Whether it’s defining their voice, shaping their messages or creating a more adaptive content strategy, many brands recognize that a strong verbal branding strategy has a tangible impact in the market—helping them show up with a consistent, differentiating presence across social, digital marketing, product interfaces, and whatever comes next.

But unlike other branding tools, like a new logo, visual identity or product name, verbal branding strategies can too often wind up replaced or simply forgotten. It doesn’t matter how brilliant the insight was or how powerful the strategy is—if it isn’t being used, it can’t make an impact.

But it doesn’t have to be this way.

3 Ways to Activate Your Verbal Branding Strategy

By managing and planning the launch of your verbal branding strategy, you can truly put it to work for your business. Here are three ways to ensure your verbal branding strategy makes an impact in the real world.

1. Make it real with training

Any change in how a brand operates requires education in order for it to be fully adopted, and verbal branding is no exception. Training teams need to understand a verbal strategy. This is a crucial step that is often overlooked—perhaps due to the daunting task of simply getting entire teams of marketers in the same room for several hours.

But in order for marketers and writers to be able to deliver against the new strategy consistently and confidently, they need to do more than read your guidelines; they need to learn the ideas within them. Consider learning your voice and messaging like learning a second language—proficiency takes practice.

At Prophet, we believe that the best trainings are in-person and high-touch. When we train communication teams, we pair educational content with interactive exercises, break-out activities, and group writing and editing. And don’t forget the fun—playful ice breakers, prizes, snacks and breaks are a great way to keep people engaged. Trainings are most successful when people are comfortable opening up, trying new things, asking questions, and challenging thinking—both their own and that of their peers.

2. Make it easy to engage with

With a little practice, your teams can become fluent in the new verbal branding strategy. But just like speaking a second language, people need to engage overtime to keep their skills sharp. To drive engagement, we have two principles. First, share content frequently and consistently. And second, make it easy to access.

Digital technology can provide a central reservoir to house your content and engage your teams. With something as simple as an intranet hub, you can “push” updates to your strategy, replace old files and fix “bugs” or tactics that proved to be ineffective—all while alerting teams to what’s been added or changed. It’s not unlike how software companies deliver updates to your smartphone.

“It doesn’t matter how brilliant the insight was or how powerful the strategy is—if it isn’t being used, it can’t make an impact.”

To optimize engagement, it’s important to keep updates frequent and at regular intervals, planning out your internal employee engagement the way you plan your content calendar. Maybe you begin every quarter by highlighting best-in-class pieces from different teams or sharing an interview with a lead content creator. Or you could publish a new version of your guidelines every twelve months, with new proof points, examples and updates. Your timing will likely depend on your resources, but whatever you do, make it consistent. And remember to communicate before, during and after you share updates to ensure teams know what’s available to them.

Finally, just like brands across categories are learning, a great way to drive engagement is to gamify it. Rewarding employees for answering questions correctly, commenting or evaluating others’ pieces, or engaging overall is an easy way to keep your teams coming back for more.

3. Make it global

In today’s world, growing your business increasingly means entering and strengthening your presence in global markets. And with increasingly global commerce and consumers, it’s more important than ever to deliver a cohesive, consistent brand in every market.

But while your visual identity can’t get lost in translation, your verbal branding strategy can. If you’re in the U.S. and considering entering China, Latin America or even the United Kingdom, you need to consider the cultural and linguistic nuances unique to each market. Increasingly brands are moving towards more casual, colloquial expressions—but is that the right tonality in Asia where communications tend to be more formal? In the U.S., directly addressing customers may sound simple, but what does that mean in Spanish-speaking countries that have two different versions of “you”?

The answer is not translation, but transcreation, or adaptation of strategies to work in local markets. At Prophet, when we transcreate verbal branding strategies, it’s not about creating translated, identical tools in each market, but rather, upholding the objective of the original work while reflecting the cultural and linguistic nuances of the language(s) spoken in the new markets. This might mean re-articulating, re-interpreting or re-prioritizing core ideas and tactics.

But equally as important as the process you follow are the people you partner with. True transcreation can only be done with in-market, native speakers that also have a deep understanding of the business and verbal strategy.

In transcreating your verbal strategies, your voice and messages will sound very different in English, Korean or Russian—but the relationship you build with customers through your communications will be the same.

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When you hear the word “tagline” what comes to mind?

