In this series, we have laid out the marketer’s playbook for building a relentlessly relevant brand. So far, we have discussed how these brands consistently follow three critical principles: They are customer-obsessed, they know how to stay inspired, and they recognize the importance of building a culture of innovation.

Why is Pragmatism Important to a Brand?

Very few brands are able to pull off these three principles without owning a fourth–what we like to call being ruthlessly pragmatic. When a brand is ruthlessly pragmatic, it makes smart bets, takes bold steps, fails fast, and experiments consistently.

Pragmatism requires a commitment to finding and maintaining clarity across your brand’s ecosystem. When you have clarity around your brand’s vision, what you stand for (and don’t), how you want your customers to feel, employees to act, and the criteria for success, you have the blueprint through which to drive all brand decisions, strategically, tactically, and economically.

6 Principles to Become Ruthlessly Pragmatic

Being pragmatic may be the most important piece of the puzzle, but also the one that most marketers find the hardest. It’s essential because it’s the one that makes the other three possible. Using the following tenets is a good place to start when building a relentlessly relevant brand:

1. Be clear and consistent on what your brand is and is not

A strong brand vision guides every decision and action you take. When Prophet partnered with T-Mobile to help it become the “Un-Carrier” in wireless, we knew it would only be credible if T-Mobile lived up to that vision by walking away from historical practices that irked consumers, such as long-term contracts, termination fees, and predatory data plans. And it worked: T-Mobile gained 1.1 million customers after announcing the Un-Carrier strategy, quickly gaining market share from competitors.

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2. Strive for success, but be willing to fail (fast)

Brand leaders must know precisely what success looks like in every metric and key performance indicator available. With metrics in place at all levels, companies can accurately assess how well they are delivering.

Capital One conducts thousands of test-and-learn experiments and pilots every year to continue to hone in on what is resonating with customers from an offering, experience, communications, and brand perspective. It tries and limits its spending on each, succeeding or failing fast and scaling the successes even faster.

3. Empower your employees to be brand ambassadors

Creating a shared mindset across an organization enables employees to wow customers with consistent and compelling experiences. Nordstrom, Southwest Airlines, and Zappos seem worlds apart from competitors because their employee training goes beyond what to do and instead teaches how to think.

4. Have a clear, compelling message

Think about Apple, Patagonia and Disney. All three of these brands stay on message, on strategy and on-brand. They make it easy for customers to follow their plotlines and even easier for customers to want to stay connected with their brands. Clear and consistent messages lead to clear expectations, which lead to customers feeling empowered and loyal.

5. Create an experience that reflects your vision as a brand and company

The brand’s vision is a critical lens through which all business decisions should be made. Some of today’s most respected brands live this day in and day out. Think about the power of these brands’ policies and actions: Chipotle stopped selling carnitas when its sources didn’t meet its standards, eBay provides buyer protection with easy returns and money-back guarantees, and employees at Home Depot are encouraged to stay as long and as patient with every single customer as needed to make sure their home dreams come true.

“Pragmatism requires a commitment to finding and maintaining clarity across your brand’s ecosystem.”

6. Be where your customers are

One of the simplest but often most forgotten tactics, for those brands that are ruthlessly pragmatic, is that they build their brands by being there for their customers, when and where they need them, on their terms. Chick-fil-A is striving to be the brand that is creating 10 million different menus and being able to get your order to you how you want it—order online, in-store, get it delivered, have it catered, etc. They want to be present when it matters. Warby Parker found that customers still enjoy the physical experience of trying on multiple pairs of glasses, not just the five they could get by mail and are now in the process of opening some of the most successful retail operations in the U.S., rivaling Apple and Tiffany’s for sales-per-square footage. They followed their customers’ lead, replicating the best of their online experience and innovated in an “Apple-like” way to get to an in-store experience that is unique, relevant and meets customers where they are at.

Inspiration is a word companies love to throw around to describe their businesses and brands, but guess what? Most businesses and brands are not inspired or inspiring. They live in functional worlds, providing functional benefits – competing on price, features and share of voice; never truly feeling confident about their decisions.

