Grow

To achieve growth similar to that of a Top-50 business, it's essential to center your brand ideal around one of the five fundamental human values: eliciting joy, enabling human connections, inspiring exploration, evoking pride, or impacting society. Jim Stengel emphasizes that while many businesses have a clear vision, strategy, and business statement, they often fail to articulate and activate a life-improving ideal that drives growth by inspiring employees and key business partners to innovate and perform at a high level across all areas of the business.

Taking Pizza Hut in the late 2000s as an example, despite having 7,200 stores in the United States, the company was struggling with stagnant sales, a shrinking market share, and declining traffic. To rejuvenate the brand, the senior management team revisited their roots, focusing on the company's founding principle of strengthening friendships and relationships over delicious pizza. By reconnecting with this heritage and launching TV commercials featuring enthusiastic employees alongside an aggressive discount price promotion, Pizza Hut saw a double-digit increase in traffic and sales within fourteen months, and employee turnover was at an all-time low. In 2012, Pizza Hut redefined their brand ideal to focus on enabling and supporting important relationships, demonstrating that every business has an ideal at its core that can drive significant growth if given the opportunity.

Deciding on an ideal to focus on is the first step in building an internal organizational culture that aligns with that ideal. The success of an enterprise often hinges on its culture, so it's crucial to find, train, manage, promote, and reward individuals who embody and can bring that ideal to life for customers. Growth driven by an ideal starts from within, meaning that before reaching out to customers, an organization must first internalize and embrace its own ideal. To bring a life-improving ideal to fruition, clarity and explicitness about the ideal and what the organization stands for are essential.

When everyone is aligned, the resulting teamwork and collaboration can be extraordinary. The ability to unite people to work together with enthusiasm and commitment can significantly accelerate one's career. An organization must stand for something clear to its people. Without understanding the organization's beliefs, employees cannot contribute meaningfully. Clarity about these beliefs allows for the exploration of new strategic possibilities and competitive advantages, and it also makes it easier to reject off-target ideas. Building a culture that closely aligns with your ideal involves revealing your brand ideal and making it a core part of all your efforts, keeping it relevant and inspirational. It's important to communicate what you stand for clearly, both within and outside the company, articulating your priorities, values, and guiding principles consistently. Design your organization to succeed by aligning work and capabilities with your brand ideal.

To effectively harness your company's potential, it's crucial to communicate your actions in a transparent and engaging manner, both internally and to the outside world. Your narrative should capture your business's ambitions and guide every aspect of your operations to reflect this narrative cohesively. It's essential to discover a unique voice to stand out amidst the market's clamor. Companies experiencing rapid growth consistently demonstrate superior communication. Their internal and external messages consistently reinforce their brand's core values. IBM's "Let's build a smarter planet" initiative is a prime example, with all corporate outputs, from internal discussions to advertising, aligning with this central theme.

John Kennedy, IBM's vice president for corporate marketing, explains that the core idea of IBM has evolved over time, from automating offices to contributing to the Apollo space program, and now to enhancing global systems in health care, transportation, and infrastructure. The "building a smarter planet" concept allows IBM to connect with various audiences based on shared beliefs about technology's role in bettering the world. This shared perspective forms the foundation of conversations with customers. Despite IBM's vast scale, with a $100 billion revenue and over 400,000 employees globally, it's the genuine commitment to the ideal of a smarter planet that unifies the company. This authenticity is not a product of their advertising budget but rather the consistency in their actions and communications.

Delivering an exceptional customer experience is fundamentally about bringing your organization's ideal to life in a meaningful way. In other words, you must strive to offer customers an experience that is as close to perfection as possible, based on your ideal. Every aspect of your organization and your entire culture should be dedicated to creating that dynamic and engaging customer experience repeatedly. Enhancing people's lives should be a pervasive passion within your organization.

Here are five suggestions on how to deliver an ideal experience:

An excellent brand experience is always rooted in the ideal, the higher purpose the business aims to serve. Take Zappos, for instance, whose core ideal is to "Deliver happiness through WOW service." Keeping this in mind, Zappos allows its employees the freedom to innovate in how they deliver on that ideal. Every employee, regardless of their role, undergoes call center training and spends time answering calls when they join the company. During the busy Christmas season, everyone in the company spends ten hours a week on the phone. This ensures that everyone has firsthand experience with customer feedback and understands how their role impacts the brand experience. You can't deliver a great experience until you make it personal. While data is valuable, it's more crucial to understand your customers and their lives. Apple stores excel at focusing on building customer relationships. By focusing on helping customers express their creativity rather than just selling products, Apple has become the most successful retailer in history, generating an impressive $50,000 in sales per square foot in its top-performing stores. Apple's Genius Bars, classes, and personal training sessions are highly effective ways to deliver customer experiences that embody Apple's ideals.

In the pursuit of business excellence, it's imperative to consistently evaluate what truly matters. While financial metrics hold their significance, it's equally vital to measure and enhance the interactions between employees, customers, and your brand ideal. Companies that are founded on strong ideals tend to outpace their competitors because they prioritize improving people's lives, which becomes their guiding principle. To attract more customers and ensure alignment with your brand's message, it's crucial to assess whether your actions reflect your words.

Jim Stengel emphasizes the importance of evaluating and managing your brand ideal to avoid mediocrity or failure. This process, from identifying the ideal to delivering an exceptional experience, can only be realized through regular assessment of both progress and personnel against the brand ideal. To effectively measure your progress, start with feedback from the most critical customers and stakeholders. Their insights are invaluable and should guide your brand-building scorecard, helping you to create value for these key individuals first.

Your key performance indicators should be formulated in terms of your brand ideal. Design measures that are relevant, actionable, and show whether you're making headway against that ideal. It's also essential to integrate the brand ideal into every employee's work plan. Each person in your organization should have a measurable plan to actualize the brand ideal within their area of responsibility, creating a direct link between daily activities and the overarching brand ideal.