These days, most annual reports are little more than a letter from the CEO and a page or two of highlights wrapped around the 10-K. No context to help explain good or bad performance, no details or proof points about long-term vision, and certainly no effort to help an average shareholder understand the management discussion and analysis (MD&A) section. Institutional investors have the luxury of listening to a CEO firsthand and asking questions in analyst meetings and in one-on-one calls. But it’s almost impossible for individual investors to get the whole picture, especially if they’re concerned about the company’s impact on the larger world and its financial implications.

Whether for reasons of conscience or the growing realization that bad citizenship hurts the bottom line, solid evidence exists that investors are taking increased note of corporate behavior. A 2009 white paper on the subject shows the trend clearly. Coauthored by the Dutch investment firm Robeco and the corporate consultant Booz & Company, this study found that “responsible investments” have been growing at an accelerated rate, climbing an average of 22 percent a year between 2003 and 2007. (This compared to flat growth in traditional investments in the same period.)

The report, however, also identified key stumbling blocks to responsible investing, chief among them the lack of any real consensus on what a responsible investment actually is. With no universally accepted standards and definitions, investors have precious little to go on. It’s up to them to create their own standards for separating the wheat from the chaff — for distinguishing sustainable, cutting-edge companies from those that merely claim to be responsible players.

For traditional measures, investors can certainly rely on the mandatory 10-K report to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to get a clear snapshot of a company’s financial performance year to year.  There is, however, no counterpart for gauging nonfinancial performance. To address this lack, many companies now produce corporate responsibility (CR) reports. But most of these documents are, in the end, not very helpful investment tools. There is no requirement that their results be audited or their content be measured against consistent benchmarks. And there is no standard way to gauge the effect of nonfinancial factors on the bottom line.

Integration Evolution

How, then, can we truly measure the long-term impact of a company’s behavior or judge the risks and/or ethical implications of a given investment? While the task remains difficult, the answer might be the “integrated report” — an annual document that combines both financial and nonfinancial data, creating clear connections between social and environmental choices, their impacts, and performance.

In 2009, integrated reporting took a big step forward with the collaboration of two major advocacy groups, the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) and the United Kingdom’s Prince of Wales’s Accounting for Sustainability Project. A meeting of investors, diplomats, standards experts, accounting firms, and major companies established a group, the International Integrated Reporting Committee, that would create universal standards and models, as well as a global governance structure to enforce consistency worldwide. Other developments also began to accelerate the trend, including a South African mandate that all companies in the country produce integrated annual reports by 2011.

In the United States, meanwhile, the SEC released guidelines requiring companies to assess and disclose the business effect of climate-change laws and regulations. This includes taking into consideration financially measurable consequences, such as the lower demand for products that are potentially damaging to the environment and the cost of adhering to environmentally progressive international accords. The directives had been called for by some large investors, including the California State Teachers’ Retirement System, the nation’s second-largest public pension fund. They represent a significant step in the drive to tie environmental impacts to a company’s bottom line.

As with most trends, some countries are well ahead of the curve, including Denmark, the first to make integrated annual reports a national requirement. A prime example of the result is Novo Nordisk’s “triple bottom line” report — a document that, in the company’s words, “ensures that decision making balances financial growth with corporate responsibility, short-term gains with long-term profitability, and shareholder return with other stakeholder interests.”

Getting on Board

It’s likely that companies everywhere will find themselves under increasing pressure to explain the impact of their decisions on the environment, society, and the bottom line. This means that integrated reporting will increasingly become the norm, so the time to begin preparing to issue this new kind of corporate report is now. Before starting, however, realize that an integrated annual report is a big undertaking. Above everything, it requires a deep commitment to the underlying goal of integrated reporting: becoming, in deed and not just word, part of a sustainable global economic model.

Where, then, to begin? Here are some basic first steps:

Bring people together. Call a joint meeting of annual report, CR (or CSR), and investor relations teams. Integrated annuals demand a great deal of cooperation and coordination. This initial meeting will establish relationships and put the subject on everyone’s radar.

See what works. Contact companies that are already doing integrated reports. Study their efforts and get as much information as you can from their team leaders. At the same time, stay abreast of developing standards and techniques — particularly by following the progress of the International Integrated Reporting Committee (IIRC).

Get buy-in from above. As with any major corporate undertaking, commitment must start from the top. Make an effort to engage and educate upper-level management. Their approval, after all, is critical to getting the resources you’ll need.