Perhaps “Where’s the beef?” “I’m loving it,” “Think different,” or “Just Do It.” These are unforgettable, timeless classics. But most of the taglines people remember are just that—classic and old. Where are the new classics?

Lately, taglines have fallen out of favor, and much has been written questioning their value. In this article, we’ll explain what’s really going on with taglines and why they still might matter for your business.

Where Did Taglines Go?

In the past, considerable focus was placed on taglines. They were often evaluated and scrutinized with the same rigor and energy we now reserve for new product launches and acquisitions.

Today, taglines are less critical. The power and effectiveness of advertising-centric marketing have been replaced by more personal brand engagement. In many cases, customers are simply not influenced by a short, static statement attached to a logo or used as a sign-off in an ad. Instead, customers are motivated by compelling, timely offers and intuitive experiences that demonstrate a brand’s relevance to their lives.

Considering the cost of taglines

Tactically, taglines can create layers of complexity and cost. They need to be locked up with logos and translated for different markets—all while fitting into the hierarchy, both strategic and visual, with headlines and product messaging, creating significant work for brand managers.

Despite these changes and challenges, a tagline can still deliver unique value. A compelling verbal shorthand can convey the same meaning as a 60-second advertisement or a six-paragraph About Us section, capturing attention and moving audiences to a specific thought or action. In short, there is still undeniable magic to getting the words just right.

Four Purposes a Brand Tagline Can Accomplish

With this perspective, we’ve identified four scenarios when an organization should consider using a tagline—either introducing one or changing an existing line—and the questions they should answer along the way.

1. To showcase your reason for being

More and more, employees want to work for an organization with a strong sense of purpose and a values system that reflects their own. Meanwhile, customers are increasingly interested in understanding the character, purpose, culture and business practices of the organization behind the brand.

A tagline can be an effective tool to speak directly to an organization’s employees and speak to the world on employees’ behalf.

In this way, a tagline reveals a deeper insight about the company, its people, how they work and what they value. Siemen’s “Ingenuity for Life” and TransUnion’s “Information for Good” are examples of this type of tagline at work. They don’t necessarily describe the organization’s value proposition, but rather seek to tell a more emotional story about who the company is and why it matters in the world.

Questions to consider:

• Do you need to inspire and re-energize your people and teams around a core idea?
• Do you believe that customers do not fully understand your purpose?
• Can you create greater value by engaging stakeholders (employees, investors, customers, influencers, communities) in a shared purpose?

2. To reposition your company

A brand tagline can effectively help organizations reframe what customers believe about them and enhance their overall value proposition. For GE, “Imagination at work,” helped to elevate the brand’s innovation profile and created a sense of whimsical curiosity, which was echoed in advertising. For McDonald’s, “I’m lovin’ it” shifted the fast-food chain’s story from convenience to enjoyment, and paved the way for the more ingredient-focused stories that followed.

It’s important to be substantive when repositioning. As these examples illustrate, successful taglines must be part of a larger marketing or branding investment. Cosmetic communication, which includes taglines, can frustrate or alienate customers if real change is not evident in the brand’s experiences.

Questions to consider:

• Do you need to reshape perceptions of your brand?
• Are you struggling to clarify how you are different from competitors?
• Are you finding customers are uninformed about your full value proposition?

3. To create a whole new category:

In the start-up world where organizations are creating entirely new value propositions and business models, a tagline can help the brand introduce itself clearly and effectively.

In 1998, eBay introduced the descriptive tagline “Your personal trading community.” In 2001, it was replaced with the more aspirational “The world’s online marketplace,” and in 2007, it was replaced again with the much more suggestive “Shop victoriously.” Over time, eBay no longer needed to educate the market and could instead focus on making an emotional connection.

“Customers are motivated by compelling, timely offers and intuitive experiences that demonstrate a brand’s relevance to their lives.”

Brands still deploy this tact today. Dollar Shave Club’s “Shave time. Shave money” not only articulates the brand’s core value proposition, but also hints at the brand’s sense of humor in a “more blades is better” market.

Tactically, these kinds of taglines work well at launch, and as eBay illustrates, they can be used more sparingly or replaced when market education is no longer needed.

Questions to consider:

• Are you introducing a new service or business model that might need additional explanation or context?
• Do you have limited resources for articulating what you offer to customers, where a tagline that travels with the name would do heavy lifting?