“They surprise and delight at moments that matter, stay true to their values and turn consumers into passionate brand advocates.”

The brands that stand at the top of Prophet’s Brand Relevance Index^TM, brands like Southwest, LEGO and Starbucks, for example, are inspired brands. They strive for a higher purpose and capture our imagination. They surprise and delight at moments that matter, stay true to their values and turn consumers into passionate brand advocates. And sometimes even more importantly, they inspire the people that come to work for them every day.

5 Ways Smart Companies Find Inspiration

Look beyond your company’s walls and learn from what has worked for others.

1. Smart companies obsess about their customers and deliver what matters.

At Panera, the food is good and priced competitively, while the service is fast and friendly. But it’s the commitment to good-for-you foods—clean, simple, and healthy—that makes Panera an inspired brand. As Americans’ concerns about food and farming have expanded, Panera has led the way in education about agriculture and ingredients. (The new “No-No List” is a great example.) It has earned the credibility to cast itself in a coveted role—a trusted teacher. Customer obsession was covered deeply in our first blog in this series and remains the number one source of inspiration for companies.

2. They “thief and doctor” best practices both inside and outside their category.

We often ask the question of our clients, “If you were more like Disney or Uber or Zappos, what would you take from what they are doing to drive change in your organization?” The answers are always surprising. The best healthcare companies, for instance, aren’t just looking to the Mayo Clinic or Cleveland Clinic for inspiration. They are just as likely to be asking how they can provide amenities as luxurious as the Four Seasons, service as consistent as Nordstrom or experiences as magical as Disney. They understand that inspiration usually requires more than imitation. They infuse borrowed ideas with their own brand identity to create a distinctive offering or experience.

3. They explore their own heritage.

Consumers crave authenticity, so brand history can offer an almost endless source of lessons. We often take clients out on what we call “brand safaris” to delve into the stories of companies such as Levi Strauss and Ford Motor Co. Studying how these great American brands honor their heritage, yet still inspire customers today always sparks fresh thinking. Levi’s found its mojo again when the 529 was reinvented into the “hot skinny” jean, and Ford inspired all of us by fully reimagining its F-150. Don’t disregard the past for future inspiration simply because it’s in the past.

4. They think big and small.

Responding to large demographic changes is essential. If you don’t respect Gen Y’s demand to do everything on their phones, you won’t win. But it also means listening to the growing desire for personalization across every customer segment. That trend has inspired companies that range from Birchbox, with its curated beauty offerings, to GE Healthcare, which continues to lead the field with its innovative DoseWatch, leveraging cloud technology to individualize radiation therapy.

5. They take a stand—even a risky one—to stay true to their mission.

As a company, sometimes it’s what you don’t do that becomes the most inspirational. CVS generated a great deal of publicity for its decision to stop selling tobacco products and was in the news again when it resigned its seat on the U.S. Chamber of Commerce over the group’s pro-smoking stance. And it did so without apology: tobacco use conflicts with the company’s commitment to helping people on their path to better health.

Today’s consumers are experts at ignoring the tens of thousands of brands that don’t interest them. But for their favorites, they go above and beyond what “rational” people do. What makes these rare brands—stalwarts such as Apple and Starbucks, or emerging favorites such as Stitchfix and Snap—stand out from the competition?

These brands, as noted in our Prophet Brand Relevance Index^TM, have made it their mission to continually find new ways to engage and delight customers. We call these relentlessly relevant brands. These brands religiously commit to four big principles: customer obsession, distinctive inspiration, pervasive innovation and ruthless pragmatism.

In this blog, we’ll look at the first tenet: Customer obsession.

It’s The Customer’s World; Brands Are Simply Living in It

Today, customers respond to brands that respond to them. It’s not just about what they buy, it’s how they buy it; getting what they want, how and where they want it. And they want to buy from brands that “get” them. Brands that fail to embrace a profound customer-centric “outside-in” approach are at risk of being quickly dismissed and overtaken by challengers, potentially overnight.