Do what you can now. While it’s unlikely you’ll accomplish an integrated annual report in the first year, there’s plenty of preliminary work to do, so get started. Create a team to get up to speed with GRI guidelines, and begin to align your current CR reporting with GRI standards. Start to explore ways to connect the current annual and CR reports. This means asking a broad range of questions, such as: How can we connect corporate strategy to emerging global trends and dynamics? How can we correlate sustainability issues to their financial implications? And how can we connect remuneration incentives to risk and organizational behaviors? As you ask these questions, start building a prototype, outlining possible structure and content. Also, draw up a rough timeline, so that your team has something to work against. Finally, while you plan, begin to rewrite the basics of your company’s story with impacts in mind.  Instead of simply saying, “Sales are up by X percent,” create a holistic picture that incorporates impacts and solutions, ethical issues, and your record on diversity and employee engagement.

Promote internally. Employees take pride in companies that are committed to responsible, sustainable behavior. Integrated reporting is proof positive of where your company stands. It’s a solid, concrete platform that can elevate the corporate brand.

Corporate reporting is ultimately about metrics — about numerical data that help investors gauge potential rewards and possible risks. What has changed is that investors seek (and will increasingly demand) new metrics, particularly as the costs of irresponsible corporate behavior come to light. Investors, in short, want more. Corporate citizenship has become more than a buzzword. And proof of good citizenship has become fundamental to investment decisions that are both ethical and sound. It’s likely the best way to provide that proof is the integrated annual report. As a standardized, quantifiable document of true performance in the marketplace, it is good for shareholders, good for the brand, and good for the world we will leave to our children.

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Steve Mignogna is a Principal at Sequel Studio, a branding and marketing, and  communications consultancy based in New York. He can be reached at smignogna@sequelstudio.com or 212-994-4320.

While few things are more important to sales than a strong, distinctive, respected brand, many mid-market CEOs place brand building on the back burner. This is probably because of the cost and the fact that value of brand building is hard to quantify. But it doesn’t have to be if the work is done right.

To elevate brand building to its rightful position as a driver of growth, and make its impact so clear and effective that the CEO knows it’s adding value, here are six fundamental actions you need to take, starting now.

The first step, always, is to view your brand the way customers do, from the outside in. Are you perceived as delivering relevant value? Does your company stand out? Are customers happy or unhappy? What do industry pundits say? If you haven’t done the basic research, the time to do it is now. Effective branding needs grounding in reality.

Craft a great story. Based on your findings and objectives, write a brand narrative everyone gets, one that defines your strengths, your differentiating value, and your brand personality (how your brand behaves). Next, angle the story for different audiences, from customer segments to employees. Your brand story will become a basis for both communication and action. This means not only advertising and marketing; it includes company policy and business practices.

Build a better experience. At our firm, we often say “experience is the brand” – because it is. That’s why the best companies focus on the customer experience across the board. Take a look at your research and examine how people experience your brand across every touch point, from product functionality, to trade show presentations, to the way your people answer the phone. Where are you delivering on your value proposition? Where are you falling short? If some time has passed since your last assessment, gauge new opportunities and changing customer expectations. Then work to improve the customer experience at every conceivable point of interaction.

Sell your ideas. Increasingly, customers want more than products – they want ideas that help them succeed. The expertise of your people can be a big factor in driving your brand. To leverage that asset, first talk to customers and see what they think and care about. Then identify people in your company that have answers and a knack for communication. With their help, create a bank of content you can then deliver across any number of venues, from the insights section of your website, to articles, white papers and videos, to webinars and presentations at important industry trade shows. Keep in mind, while ideas don’t drive sales, they surely drive buzz, which in turn drives sales. In the long run, thought leadership can help you dominate by becoming an indisputable go-to source.

Fire up the team. To drive sales on the outside, your brand has to be strong in the inside, inspiring a work force that’s up to speed and fully equipped to deliver value. Survey employees to see what they’re thinking and what they need to do their jobs better. Uncover issues that detract from productivity, collaboration and customer satisfaction. Begin to build a brand-aligned culture that’s knowledgeable, dedicated and excited – and invest in the tools and training the need to innovate, collaborate and succeed.

Leverage quick wins. While you’re working for the long term, think about the short term – specifically, tactical campaigns that can accelerate sales by surprising customers, increasing awareness, or throwing competitors off balance. Just as important, you can use quick campaigns to test ideas at relatively low cost. And because results are easy to track, you can refine and platform ideas that work.

One final thought: No matter what your business, customers are emerging from the bunker right now. But they remain wary about spending. Their business must be earned. In this environment, a strong, trusted brand that delivers the value it’s supposed to and that captures the imagination of its customers is in position to win.

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Brett Gerstenblatt is principal in charge of business and creative strategy at Sequel, a brand and marketing consultancy based in New York. He has led major branding and communications programs for both b2b and b2c verticals, including banking, consumer products, energy, healthcare, manufacturing, media and technology. Contact him at bgerstenblatt@sequelstudio.com or 212-994-4304.

