Every time consumers open their wallets, they show their preference for the brands they trust.  A key driver of relevance is the values brands stand for and the way they bring those values to life in the customer experience.

The 2019 Prophet Brand Relevance Index® gives us a unique view into how brands today stay relevant to consumers. To determine relevance, Prophet surveyed 13,500 U.S. consumers about more than 225 brands across 27 industries. It measured four brand principles: customer obsession, ruthless pragmatism, pervasive innovation and distinctive inspiration. Within these principles, we measured how customers rated brands on a set of values and beliefs that align with their own.

The study reinforced a strong correlation between relevance and values (R²=0.55), suggesting that brands that effectively demonstrate strong values externally have greater relevance with the consumers they are engaging.  Said another way, consumers place greater weight on how brands demonstrate and live their values rather than the specific values themselves. We can look to brands that perform highly on “has a set of values and beliefs that align with my own” to learn how to help drive greater relevance in the market.

 The Importance of Brand Values

To have a lasting impact, brand values need to be more than words on a wall – they need to come to life across touchpoints, internally and externally. Internally, values can engage, empower and equip. They form the foundation of a company’s culture, defining behavioral standards, unifying employees, boosting morale and helping employees work towards a shared vision. When employees enthusiastically live the company’s values, those values radiate externally and can be felt by customers.

Brands that turn their commitment to values inside out create deeper relationships with consumers who share those values and believe in the brand’s bigger purpose. Brands with weaker values – or those that don’t live up to their values – can have negative impacts on customers’ perceptions of the brand. To see the impact values can have on brand perceptions, we studied brands that are winning with customers and employees around a shared set of beliefs and values.

1. USAA – Values That Build Empathy

USAA, #46 in the BRI overall, brings their values to life for employees, empowering them and transforming how they engage with customers. The company starts by reinforcing its values internally, providing employees with a USAA membership and conducting extensive training. Through USAA’s “Surround Sound” approach, trainees read deployment letters from soldiers and even practice carrying a 65-lb backpack. These values-driven experiences enable employees to see their work through the customers’ eyes, creating a connection between the employee and the needs of the customer. As a result, customers feel that USAA employees truly understand their needs, which are rooted in their personal beliefs and values.

“When employees enthusiastically live the company’s values, those values radiate externally and can be felt by customers.”

2. Disney – Values Motivate at Every Touchpoint

Disney, #5 in the BRI overall, has beliefs that are continuously reinforced throughout the organization – through how leaders communicate, to how performance is measured, to how employees are recognized and rewarded. Disney’s professional development team, Disney Institute, showcases the “business behind the magic” as a resource for companies across industries. One feature, “Disney’s Approach to Employee Engagement,” explains the company’s commitment to selecting the right people and retaining them. A key aspect of this commitment? Reiterating the brand’s core purpose – to create happiness – and empowering each employee from the start to provide outstanding service to guests with this purpose in mind. This constant reinforcement and clear communication of expectations create an intentional culture where decisions are rooted in those beliefs. And customers feel the values as the magic of Disney is brought to life across channels and touchpoints.

3. Chick-fil-A – Values Drive Consistent, Quality Experiences

Chick-fil-A, #27 in the BRI overall, has values that are an integral part of their company, with each team member – from corporate leaders to frontline employees – living them every day. Unlike the rest of the QSR industry which largely takes a transactional approach to customers and employees, Chick-fil-A has constructed an intentional culture rooted in family values with a “servant leadership” mindset. This is nurtured in the culture across every touchpoint, from how they recruit talent (e.g., observing how potential hires interact with employees) to how they engage with customers (e.g., closed on Sundays and saying “it’s my pleasure” when serving customers), and ensures employees truly live the culture and values every day.

Chick-fil-A’s values are so deeply engrained in employees’ lives, that they permeate into customers’ experiences. The chain has established a high bar for what customers will experience at any of their restaurants in the country, and with values that are instilled on the individual level, the brand consistently delivers.

