The Undeniable Power And Benefits Of Brand Alignment

In today’s hyper-competitive marketplaces, a powerful brand is one of the most valuable assets a company can possess. A brand with strong tangible and intangible equity commands premium pricing, fosters customer loyalty, attracts top talent, and enjoys a sustainable competitive advantage, among a myriad of other benefits. However, achieving true brand dominance hinges on an often-overlooked factor: alignment. Brand equity can’t be built without consistent and ongoing brand alignment. And equity is the brass ring — it’s where the money is buried. Brand equity is the leading driver of market performance and increased asset, enterprise, and shareholder value.

Building brand equity takes consistency. It’s built by repeatedly presenting and reinforcing a brand’s image, personality, and value proposition over time to all constituents, internally and externally, and, of course, delivering on its brand promise. Did I say consistently and over time enough? Because they bear repeating. Building equity is a frequency over time equation.

To build brand equity, get aligned.
Brand alignment represents the synchronization and harmonization of every brand expression, engagement, and experience across all internal functions and external touchpoints to consistently reinforce the defined brand identity, its values, and its promise. Alignment is one of the single most important management tactics for building competitive advantage and long-term sustainable success.

Being aligned requires unambiguous clarity of the brand’s vision, personality, and value proposition — a brand’s proverbial stake in the ground, its sustainable commitment. Let’s break this down into steps (simplified here) to get to alignment because each strategic decision necessarily informs the next.

First, it’s “what we are.”
Establishing a foundation on which to build brand equity first requires aligning stakeholder objectives with clear market opportunity and competitive whitespace and shaping those conclusions into a competitively differentiated and compelling positioning. Know your audience, your market context, your core point of difference or value proposition, and the proof or support for that value prop. It all starts here.

Next, it’s “who we are and why we are.”
Define the brand’s attributes to align with and leverage the positioning bringing the positioning to life. This is both a strategic and creative exercise. Attributes include, among other things, mission, values, purpose, brand pillars, brand architecture, messaging hierarchy, brand narratives, and full brand guidelines.

And then it’s “what we do.”
Contrary to common misconceptions, a brand is not logos, colors, taglines, or design elements. These are brand extensions of a brand strategy. A brand is an experience; a collection of perceptions in the minds of those aware. And every experience reinforces the “what we are,” the “who we are,” and “why we are.” Every experience and every engagement must reinforce everything the brand stands for while fulfilling its promise. That requires focus, single-mindedness, consistency, and, most importantly, alignment.

Achieving brand alignment is an exercise in holism.
To truly reap the rewards of optimal brand alignment, apply a comprehensive, inside-out approach covering all internal and external dimensions of the brand’s experience. Here are seven critical areas you’ll want to align:

1. Employee Alignment: Training and incentives can ensure all employees understand, embrace, and live the defined brand ethos. Employees are your first constituents; they fulfill the brand promise. If they don’t get it, neither will your market. Before any brand can consistently deliver on its external promises, it must first cultivate alignment from within. When employees internalize brand values, their actions and customer interactions reinforce the brand’s desired position and values.
2. Cultural Alignment: Aligning an organization’s culture around the brand’s values, beliefs, and behaviors that define how work gets done is essential for building brand equity. When the brand and the culture are aligned, the organizational energy coalesces around fulfilling the brand promise to build a unified culture. All of which directly contribute to employee satisfaction, productivity, and retention.
3. Operational Alignment: Brand priorities should be embedded into processes, policies, and operational procedures across product development, manufacturing, distribution, customer experience, and support functions. Operations need to be optimized and aligned to deliver the values and promise of the brand. Aligning how we do what we do with core brand values is vital.
4. Visual Identity: This one is not news. A brand book or guidelines ensures consistency to maintain consistency across logos, color palettes, fonts, photography styles, iconography, packaging, digital interfaces, uniforms, signage, retail/office environments, and other branded assets. Consistent identity and personality support memory and reinforce brand associations.
5. Marketing Communication: Also somewhat obvious, brand architecture, marcom strategies/tactics, messaging hierarchies, digital engagement, content themes, and creative tonality should all consistently align with core positioning and brand identity across all channels, including advertising, social media, PR, email, website, events, and sponsorships.
6. Product & Service Experience: Think of an Apple unboxing experience — it’s always on-brand. Product quality and experience and value-aligned service delivery (think Apple’s Genius Bar) are critical for consistently reinforcing and building a brand’s equity through experiences. Each product line, service interaction, and point in the customer journey should manifest the defined brand persona and value proposition. Brand equity can be crushed in a heartbeat by a crappy call center experience.
7. Partnerships and JVs: This can be tricky in the age of influencers and social media. Who you hang with is important. (Avoid P. Diddy.) For brands reliant on third parties like channel partners, influencers, licensees, and joint ventures, alignment of values is critical. Any association should provide a positive halo to the brand and not denigrate its positioning or co-opt its brand equity.