Right now, every business has felt or continues to feel it. Spending is down. Skepticism among consumers, employees, and shareholders is high. Marketers are unsure how to best leverage the limited resources they have, but they recognize times of uncertainty are opportunities to increase market- and mind-share.

Where to start? Let’s assume that brand = the promise of a differentiated experience, and image = the external perceptions. How does one impact the other? Brand experiences trigger either positive or negative perceptions amongst audiences. That means that every interaction, be they in-person, online, or offline communications, can build on or diminish a company’s reputation.

Here are the five key actions a company can take to bolster its brand and image that will build trust in its products/services as well as its culture. 

ONE: Look at brands from the outside in.

So what if you think your company’s products and services are great? That’s not what counts. What matters is how others perceive your company’s brand. Decisions should be based on an honest assessment of what the marketplace thinks.

To look at a company from the outside in requires external audience research that spans qualitative, quantitative, and social media insights from customers, prospects, and analysts. Then, fold in frontline sales and support staff insights, competitive intelligence, and perception surveys to achieve a well-rounded view of how outbound messages and actions are being received. Couple this external view with a brand experience audit, and you have a comprehensive picture of both sides of the relationship.

An example of a company that took this approach is HP. At a time when competitors like Dell were looking at improving internal efficiencies and managing operating costs, HP made the PC personal again based on the insight that customers wanted the ability to humanize and personalize what has become a utilitarian digital tool.

TWO: Empower your people to drive your brand.

With many companies cutting jobs, it’s easy to forget that people are the key to delivering real and perceived value. Make sure your people are prepared to deliver the right brand experience. Give them the right tools and messages in helping them understand what’s important to the customer and, ultimately, what’s in it for them.

For NFP (formerly National Financial Partners), a financial services company built through the acquisition of more than 150 insurance, benefits, and wealth management firms, this meant gaining the insight and trust of internal audiences in reshaping a more unified story.

In addition to providing sessions for listening, senior executives used the opportunity to help employees understand the value of brand and the potential strength of a more aligned organization. Once the new brand platform was developed, a road map that consisted of presentation and communications tools, sales FAQs, CEO webcasts, and in-person roadshows set a path forward toward empowering the field force to own and activate the new NFP brand promise.

THREE: Deliver the right insight, at the right time, to the right people.

With companies shedding personnel and acquiring or inheriting new capabilities and businesses, it’s become more challenging to retain and grow customer relationships. To succeed, it’s critical to know your customers and deliver messages that are relevant to them.

The days of “spray and pray” campaign delivery are over. Targeted messages have more cost and customer efficacy than a blind mass-market approach.

For Boost Mobile, a unit of Sprint Nextel, building loyalty with independent retail dealers was about knowing that they were looking for a mobile carrier to be a partner, not just a provider. By giving independent retail dealers timely access to their own store performance, increased efficiencies around customer transactions, and educational experiences that helped them build their business, Boost became more valuable to their bottom line, not just the dealers’ product line-ups.

FOUR: Change perception by doing good things.

For your brand to win, it’s essential that your company get ahead of the issues — and avoid letting analysts and the media define your brand story. As with anything else, actions speak louder than words. The best way to succeed is to demonstrate that your company truly looks out for constituents’ interests. Public relations and marketing aren’t band-aids; companies need to “live it.”

Corporate reputation and social responsibility initiatives enhanced perceptions for brands like JetBlue and Bank of America. In February 2007, when passengers were left for hours on the tarmac, most airlines took a beating. JetBlue, anticipating Congressional action, introduced a passengers bill-of-rights.

During the financial crisis of 2008, with Lehman, Bear Stearns, and Washington Mutual disappearing almost overnight, customer fear, uncertainty and doubt was at an all-time high. Brands like Bank of America, with its Clarity Commitment program, launched in April 2009, demystified the lending process in an effort to empower the consumer to make informed decisions. With its Assurance Program in early 2009, Hyundai took meaningful steps to respond to customers' concerns in considering a big-ticket purchase as well as accrue positive associations for its brand.

FIVE: Leverage quick wins.

Whether you’re improving results, or customer service, or righting an environmental wrong, make it clear that your company is serious, not just sitting on its hands. Remember, the narrative about your company is yours to shape. If you hesitate, you lose the moment and leave it to others to shape stories about you.

In 2004, CA (formerly Computer Associates) was in the midst of a criminal investigation for corporate accounting fraud. By the second quarter of the following year, new leadership had been put in place, and the tarnished public image and low employee morale had hit bottom. With solid customer insights and the foundation for a new positioning under way, it would have taken eight to 10 months to move from the idea to a fully realized re-branding program. In the fourth quarter that same year, CA used its biggest annual customer conference as the stage to introduce the new vision for the company, manifested in the new brand platform and a refreshed logo.