4. To stand out and inspire loyalty:

In markets with high levels of competition, price-conscious customers and intense marketing activity such as telecom, automotive, food and beverage and CPG taglines can support awareness, memorability and recall.

In these cases, brands use taglines to cut through dense communication environments and create a more emotional, memorable connection. Examples of this approach are BMW’s “Freude am Fahren” or “The ultimate driving machine,” Carlsberg’s “That calls for a Carlsberg,” and Nike’s “Just Do It.”

These taglines do little work to articulate the brand’s value proposition or core differentiators. Instead, they appeal to consumers’ emotional nature to drive loyalty to the brand.

Questions to consider:

• Do customers make decisions about your products in a high-volume communications environment?
• Is your category fast-moving, with apparent parity among competitive products?
• Do you rely on broadcast marketing and advertising as a major tool for connecting with customers?

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In the mid-’90s, on a trip to San Francisco, my mom brought an empty suitcase with her on the flight. We thought it was for souvenirs, but sadly, we were wrong. She was on a mission: A Trader Joe’s mission. And sure enough, on the way home, the suitcase was so full that we had to sit on it just to get the zipper closed. In it was 50 pounds of Trader Joe’s products. If that isn’t the definition of brand loyalty, I don’t know what is.

For years after, in an effort to avoid having to lug a suitcase cross-country just to get her Trader Joe’s fix, my mom wrote letters to their headquarters making a case for why they should open a store in Atlanta. This seemingly insane desire for a local Trader Joe’s is why it comes as no surprise to me that the brand is the first grocery store identified in the 2017 Prophet Brand Relevance Index™ (BRI).

Consistent & Authentic Customer Experience

Whether visiting a store in San Francisco or Atlanta, the Trader Joe’s in-store experience is uniform, yet true to the culture of the city that it’s in. In our Brand Relevance Index, Trader Joe’s scores high marks for the consistency and dependability of its customer experience.

Each store is modeled on a similar scale and the employees always sport iconic Hawaiian shirts, but the locations also draw from the personality of the local community. For example, a local artist is hired at each location to create unique hand-drawn designs for the product identifiers and signage.

By featuring local produce, murals incorporating local sports teams, and reusable bags with designs for that city, Trader Joe’s creates unique experiences that are still true to their overarching brand.

Unwavering Customer Trust

In the BRI, the metric Trader Joe’s ranks highest for is “I trust.” With no sales, no special clubs and no loyalty cards needed, customers know the price they see is what they get.

Buyers can also purchase with confidence, as you can try anything in the store before purchasing, and return any item for any reason. I’ll never forget the time when I was checking out and mentioned to the cashier the bad kiwis I had purchased the week prior. Without a second thought and without prompting, he reimbursed me.

Commitment to Inspire Customers & Employees

Trader Joe’s ranks highly in one of our key principles of building a relentlessly relevant brand, distinctively inspired. It does more than just supply a carton of eggs or gallon of milk to customers – it inspires them. Whether motivating my mom to lug a suitcase cross-country or attracting employees who are proud to work there, Trader Joe’s goes above and beyond.

Employees get to know your buying habits, recommending a wine that compliments your other groceries, a seasonal pumpkin-flavored Joe Joe (Trader Joe’s take on Oreos), or a mac and cheese recipe that your family will love. Trader Joe’s works to facilitate connections and experiences beyond that of a typical grocer.

“If that isn’t the definition of brand loyalty, I don’t know what is.”

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Recently, there has been an outflow of cash from Chinese brands into global blue-chip sponsorships.

In January, Alibaba shelled out $800 million to become a top-tier Olympic Games sponsor until 2028, and last month Vivo signed a $450 million deal to sponsor the 2018 and 2022 World Cups, joining Wanda and Hisense on the roster of FIFA’s top tier partners.

It is well-publicized that Alibaba has aggressive growth goals, and with less than 10% of revenue coming from outside of China today, it must win overseas in order to meet its targets.

“Alibaba shelled out $800 million to become a top-tier Olympic Games sponsor.”

With the recent signals from Beijing that brand-building is a key growth imperative for China (as evidenced by the proclamation that May 10 is now “Chinese Brands Day”), it is likely that we will see more and more Chinese brands using global sponsorships as a platform to drive greater awareness and consideration as they enter new markets.