The Payback
Aligning all these aspects of business is no small task, but the return on commitment (ROC) is undeniable. Apple is easily the biggest show-off when it comes to alignment and building equity value. Over $500B of its market cap comes from intangible equity. BrandFinance estimates Apple’s brand value alone to be 20% of its market capitalization. These are big numbers over its book value.

• While the exact number is hard to pin down definitively, it’s clear that Apple’s unparalleled brand alignment spanning product design, marketing, retail environments, and company culture allows it to extract tremendous brand equity value. Most valuation experts agree that well over half, if not two-thirds or more, of Apple’s massive market cap can be attributed to the company’s exceptional brand equity and intellectual property positioning rather than tangible assets.
• According to Interbrand’s Study on Brand Value, companies with a high degree of brand alignment and consistency typically enjoy brand values that are 20% higher than the average company. Their annual “Best Global Brands” study highlights companies like Apple, Google, and Amazon, whose consumer preference and trust come from superior alignment across products, services, marketing, and company culture. (Interbrand Best Global Brands 2022 Report)
• A Deloitte research study on brand alignment’s Impact found that companies with strong brand-culture alignment see revenue growth rates 33% higher than their competitors. The research highlights brands like Southwest Airlines and REI, whose employee experiences and culture reinforce their positioning and brand promises. The research found that misalignment reduced company revenue by up to 7%. (Deloitte — The Value of Brand-Culture Alignment)
• Lippincott’s Brand Scoreboard Analysis looked at over 165,000 brand ratings and found companies in the top quartile of brand alignment achieve 33% higher revenue growth than unaligned brands. The most aligned brands also commanded 20% price premiums on average over competitors.
• Forrester Customer Experience Study found that brands delivering aligned customer experiences across physical and digital touchpoints grew revenues 5.1 times faster than brands with poor alignment. Retailers with seamless omnichannel experiences saw a direct revenue upside. Brands with low experience alignment saw declining revenues. (Forrester Customer Experience Drives Revenue Growth, 2022)
• Internal Alignment Impact at Kimberly-Clark reported that for each 5% increase in employee alignment with its brand purpose and values, companies realized a 0.7% increase in revenue growth. Profits were also 9% higher in departments with strong cultural/brand alignment compared to unaligned groups. Get your internal alignment right. (Harvard Business Review — Aligning for Advantage)

Get It Right And Dominate
The numbers are there. Alignment builds equity, and equity makes the cash register ring, increases enterprise value, reduces the cost of capital, and increases transaction multiples. These financial benefits are why we put our hearts and souls into building business in the first place. Shareholders demand it. While research companies tend to always use the big companies in these brand studies, make no mistake, large or small, B2B or B2C, the power and return on alignment apply to all businesses. The benefits will come.

Getting there requires an unrelenting commitment to establishing core, foundational positioning from which there will be no waver, clear brand values, and a commitment to brand management, recalibration, governance, and cross-functional alignment of purpose and objective.

It requires brand-centric leadership, who gets it because building a brand-centric company is a philosophy, a way you run your business. It must be pushed from the top down. Leadership must empower brand leaders with a seat in the C-suite. Attaining and maintaining brand alignment must be championed as an organization-wide strategic, philosophical, and cultural priority — it is a 24/7/365, always-on commitment requiring sustained investment, diligence, and accountability.

Get aligned and build equity. The rewards are unparalleled — commanding premium positioning, unwavering customer loyalty, and a resilient competitive advantage.

Yes, you want all that.

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About the Author: Lysle C. Wickersham leverages his background in advertising/branding, management consulting, and investment banking as Founder and Principal Consultant at BRANDThink, LLC, a brand strategy consulting firm supporting startups, early-stage, general businesses, and PE & VC in amplifying value creation and building brand strategies that build high-performing and high-value businesses. Lysle on LinkedIn. BRANDThink on LinkedIn.