Building a relentlessly relevant brand begins with adopting a customer-obsessed mindset. Being customer-obsessed requires a pervasive focus on not just what customers want, but brands must also gain a greater customer understanding, and especially, empathy for what is important in customers’ whole lives, not just the narrow slice where brands interact with them. It is with this view that a brand can make itself relevant in the moments that matter.

Three Simple Steps to Customer Obsession

1. See your customers as people, not transactions.

Most marketers approach customer insights by asking, “What will it take to get our customers to buy more?” They are using a transactional lens, making their focus too narrow. They are listening to customers but not really hearing what’s important: what customers are saying to each other online, on social media, in reviews and in context with the greater world around them. This leaves most companies deaf to the deeper conversations that can reveal opportunities to build true and profound relevance with their customers. Marketers need to understand a complete view of their customers’ world in order to gain more attention, intention, and engagement.

Marketing agility will be a term you will hear often over the next few years, forcing marketers to move from broad to focused and back again, allowing them to truly understand the whole customer, and giving them the power to inspire breakthrough innovation rather than incremental progress.

Let’s take Netflix, for example. This brand has reshaped its category by embracing customer obsession and becoming an indispensable part of customers’ lives in 50 countries with nearly 33.3 million subscribers worldwide, according to Statista. Netflix built its success on developing a keen sense of what people love to watch and how they love to watch it. The micro understanding of customers is delivered through hyper-personalization and recommendations based on behavioral algorithms.

Customer obsession allowed Netflix to create the category breakthroughs that traditional media never thought was possible. Unlike traditional media, Netflix understood its customers’ hunger to binge-watch new TV series and pivoted its content release strategy. It wasn’t long before HBO, Amazon and Hulu followed suit.

2. Seek common ground and shared interests with customers.

Most marketers approach brand building by asking, “How can we differentiate from our competitors?” Customer-obsessed marketers understand that brands have the power to create deeper connections and motivations by finding common ground – shared interests between what matters in their customers’ lives and what they do as a company.

Facing a heavy-hitting competitive set, GoPro set out to be an adventurous lifestyle brand that made technology products, rather than a tech company marketing to athletes. It created products specifically designed to equip adrenaline junkies for whom the sharing of their stories from adventures in surfing, snowboarding, sky-diving and auto racing was almost as important as doing them. GoPro ignited its customers’ desire to capture their own epic feats and bring family and friends along for the ride.

With user-generated content pouring in, the customers themselves became the marketing engine to build the brand. And it worked: The company increased its marketing cost by only $41,000 in 2013 but made $28 million more in net income than it did in 2012.

3. Embrace the change your customers demand.

Most marketers ask, “How can we sell customers what we’ve got today?” Customer-obsessed brands welcome change because they understand maintaining relevance means thinking dynamically and staying nimble to anticipate customer demand. Customer-obsessed marketers seek to anticipate where the puck is heading by asking, “What will our customers be looking for next, and how can we deliver?”

Customers’ needs and attitudes will inevitably shift, and competitors will attempt to emulate other brands’ success. Customer-obsessed brands anticipate the need for change by more actively sensing what is changing in what customers value. This obsessed focus on what’s changing in customers’ attitudes will allow brands to lean forward and act with an agile mindset, ahead of their competition.

LEGO’s focus on being customer-obsessed has enabled it to continue building relevance by imagining new possibilities for kids and their parents. Dubbed “the Apple of toys” by Fast Company, the Danish toy company knows a lot about the future of play. LEGO’s Future Lab analyzes massive amounts of global data and conducts deep ethnographic research to understand what’s next. Its diverse product portfolio has grown to keep builders engaged as they grow.

When LEGO faced increasing competition from digital entertainment, it successfully partnered with Harry Potter, Star Wars and Ninjago to keep customers engaged. LEGO puts customers at the helm of their own innovation with LEGO Ideas–an online community that invites builders to submit their own ideas for the next LEGO set. The community votes to pick their favorites and LEGO selects winners to create actual products, giving the inventor a portion of sales. With storylines, characters and humor that entertains kids and adults alike, LEGO proves when it comes to creative play, their brand will be relentlessly relevant.

