How to make actions speak louder than words
Your university, faculty or innovation hub may have resolved the important challenges of defining its Purpose, Mission, Vision and Values – and it may have found a way to tell a powerful, engaging story. So you may feel you're done, right?
Unfortunately, this is where things often fall down.
"People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
Maya Angelou is quotable on many topics, but this one is a real gem for reminding organisations about the importance of behaviour when they're embarking on, or re-energising their brand.
It’s obvious when you think about your own experience with brands.
You might be attracted to their message; their advertising might have captured your imagination. And their website and content may say all the right things. But when you engage with them in person (or digitally), it all falls down. Disinterested staff, poor user journeys, over-communicating to the point of junk, and zero response from Customer Service.
You feel cheated in some way. It’s one of the reasons why marketing gets it in the neck so often because it’s seen as a smokescreen instead of being, as the agency McCann coined in 1912, Truth Well Told.
Driving consistent behaviour across your team is critical to success. It should influence the ethics of your identity, recruitment and training as much as the methods and modes of communication.
It’s one of the reasons we recommend building a multi-disciplinary team at the start of a project. Inspired by the excellent book, Built to Last, we’ve called them Rocketship, Mars and Fire Crew among many other suitably adventurous monikers.
By drawing on a diverse and inclusive group of people to drive the project forward, relationships are forged that can inform the way you want to build your behaviours more widely. People who see (and feel) how the group behaves truly ‘experience’ the brand.
One such diverse group was Loughborough Business School. It culminated in 120 academics workshopping how their newly defined brand would behave – internally and externally.
Split into discipline-based teams they covered subjects as broad as performance reviews, course content and staff recruitment.
Using the foundations covered in previous articles and driven by a unified sense of Purpose and a clearly articulated Brand Idea, they were able to recognise behaviours that needed to be adopted; those to be nurtured and those to leave behind. In effect, what to do more of and what to do less of.
In another example, we convened a diverse group of representatives from university faculties, support services and commercial partners to define the behaviours the deep-tech innovation hub would manifest.
These behaviours will build the culture required to leverage the collaboration and positivity engendered in the Brand Idea.
It's behaviour that manifests the brand in its most visceral form.
But far from seeing this exercise as negative and restrictive, it should be embraced as a way of liberating all the good stuff – those behaviours that support, inspire, challenge and nurture. Just like any university, faculty or innovation hub should do.
Free up the good stuff to create Real World Impact.
Igniting your university or innovation hub identity can catalyse commercial opportunities. It can harness a sense of purpose, shared mission and energy that leads to greater entrepreneurialism, new sources of funding, new corporate partnerships new IP income, and an improved reputation – even fame.
To help a greater range of stakeholders to embrace this opportunity a simple change of language can help focus minds. Less corporate identity – more Impact Identity. It could increase the likelihood of maintaining a culture of innovation and ...
> intensify the clarity and focus of your purpose, mission and vision
> inspire emotional engagement