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The first thing to get to grips with is that there are many questions for any CEO to grapple with, almost certainly too many. Many potential answers as well. If brand people with their own specialism aim to provide answers for clients, well that can be a very subjective and precipitous path to tread too.

Of course we should start with what the customer wants, what does he or she need or aspire to from us and our products or service? Now that’s a great question but what does the consumer actually feel? What perception exists? What sentiments are out there? When during the day does he or she really consider your product – if at all?

Hmm, that’s a bit more tricky.

There are 6 billion people on the planet so we had better try to imagine what they need and want from us. And who are these people? What are they like? Where do they live? What marks out their community? How might we refer to them – categorize them if you like? What are their vital statistics? What are their CVs like? Are they similar to one another or markedly different? How should we group them? How should we classify or manage them? Is that feasible anyway?

Now, does the database strategy we have in place ‘map’ to these criteria? Or does the company hold insights that relate to the most prof- itable customers in ways in which they can perhaps talk to them more valuably? Are they growing as sectors or segments? Can the business

decide whether these communities are in decline or are they static? Can they address each segment differently? Can they rank all of these needs and wants to each category or type of potential customer? What would they be able to do if they did? Would they create different services and products?

Now that’s getting interesting.

Well, OK, if we could arrange and organize the value metrics of all of this then that’s great but then it just gets more complex. Each of these indi- viduals has countless ways in which to get to the product through a retailer, a wholesaler, online, direct through an intermediary, a club, an association, in fact third parties galore. And then what about the influ- encers like the media, trade associations, local government, the press. So much chatter, so many influences however well intentioned, often out of the control of the business.

Ah, it’s just getting too difficult.

And what are these stakeholders’ needs? What are their business interests? What are their imperatives? How do they describe their problems, their ‘points of pain’ as we might call them? The point is that we have to speak very differently to the business community and show that we understand them, even build specific services and solutions for them. This is becoming of increasing importance in ensuring that we build business as cost-efficiently as possible and finesse the demand chain through which our ultimate customers can gain access to our products and services.

Furthermore the enterprise has constantly to consider the pure product, its current positioning, the competition, the ‘commodity of everything’, the systems of manufacture, the resources, the services, many of which are often still unformed or nascent. How much time is devoted to thinking about the current business model, the price, the value, the way in which the business describes itself? It’s interesting to listen to the ‘What do you do for a living?’ answer they give as that is often proved to be way out. How can the business better create an improved and differentiable expe- rience for their partners and alliances, their customers across all of these channels, the call centres and data centres? What about improving the training and consulting they may do to support their sales?

OK, so now they have considered all of the complex conversations they may have and that are inextricably associated with their products, services, channels, channel needs, communities of need and customer needs, what should they be saying they really do now it’s all added up? What’s the big

idea behind their business? Should they actually refer to what they actually do in the light of all this somewhat differently? Could they have a whole new language to describe what they do? I would say so.

The reality is that most consumers are pretty tired of the same old stuff being addressed to them. They get communication fatigue. Customers get bombarded by thousands of new messages every day. I heard that the average consumer receives over 20,000 messages every day. Let’s have a go at saying something fresh and different. Please.

So clearly CEOs really do have a lot to think about. Yet how can they prioritize it all, how can they make certain decisions and how can they make those decisions to the benefit of everyone: the enterprise stake- holders, the customers, the environment, the society and sustainable for the good of long-term success of the business?

This is clearly not easy and really does provide any organization with a set of very difficult decisions. Many of these decisions could be almost paradoxical. We most certainly live with paradox all around us. If you think about it, almost everything that you consider in business or in everyday life has its opposite energy with a win for one invariably meaning a loss for the other. Subjectivity rearing its head again perhaps. This win–lose struggle is a massive drain of energy, and causes frustration and inevitably the failure to appreciate reality. The counter-intuitive behaviour of social systems further compounds paradox. Things can get worse before getting better, or vice versa. You can win or lose for the wrong reason, and actions intended to produce a desired outcome may, in fact, generate opposite results. What we could really do with is far better ‘decision quality’.

Given all of the above ‘striving for alignment’, it’s now very important to integrate the external messages within this bigger picture, the awareness, the generation of leads, their conversion, the retention and long-term rela- tionships and support of newfound customers. The continuous ‘mantra’ of integrated communication and tactical customer acquisition is important, yes, but at least we could make it a pleasant and coherent conversation for our customers, couldn’t we? And surely advertising isn’t the only way to do things any more, is it?

Oh, and then perhaps we should remind ourselves of what we were aiming to achieve: those business imperatives. Will they be changing now that we actually begin to understand all of the issues we are setting out to address? They just might.

Moving on…

So have we described the totality of what an integrated business, brand equation and brand framework might look like? A new mould? Well, maybe, with a clear language, we’d be getting closer, but as we all know to our cost, business plans were probably fixed at a particular time and perhaps also at a time when external observers were brought in. It’s usually all gone a little bit off the tracks by now.