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It’s the time of year when organizational leaders are publishing their 2020 plans, hoping they are effectively responding to the disruptive forces and opportunities of the digital age.

We’ve similarly been reflecting within our Organization & Culture practice here at Prophet. Our views come from not just our ongoing research, but also from helping our clients around the world lead transformations of all shapes and sizes. We’ve distilled that experience into the three factors we believe will be critical to organizational transformations in 2020.

In setting out these opportunity areas for focus, we are not saying these are the only big-ticket items that should occupy your attention. But it is our belief that the ones we have selected are going to become points of differentiation in accelerating successful organizational transformation.

1. Connecting Purpose and Ambition

We’ve written previously about the arrival of “purpose” as a critical component in transformation; bringing a sense of meaning and direction by answering why an organization has its place in the world. We have helped many clients arrive at their north star and to think beyond words about what needs to happen daily for them to infuse true purpose into their organizations and thereby align behaviors and accelerate decision making across the business.

But having a purpose alone is not enough to help people through the dizzying world of change we are in. What our 2019 research revealed is needed, and what we are now seeing more of in successful transformations, is codifying purpose through a clear, measurable and time-bound ambition. For some organizations, this is as narrow as painting a comprehensive picture of what a digital transformation will look like in their own firm and for their customers. For others, it means creating a more tangible set of future outcomes that cater to the complete stakeholder ecosystem, both in and outside of the organization.

2. Incorporating the Next Generation of Workforce Planning into Your Talent Strategy

We see organizations realising more starkly than ever before that they were designed for a different era. New operating models are no longer a consideration – they are becoming a necessity with significant implications for an organizational redesign. Tinkering at the edges of this problem is no longer viable.

Workforce planning is a key strategic imperative, but it has moved firmly beyond predicting talent needs to a synthesis of three formerly separate disciplines: functional and enterprise visioning, business architecture, and powerful people analytics. All three of these disciplines impact how you organize talent to deliver on your business ambition. Prior approaches were frequently focused on cost-cutting and demotivating, decoupled from growth strategy, and executed with the thinnest veneer of quantitative insights to support them. We’re toe-to-toe with this issue with several clients right now and we’ve found that the next generation of workforce planning is different from past approaches because it’s:

• Linked to vision and ambition
• Driven by business architecture and not existing organization charts, it’s more tightly coupled to longer term business strategy
• Facilitating more strategic decision making as quantitative tools help SaaS people data platforms really come into their own

On top of this, the reskilling component of workforce planning has now ballooned as a result of years of declining learning and development investment and the use of often ineffective, low-cost alternatives. The future is already here for some leading companies making multi-billion-dollar investments in reskilling in order to remain competitive.

3. EX=CX=EX

Employee experience (EX) has long been talked about as the acid test of any employer brand – the reality of expectations met or otherwise. But in a world where consumer brands have shifted to build their worth through experience first and foremost – suddenly the connective tissue between EX and Customer Experience (CX) is a growing area of focus and can easily hit the headlines when it clearly falls short – notably recently at the direct-to-customer luggage brand, Away.

This is made even more complex through the interplay between technology and humanity – and the challenge that EX has lagged light-years behind CX in terms of technological enablement. The sad truth is that so many “employee tools” are actually designed to cut costs and make the lives of Finance, HR and Operations teams easier – rather than deliver a customer-grade employee experience. As a result, we see HR leaders looking to approach EX differently and learn from CX innovation. And there are also CX leaders taking a more holistic view of the organization and looking at how EX can really drive differentiation for their goals. Ultimately, there is a big prize: EX that is powerful and makes work easier for employees, thereby delivering both direct and indirect benefits to the end customer and reinforcing the value proposition for employees to join a firm and thrive – win, win, win.

“Our views come from not just our ongoing research, but also from helping our clients around the world lead transformations of all shapes and sizes.”

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