Being customer-obsessed requires a pervasive focus on not just what customers want, but brands must also gain a greater customer understanding, and especially, empathy for what is important in customers’ whole lives, not just the narrow slice where brands interact with them.

This post originally appeared on CMO.com.

A merger is a unique opportunity to reimagine your business and brand. But the reality is stark: 70%-90% of mergers and acquisitions fall short of expectations. Prophet’s approach to M&A not only ensures that brand equity isn’t degraded but creates a new platform for growth through the development of a relentlessly relevant brand. This demand-driven approach is complimentary to driving efficiency of costs post-merger.

Relevance is the most reliable indicator of a brand’s long-term success. In fact, data from our latest Prophet Brand Relevance Index™ reveals that revenue growth of the most relevant brands have outperformed the S&P 500 average by 12% over the last decade on profitable growth.

It’s important to understand how to navigate this process, and mitigate the pitfalls that can derail or sub-optimize an M&A effort. This article will illustrate the key areas to focus on, and the opportunities and risks your business is likely to encounter.

The following potential pitfalls can be navigated if anticipated and addressed with a proper strategy:

• Inadequate alignment with business strategy – Brand strategy must be informed by business strategy and designed to support strategic objectives and intent.
• Too narrowly framing the merger as a “re-branding” effort – Mergers present a rare point-in-time opportunity to drive broader cultural and experiential change for a new brand or company.
• Minimal internal orientation and focus – Successfully informing, engaging and enabling employees BEFORE launching externally is critical.
• Approaching launch as a “one and done” effort – The initial launch is really only the beginning of creating a meaningful brand that is understood by consumers and valued by stakeholders.
• Lack of coordination, integration and cohesion – Centralized planning and rigorous program management are essential to ensure success across numerous, concurrent efforts.

After all, a successful merger is defined by the value it creates in the marketplace. Effective business and brand integration goes beyond eliminating redundancies, merging teams and unveiling a new name and logo. While short-term profits can be achieved through efficiencies and cost reductions, long-term shareholder value is created through a deep understanding of customers and the power of the brand.

Developing relevant offerings that appeal to your customers will accelerate top-line growth. Additionally, creating a relentlessly relevant brand will inspire, influence and compel consumer behavior.

4 Key Areas to Prioritize for Brand Growth

Over decades of M&A work, Prophet has identified four key areas a company should prioritize to power M&A growth:

1. Create a compelling “how-to-win plan.” This plan builds a comprehensive portfolio of company moves and customer-facing offers and experiences that deliver on unmet or underserved needs.
2. Develop a transformative brand purpose. Building a powerful brand purpose and narrative can unify a company and establish an aspirational north star.
3. Establish a motivating employee value proposition. This drives growth by engaging and inspiring employees to achieve their full potential and increasing the acquisition and retention of talent.
4. Prepare to activate your brand. Ensure that your brand’s external activation shapes perceptions, changes behaviors and drives business impact.

As early as 2012—which seems like ancient history in social media—Altimeter researched the uncontrolled spread of brand pages on social. The first sentence of our 2012 report captured our message:

“Like a disease, social media proliferation will leave companies crippled — unless they develop a strategy to manage now.”

Problem solved? No. The problem still resonates with social business leaders today, including Alison Herzog, Director of Social Business Strategy at Dell. Herzog said, “Global businesses like Dell are complex – they’re made up of many regions, varying languages and cultures, diverse audiences and interests and wide-ranging areas of internal focus. Creating a focused, scalable social architecture and implementing this with a governing body is paramount. We knew that centering on customer experience, strategic pillars and where the real impact was possible matched with the appropriate resources would guide this, which became imperative when we completed the largest tech acquisition in history.” Prophet had the opportunity to work with the exceptional team at Dell to solve this challenge.