It remains to be seen whether these sponsorships will promote consideration of Chinese brands in Western markets, but spending the cash needed to get their brand in front of more than 3 billion eyeballs is certainly a good start.

3 Key Elements of Successful Brand Sponsorships in China

To create a return on the investment, brand sponsorships must amount to more than putting a company logo on a T-shirt or billboard. They need to deliver on three things:

1. Serving Clear Goals that can be Measured

Surprisingly, many companies focus more on what to sponsor than on the business impact the sponsorship will make. First, identify the objective of the sponsorship. (e.g., Are you trying to increase awareness, advocacy or engagement?) Make sure leadership is aligned on the goal, and then build the team and capabilities needed to deliver against your objective.

2. Authentically Linking to the Brand

Sponsor companies often struggle to show a connection between their brand and the event that customers can easily understand. For any brand sponsorship to be effective, there must be congruence between your company and the values of the property you’re sponsoring. For example, Visa sponsored members of the IOC refugee team. This resulted in customers associating positive values of “acceptance, partnership and innovation” with the Visa brand.

3. Ensuring Sponsorship Activation is Integrated

Every brand associated with the Olympics or World Cup (officially and unofficially) competes for the same customers’ attention, making it hard for any to stand out. So companies need to look for integrated experiences across digital and physical channels that elevate their sponsorship to a bigger idea. (e.g. Abbott nicely linked social media and smart offline tactics with their sponsorship of World Marathon Majors to encourage advocacy among fans and reinforce their message of “human potential.”)

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2015 and 2016 were record years for mergers and acquisitions, and 2017 appears to be more of the same. According to MergerMarket, H1 recorded an 8.4% increase in deal value globally, compared to the previous period. 17 mega-deals equating to more than $10B have already been announced in 2017 – including Amazon/WholeFoods, Essilor/Luxotica and Mars/VCA. And with PE raising record buy-out funds, and several massive deals announced in 2016 that have yet to close – see AT&T and Time Warner or Qualcom and NXP – M&A will remain at the top of the agenda as the search for growth continues.

But will all these deals payout?

It’s not entirely clear that they will. M&A has an inconsistent record. Mega-deals tend to underperform while other M&A strategies appear to fare much better. Last year HBR challenged the industry, stating that M&As are a “mug’s game” with 70-90% of acquisitions ending up as “abysmal failures.” Despite the debate, M&A deals, especially for larger organizations, will continue. The prospects for organic growth are simply too low and the competitive risk of not moving is too high.

How to Build a Successful M&A Strategy

M&A transactions are modeled against a value creation logic: the economic theory for how a new combination of assets will create shareholder value through superior use of funds. The larger the deal, the harder it is for this logic to play out.

Mega-deal success demands that multiple strategic and operational assumptions of staggering size and complexity fall into place. Future market dynamics must play out as envisioned. Large employee populations and cultures have to mesh. Cost-savings schemes requiring intense operational discipline must be driven to completion in a marathon of sprints. Throw in systems integration, customer defection risk, key talent discounts and the occasional black swan event and the checkered history of mega-deal M&A becomes more understandable. But not inevitable.

3 M&A Strategies to Drive Mega-Deal Success

Drawing from decades of experience helping executives through M&A integrations, we have identified a blueprint for managing downside risk and accelerating growth.

From that blueprint, here are three plays to run at the beginning of the M&A process to maximize the possibility of success:

1. Model Marketing and Branding Decisions Before You Make Them

After the deal is signed and bankers clear the room, the hard work of realizing new value begins. Typically, this involves dozens of parallel initiatives including system integration, organizational restructuring, expense rationalization and branding/customer experience workstreams. These projects are bundled into a broader integration plan, coordinated through a PMO and funded from tax-advantaged integration budgets. Curiously, while essential to the post-close success of the deal, the marketing/branding workstream is often not managed with the rigor of other integration initiatives.

We frequently observe teams passing on high-potential strategies either because of a lack of analytical rigor or a failure of strategic focus. Often, companies do not recognize the power of available financial and risk modeling tools to support marketing and branding decisions. Additionally, because these techniques are often less familiar to marketing leadership, their insights can fail to sufficiently influence internal decision-making.

Case in point: Recently, a large multinational made a transformative acquisition (>$10B) that extended its reach into an adjacent category. Using an econometric model based on-demand analytics, we estimated the potential market share increase of several new brand and product architecture scenarios. In the leading scenario, the model estimated a multiple-point increase in share on the acquired company’s base business. Unfortunately, that scenario never made it to market as executives selected a suboptimal strategy based on pre-merger working assumptions.

