Do you have team alignment? How to put your brand values to the test
Do you have team alignment? How to put your brand values to the test
Clarity on your business goals and brand values is fundamental for building a team that autonomously behaves in a way that is consistent with the experience you want to create.
In our Alignment Audits, we often find a disconnect between how the leadership defines the brand values and how the team interprets them. Misunderstandings around a brand’s vision and values often happen when the language used to write them is too vague.
There are numerous digital survey resources available to gauge how teams perceive and feel about their brands. (We’ve used Survey Monkey, Tiny Pulse and Google Forms in our own business.) But to get the full picture, nothing trumps talking about it.
Conversational Research is a one-on-one interview with a professional interviewer (a journalist or social scientist) to dig into how a team member feels about the brand – and why. This insight can be critical when assessing whether alignment issues are simply a misinterpretation of what the brand actually means.
Getting yourself into a journalist mindset requires asking questions and listening like one.
1. Be ready to toss out your list of prepared questions. People like to tell their stories.
Yet, too often, we’re so focused on our personal agendas that the idea of “listening” is really just waiting for our turn to speak. The risk is that you only end up validating your own perspective instead of uncovering deeper insights that give a brand nuance. A great interviewer doesn’t just ask probing questions—they know when to shut up. When you’re doing conversational research right, the questions should flow out of the conversation. Going into an interview with a list of questions that you are dead set on getting answered often means you’ll miss something important brought up during an answer to your first question, possibly fertile ground for further investigation. To get to that great stuff, you only have to remember one follow-up question: “Why?”
2. Get the colour.
When you read profiles of your favourite celebrity or businessperson in a magazine, often the most insightful (and juicy) parts come from the journalist telling us what emotion or attitude was betrayed by the way the person answered a question—sometimes even in opposition to what they are literally saying. In journalism, a descriptive article in this vein is called a “colour piece.”
In stakeholder interviews, what people don’t say is often just as informative as what they do say. The feedback from a voice of stakeholder interview should be more than a transcription of words—it should take careful note of the feeling beneath those words.
3. Dig for the dirt
You’ve probably heard the term “fluff piece”—it’s the resulting story when a journalist paints a subject in only the most favourable light, ignoring any opposing viewpoints and devoid of any challenges to facts stated by its subject. In a voice of stakeholder interview, you still need to ask your subject to explore things that may be difficult for them to talk about. Drawing out these points of tension, conflict, or difficulty can be some of the best feedback for a brand.
We once worked with a client who never suspected that his company’s brand had a perception problem because their customers never indicated there was anything to worry about. But by digging beneath the surface, our interviewers uncovered some extremely critical feedback and negative impressions of the brand. It was one of the most difficult presentations I’ve ever had to make, but although it was hard to hear, the client embraced the feedback. Working together, we leveraged those insights to build a stronger brand platform. It’s never easy to deliver bad news to a client, but in our experience, solving these challenges not only provides the quickest routes to improvement but, in the end, will also prove that you listened.