Social teams keep growing the number of owned accounts to keep up with continuous changes in social platforms, consumer behavior and business priorities. The result is a growing operational burden and a decrease in effectiveness per account. For many firms, like Dell, optimizing social account architecture is a requirement for effective social media innovation and performance.

Reinforcing the need for a solution is a telling data point from Altimeter’s 2016 State of Social Business report: 79% of the more than 500 strategists surveyed globally reported that “the social team is becoming more operational and a platform for other innovation teams.”

As a former social business leader at a major brand, that result didn’t surprise me. But, it heightened the importance of getting to the root of account proliferation. Business units will have a hard time using social platforms for business if they are too fragmented.  As a mature practice, we can expect the scope of social business operational responsibilities to grow, but an unchecked proliferation of pages amplifies this burden needlessly.

Can this be solved? Why hasn’t it?

Lack of governance lies at the heart of the problem. As a community of social business strategists, our “test & learn” approach has led to many impactful innovations, but rarely do we take the time to look back and decommission ideas that aren’t meeting objectives (especially individual pages/accounts that are perhaps perceived as low risk to leave abandoned).

There is a disconnect between the business objectives that initiated the page and the social team tasked with managing it. Or, the page’s creator may have left the company, making it difficult to remove. For many brands without an account management team for the social platform, filing a DMCA notice of copyright infringement may be the only option.

Another key issue is the low bar required to create a new branded page—especially if listening tools or rogue page trackers aren’t in place. Well-meaning employees may create pages for their store, an event or as a test. A few abandoned or underperforming pages may incur a little financial cost, but they quickly add up: crowding social metrics, complicating listening, confusing prospective customers with conflicting messages and – worst of all – creating the user perception that the brand doesn’t care or understand social media.

Simplifying a complex problem

As a governance problem, this is solvable—but it’s more than that. Not only do we need to fix the problem before it gets out of control, but better yet, this is the time to rethink the brand’s architecture of social media accounts.

Make a quick mental shift from today’s situation: If your current company had never implemented social media before, and had the benefit of starting from scratch, what would your social media brand architecture look like? You would want to consider the following:

1. The Customer’s Journey. How do my social media pages fit within our broader, omnichannel customer journey? What pages do customers need and how do we create an intuitive experience that results in the outcomes we’re focused on? Does each organizational unit determine its own accounts in a silo, or is there a higher-level perspective where fewer, broader accounts could make the journey feel seamless? When is an account so broad that it loses effectiveness?
2. The Social Network Landscape. Where is there alignment between my business goals and the capabilities, culture, user demographics and consumer behavior of social networks? It may be easy to name Linkedin for recruiting, thought leadership or B2B sales needs, but what if alignment like this isn’t so obvious?
3. Your Team & Resources. What social account architecture meets customer needs and has teams in my organization who are ready to commit to ongoing content and engagement? While internal reorganizations may be a constant challenge, finding teams who have strong alignment between goals and a new social page (that they can run with) is ideal. Of course, the danger to avoid here is an “inside-out” architecture, where your pages reflect your internal organizational structure, rather than the market and customer you’re serving.
4. Your influence. Beyond the issues above, if you manage social for your company, you know the decision to take down an underperforming page can be problematic. How do you convince that leader that set up a Twitter handle she rarely uses that she should re-invest or decommission the account?  What if you only have a single page in Chinese for that market, but it isn’t performing?  Do you take it down, merge with others or reinvest? These are just some “tip of the iceberg” issues that emerge.

3 steps to redefining social account architecture

In our work with Dell, we found the secret to success is to work on three fronts:

1) Identify “social account territories” that reflect coherent customer journey needs. Once identified, it is possible to optimize the social account architecture (steps 2 and 3 below) one territory at a time;

2) use a data-driven, quantitative model for making easy decisions (e.g., those pages showing great or very poor results); and

3) use a decision tree—based on governance principles that leadership supports—to make tough decisions. Decisions range from removing the page, maintaining as is, re-investing, creating a new page where there is a missed opportunity, or merging the page with another.