The same holds on the cost side. Post-deal integration of a marketing system will demand significant resources of capital and time. The data is available to model scenarios that remove cost and process layers, while optimizing the capital deployed. The tools and capabilities are available but too few, we find, take advantage.

The lesson: the marketing and branding moves that could tilt the balance of power in your favor require:

1. Decisions based on analytical precision
2. The leadership wherewithal to make them

 2. Operationalize the Value Creation Logic Into a Plan to Win

Execution creates new value, not strategy. Almost all mega-deal structures rely on often aggressive cost-savings assumptions. They are central to securing financing or shareholder approvals. However, this focus on cost-take-outs and backend integration often distracts leadership from building actions plans that bring the new assets of the post-deal firm directly to customers.

“How does this deal actually create value for your customers?”

A few years ago, we were working with the CEO and executive committee of a Fortune 200 financial services player. The company had nearly doubled in size through a mega-deal that combined banking and asset management into a single entity and brand. The firm was tracking on its multi-year cost reduction plan but wasn’t gaining traction with clients. During a working session with the executive team, it occurred to us that the combined company had never articulated new customer (or employee) value propositions. At one point, we asked the straightforward question: “How does this deal actually create value for your customers?”. The absence of an answer from leadership was startling. A year later, an activist investor was in the boardroom and the CEO was out amid calls for a breakup.

The value creation logic will vary from firm to firm. For deals of significant size, the logic always features significant cost savings components (scales economies, tax inversion strategies, etc.). But M&As also present an opportunity for firms to significantly increase the value of their products and services to customers. Smart deal-makers realize this top-line advantage by building a plan to win that operationalizes the value creation logic. These plans will include an expanded customer value proposition, updated strategies for key accounts, product enhancements and an expanded client servicing model that uses data and UX to enrich the customer experience, among other moves.

When Microsoft announced its acquisition of LinkedIn at $26B – the largest in the company’s history – they immediately articulated a new customer value proposition for the combined firms. Their investor presentation laid out realistic product use cases that showed how customers will benefit when Microsoft software is embedded into LinkedIn’s platform and UX.

Investors care about the cost base; customers don’t. In the M&A context, customer sentiment is clear: “I’m happy for you to bring new value to the table. Just don’t change my team”. Companies that operationalize the deal logic into a value-add for customers will simply create shareholder value faster than those that don’t.

3. Build a Culture That Keeps Faith With the Deal

Beyond the models and strategies, the deal’s value will ultimately be secured or forfeited through the actions of employees. Irrespective of the size of the deal, retaining talent, focusing teams and nurturing cultures is the most challenging M&A leadership task. It simply gets harder for mega-deals.

Success requires that the talent levers of the organization line up with value creation logic, which my colleague Helen Rosethorn in her seminal book calls “keeping faith with the deal”. This often includes reorganizing operating units around new capabilities, recoding sales scripts and customer engagement models, and reengineering operations. Heavy lifts, for sure. But tending to culture is probably harder and more important.

Nothing grinds post-M&A value creation to a halt like resistant culture. Mega-deals create change and ambiguity for large employee bases. The M&A stimulates the free-market dynamics among employees – basically, they become open to considering other deals. It occasions big questions like “How does my world change?”, “Am I still valuable?” and “What’s it in for me?”. Change is difficult to process at a human level; ambiguity is always interpreted negatively. To unlock the full value of the deal, leaders must frame the big move in the context of a deeper purpose for the organization, strengthening the employee value proposition by focusing not just on the “what,” but on the “so what?”

Satya Nadella was clear about how the LinkedIn acquisition fit into his broader goal of reanimating Microsoft’s purpose. Similarly, when Roche acquired Genentech, it ring-fenced the biotech’s vaunted talent and culture by retaining its identity and independence. Others have not been as successful.

When Xerox bought ACS, its largest acquisition ever, it correctly foresaw the need to swim upstream into higher-margin services. But the deal logic never panned out. Revenues failed to reach targets and the market cap had fallen 37% by the time CEO Ursula Burns capitulated to investors and abandon the vision, spinning out the old ACS business off in a stand-alone services play. While Xerox found some cost synergies, people and processes never coalesced around a shared purpose worth fighting for.

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