So, hi. Welcome. We're here this afternoon or this morning wherever you are with Leslie Andrachuk and Leslie has a lot of experience in branding, in marketing, and a lot of different roles around the whole idea of pushing out customer voice and brand guidelines. Because brand guidelines as we've been discussing are a really important part or a way of manifesting a brand voice inside the customer experience and across a customer journey, we thought it'd be very useful to talk to somebody with a lot of experience with brand guidelines and brand marketing. So with that, I'd like to introduce you to Leslie, Leslie, if you want to introduce yourself, and just a quick overview of what your role and how you got to where you are today. Sure, very simple. Hi everybody, I'm staying here in Toronto today and a quick overview about myself. I've worked a lot in publishing and broadcasting and in those, in markets I occupies a senior marketing roles, but then in the mid 2000s and to the early teens, I worked as a digital publisher in some of Canada's largest publishing companies. Then I've also worked in technology companies as a senior marketer. So I have an interesting amalgamation of marketing experience, so pure marketing, developing brands, creating large-scale marketing communications campaigns coupled with digital publishing experience. So that's really important today because content marketing and social media community management is really this cornerstone of this continual marketing that marketers think about today. Then the other aspect, as I just said, content development. So as a publisher, I had to develop tons and tons of content, and so that's really served me well in what I do today. So, thank you very much. In our class we've been really focusing on how brand cascades or rather should cascade into the various stages of customer journeys touch points. From the perspective of a marketing professional who helps companies with their brand story and activities, tell me how you view brand messaging and how it impacts or not, the different touch points along the customer experience. Yeah, so that's a great question. I'm going to sight some experience that I recently had at technology company. What they existed to do was to connect homeowners with contractors who can do work on their homes. So my mission at this company was to take a brand that had developed organically and really harness the power of that organic growth to actually create a brand essence, to define what that brand essence is, to define what that brand footprint was and then to create marketing communications and then further to ensure that as you said, all the touch points that the consumer experienced within the product, all the brand attributes are also reflected in that. So it was a really interesting journey. So I started from the very beginning and I really feel that when you develop brand guidelines which you include your color palette, your tone of voice, your look and feel, the reason why you do that is I really feel that brands are almost like people. People need consistency, they need to feel that, change is hard for people, so I as a person, Leslie the person, I stand for something, and my friends, all of my colleagues, everyone I know, they know what I stand for, the values that I stand for. Suddenly, I start to become somebody different, have different values, my friends are going to go, what the heck is happening? The same happens with brands and that you need to establish a set of guidelines that are consistent. If there's inconsistency, people are getting confused and they don't really understand what you stand for anymore. So yeah, it's really important, you go through this exercise of developing a brand platform, and it takes a lot of effort from key people in the company to develop a brand platform and then to develop the marketing implications that comes out of that, and the guidelines. It's really critical to then develop ways to enable other groups in the companies, for example, product development, the sales team, even your accounting team, customer service, to enable them to integrate those brand guidelines into their day-to-day operations. This often is the most challenging thing that you can possibly do in a company. Sometimes there are conflicts or disconnects. Can you talk about where you've seen disconnects? And maybe the example of why you think it might have been disconnected in terms of, hey we've, as you mentioned, there's a lot of work that goes into defining the brand, but if there's a whole in terms of the customer touch point, the people owning the customer touch point and the communications whether it's written, digital, synchronous or asynchronous, whatever that communication with the customer is, if they're not reflecting the brand, that's a lost opportunity. Have you encountered any examples where there has been a disconnect? I definitely have, so I'll give you a specific example from the same company. So one of the brand attributes that was very important was trust. Because as a homeowner, you're inviting somebody, a contractor into your home that you don't know, and there are always awful stories that people have about a contractor doing terrible things, and we've had a lot of them at this company. So trust was really a crucial element of the brand essence that we developed. So the product team however, one piece of a product that they developed was that they enabled the contractors to rake a homeowner's without the homeowner being aware that this was happening. When I heard about this, I was alarmed that this was happening without any discussion with the marketing team because it directly conflicted with this really important value that we had set out in our brand essence and in our brand guidelines. So, it's interesting because you mentioned trust, but one challenge on contracting and construction at home is that there is this ever increasing chain of outsourcing where the plumber is not available, so you get his other plumber they came recommended. So almost by definition, there's a disconnect, it's not the team always, I don't know if that was true in your company, but outsourcing is one of the areas that will be talking about quite a bit in this course. The fact that as soon as you start outsourcing to other organizations to own that touch point with the customer, you run the risk of having a diffused or missing brand message. Was there something? Yeah, it's a really good point, Michael. I think there's another aspect to this, so on the home owner's side, the consumer side, we were developing a seal of approval. That was backed up by having a criminal record checked, yeah, credit checks and also all of their licensing checks. So if you're an electrician, if you had a certification, we had actually checked that your licenses were valid. So on the homeowner side, we were saying trust us, trust us, that we are actually doing the work that needs to be done, so you can trust the contractors that you hire through us. So what alarmed me because again, the trusting, what I was alarmed at as the market work, the key marketers company was that on the contractor's side, we were doing something in a centrifuge and not being transparent to the homeowners. While on the home owners side, we were being completely transparent with all of the background of the contractors. There was a brand disconnect there and I was alarmed that if the homeowners actually discovered that we were doing this, the brand backlash would be very negative. Right. Absolutely. So, one last question I'd like to explore, and there are a lots of things I'd like to continue to talk about, but we're just being sensitive to your time. If you were to take some of the work you are doing for this contracting business and you were to cascade it back into other operations or bigger companies or different industries you work for, what are some general ways to achieve the alignment that is sometimes very difficult, like in a 50,000 person company or even on a startup where everybody's got their own, I have to get this done by yesterday, that type of attitude. How do you get that alignment? That's actually a good question, and I certainly don't pretend that I'm always successful at that company. I thought about how it can be done and I feel that involving key people in that brand development phase and even in the research that informs the insights into the brand attributes that you eventually establish is really key. As an example, when I was doing all that work, I didn't involve the head of technology and or the product managers. I think if that would have been a key thing. Even the sales team, for me it was about the product team where I felt the most challenge. Yes, and so I think that that would be the way to move forward with it because today especially in technology companies, and this may not be the case in other same or modern companies, for example. The technology team is taking on more and more of a marketing role today. You have things like growth hacking and a lot of the growth comes from SEO efforts, others is sincerely in marketing implication efforts. So it's a blurred line. So I feel that marketing chose me to work very closely and also have really opened lines of communication about what are the best lot of ways to collaborate so that we leverage each other's expertise in the best way possible. That's something I talk about in terms of customer journey mapping, as well as that it's not the end tool, it's a tool for getting a conversation started. I think brand guidelines are the same like you're talking about the whole idea of trust, that can be interpreted in a lot of different ways and to some extent, you need the oversight and continuous conversation with those who've defined those granulitic guidelines to make sure that you're on the right track for interpreting what does trust mean in my particular part of the customer journey. I think that's a great point. Go ahead. This has been a fantastic day, and again, I wish we had a lot more time to talk. I want to thank Leslie for joining us today, and obviously, the whole idea of brand guidelines is something we've explored and we'll continue to explore throughout this program, this course. If you don't get the brand guidelines right, and they're not ruled out in a good thoughtful and consistent way, your brands are going to suffer. I think if we're talking about the intersection of customer experience and brand experience, you have to make those two things work together. So thank you, until next time. We'll see you in tomorrow's class.
