Developing Decision-Making Tools

Viewpoint by Roland Bernhard, Associate Partner

Effective decision-making for world-class brand building requires a smart balance between art and science.  While many organizations have an excess of strategic documents and customer research, they lack a structured approach and methodology to turn existing information into meaningful insights and subsequently into informed and inspired decisions.  Due to this lack of structure, many brand decisions end up determined by subjective opinions of strong personalities within an organization or, worse yet, are the result of compromised decisions made to satisfy the needs of all members of a cross functional/divisional organization.

The key to making systematic brand decisions is to place the expected customer impact/benefit at the center of all key decisions and apply an agreed-to decision making process that is inclusive of different internal and external perspectives.  A structured, customer-centric decision making process exposes key trade-offs which can more easily be resolved based on customer and business impact rather than defaulting to subjective perspectives influenced by internal political agendas. This requires the right mix of process, insights and intuition. In the end, if the customer derives maximum benefit from a brand decision, the organization will know the right decision was made in the first place.