stewardship, visible leadership will drive consistent behavior.

Top managers must demonstrate that internal brand alignment is a high priority for the entire company through their own commitment to brand goals, values and behaviors. Through words, matching actions, and the initiatives they support, senior managers can demonstrate that the whole company is serious about keeping its brand promise.

Aligning business and brand strategy, customer relationships fuel success. Brand strategy must foster loyalty-based relationships by defining a relevant, differentiated and credible value proposition. Such success achieved by ensuring the product and service quality is consistent with the brand promise.

Support customer expectations through every interaction and purchase. Failures to live up to the brand promise will quickly depreciate brand equity and ultimately, the bottom line.

Responsibility and accountability; middle managers are key to delivering the brand promise. Their role is to infuse their teams and their operations with a practical commitment to the living brand. This protocol applies as much to back office functions as to sales and customer service.

In this way, the brand becomes the platform for focusing staff attention outwards, towards the customer priorities that will secure future earnings. It often involves chances to processes, incentives, training and management style as much as communication.

Ongoing performance measurement and feedback; what gets measured gets done. A coherent brand evaluation program with milestones, progress measures and celebrations of success is vital for sustaining the momentum of internal brand alignment.

Regular customer feedback to monitor the effectiveness of the brand delivery serves two distinct and equally important purposes. It determines how successfully internal managers are translating business strategies into compelling value propositions. It also creates an employee feedback loop to assess customer acceptance of and satisfaction with the brand promise.

At the integrated level of branding, senior management and other company leaders guide their actions based on the company’s brand principle, while demonstrating its consistent personality and values. Everyone believes in, advocates for the mission, and tells a consistent company story.

The benefit of brand integration is that every employee action, company practice and even the corporate culture helps deliver a valuable and differentiated customer experience. At the integrated branding level, part of a leader’s job is to recognize and nurture valuable brand assets.

The result of creating an integrated brand is a shift in the company’s focus from delivering products and services to delivering a unique and compelling customer experience based on the strategic goal.

Creating a brand alignment team for high priority alignment projects is useful in helping to tackle critical alignment projects as well as oversee existing project management teams.

Brand strategy is the guideline that a company uses to build its integrated brand.

An effective brand strategy deals with all of the ways the managers plan to improve the customers experience and satisfaction. It includes aligning not just the marketing department but also all departments with the integrated brand.

 It focuses on things that need to be changed and the priorities and timeline for that change. A brand strategy answers this question, what is the brand focus this year? The brand strategy is a core component of the organization’s annual plan.

The goal of a brand strategy is to capture the hearts and minds of the customers and lead them to the loyalty and commitment levels of brand equity. There are three components to an effective brand strategy: Internal:the company brand direction as played out in the customer experience; new or existing product and service development; company activities; budgets.

External: economic cycles; competitive threats; regulatory threats; industry threats such as a sea change in the customer experience area for instance, from black and white to color television, or from mainframes to networked computers.

ROI and improvement: how managers will handle implementation, benchmarking, contingencies, feedback and fine-tuning. It is important to create a brand strategy that keeps things fresh. The brand manager’s mantra should always be what should we keep?

While keeping it fresh, however, managers must also keep the brand core consistent. What is unique about the approach to customers that should not change? If managers consistently use the strategic role, brand principle, personality and values over a period of year, they will build defensible differentiation.