Building a brand from the inside out by Russell Pocock

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Ahead of his appearance at our Birmingham Awards Showcase, Russell Pocock, head of brand marketing at City & Guilds, talks about his journey to winning a 2011 Marketing Society Award for Excellence.

Winning a Marketing Society Award is an amazing experience: the sense of anticipation in the days leading up to the ceremony, the night itself which was full of nerves, euphoria and pride in what the team had achieved, and once the hangovers had died down (and they lingered for a while) and the accolades back at the office had passed, we were left to reflect on our journey and what we learnt along the way.

Our award was for Employee Engagement: how we rebuilt the brand for the business, by the business, from the inside out. Our objective was to create a new brand strategy by August 2010 and lay the foundations of a brand-led business by December 2010. Simple, you say? In some cases, yes; in this case, not quite so. City & Guilds is an organisation that has been product-led for the past 130 years. This was a huge transition for the organisation and the people within it.

One of the main issues to overcome was the lack of understanding of the value that Marketing could bring to the business. For a long time we had been seen as, and were acting like, the ‘colouring-in’ department. Now it was time to lead, but we had to lead by stealth, we had to challenge the traditional way of working by engaging people so that they truly believed in the direction the brand was taking and didn’t just pay lip-service to it; the business had to be the driver of its own destiny. Simply rolling out a brand strategy to the rest of the business with the accompanying fanfare that we marketers like was going to sink like a lead balloon.

Getting the business to create its own sense of destiny meant piecing bits of it together and, if I’m honest, keeping our fingers crossed at times. A team of 28 people from across the business were selected to attend our first workshop and came as willing participants; however I’m not sure they were prepared for what they encountered. We had people who had never met before, let alone worked together, suddenly forced to consider their ‘reason for being’, their ‘higher sense of purpose’ in what they come to work for every day. And this, led by the guys with colouring books and crayons.

I’m told that the workshop felt like three days and six nights when people look back on it now, but what we managed to ignite in the organisation was very special; we created the spark that drove the entire business. Suddenly we didn’t just make qualifications and sell them as a product as we had done since our founding days in the industrial revolution. We were on a mission to lead a new kind of revolution about talent. Piecing together those disparate parts of the business felt uncomfortable at times. The biggest thing I took away from those early days especially, is that you’ve got to feel comfortable about being uncomfortable; you’ve got to trust in chaos even if your logical mind craves the safety of process.

It’s these moments of organised chaos that I’ve learnt to recognise and control. Initiating a tried and trusted process is one way of getting there and is wholly appropriate for certain situations, but, I believe that for a transformational shift in culture and people’s thinking to take place you have to be prepared to roll with the uncertainty that comes with the devolution of leadership to the collective. The key to making the strategy stick was again in utilising our people as we made the transition to brand expression: a new brand guide (note we didn’t create ‘guidelines’, ‘a book’ or ‘a bible’) and communications proposition were created with key members of that original group of 28. HR and Internal Communications also played an important role in ensuring that we lived our brand values of ‘leadership’, ‘integrity’ and ‘imagination’; they now form part of our employee value proposition and are included in every performance review.

It still feels uncomfortable at times. It’s old juxtaposed with the new, like the little old church of St Andrew Undershaft that sits dwarfed alongside the towering Gherkin in the city of London; however the beauty of it really is in the eye of the beholder and if you can get the business to create something amazing for itself, the power of that collective is awesome.

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Posted: September 27th, 2011 | Author: elen.lewis | Filed under: Awards for Excellence, Growth Drivers, Uncategorized | Tags: , , , | Leave a Comment »

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