Implemented only across the basic business tools (stationery, presentation tools, and the corporate website), this important but incremental step signified a sea change to the existing customer base, the 15,000 employees, and Wall Street and set the tone for a full rollout of internal and external communications milestones throughout the next 12 to 18 months. This represented an unconventional approach to a brand launch but was a necessary step in garnering the right level of positive change in the eyes of key stakeholders that progress was being made.

Although the cloud of financial uncertainty continues to be cause for cost-cutting or worse, business leaders should see these times as a moment of opportunity to align, improve, and grow their business. Those priorities, done well, will provide tremendous possibilities to gain marketshare and enhance stakeholder confidence in your business and your brand.

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John Nishimoto is creative director and practice leader for brand development at Sequel, a branding and marketing consultancy based in New York. An executive with a wealth of branding experience, he is responsible for turning client objectives into strong platforms and strategies for creative execution.

As we’re all aware, the digital age has given us the ability to reach an enormous audience quickly and more frequently. Through RSS feeds, Twitter, and the older standbys of e-mail and Web sites, a world’s worth of consumers has become a viable, and fairly instantaneous, target. But while these digital devices have made it far easier to communicate, they fail in one critical respect. They have not made it any easier to decide what to say, or how to say it clearly. Another way to put it: More brands and more people are mumbling their messages in more ways than ever — but mumbling more or mumbling louder is no way to get noticed.

Let me shrink this dynamic down to a more personal level for a moment. Imagine this: You’re at a cocktail party. You fall into conversation with someone who asks you what your company does — why it’s different from your competitors. Quick now: Do you have a crisp, ready reply? Here’s another question: How many of your colleagues would have one? If the answers are “no” and “not many,” listen up: Before you can communicate on a mass level, you need to be clear on an individual basis.

Hopefully, these truths are self-evident. Your company’s productivity and effectiveness depend on a common understanding of goals, customers, capabilities and responsibilities. That’s been the case for a long time. What’s become more critical, in this age of competing messages, is the mandate to develop and communicate a clear, differentiated brand narrative — the “brand story” that defines exactly what your company stands for.

What complicates the issue is that the “story” cannot be a pure marketing effort. It must paint a clear vision of where the company is headed, based on true intent, and be synchronized with actual company strategy. All too often, the marketing team takes the rap for poor execution when in fact the company proper has failed to take the time to do the critical thinking, get everyone to understand it — or both.

A well-crafted and synchronized story can transform motion into progress. One of the most obvious symptoms of dysfunction is an organization that just spins its wheels. Everyone is working hard, but the brand is going nowhere. This sort of problem happens all too easily. Usually, the culture is misaligned, with employees working furiously to solve isolated problems at the expense of a larger, common goal. A clear brand narrative is essential to solving this problem. It spells out what the company is trying to achieve and articulates the values and behaviors that support the brand.

Here’s an example of what I’m talking about. Five years ago I joined a company called Computer Associates. It was a proud company but a troubled one, too. Both internally and externally, people were confused about what the company simply was. CA needed a brand story, and after a while we came up with one. We looked at the biggest headache IT managers faced: the challenge of managing IT environments that had grown extraordinarily complex. So from that point on, we decided that our aim would be to tame that environment, to unify and simplify IT management. That became our story. And it then enabled employees to make decisions that moved the brand forward.

Perhaps, in the past, a company might have been able to manage without this kind of clarity of purpose, but that’s impossible now. Customers are hearing about your brand from many different sources. Analysts, competitors, media, bloggers — all have plenty to say. Obviously, you can’t control the conversation, but a crisp, clear brand story, told by you, can shape that buzz and influence it. Let’s not forget that your own people are, via social networks, participating in all this chatter, too. They’re talking up the company. It’s critical that they say the right things and say them consistently. Once they do, all that other mumbling the consumers hear won’t be as loud or as clear as the one message that truly matters — your own.

I think not.

For CMOs who take the initiative, these pressures create opportunities. So why not seize these opportunities and turn them to your advantage? There are, in fact, five steps you can take to deliver more value and reshape perception — to gain the respect that your group, and the marketing profession in general, deserve.

ONE: Offer fresh perspective.

CMOs have two distinct advantages over other functional executives. First, they’re hard-wired to see the big picture when others can’t (see A Company and Its CMO: Creating a Marriage That Lasts, Korn Ferry, 2008). Among other traits: They tolerate ambiguity, have no problem thinking outside the box, are able to process large volumes of data and balance long-term strategy with short-term goals. They also tend to be personable, approachable and highly persuasive, which means they can offer convincing long- and short-term market perspective for C-suite peers. What’s more, CMOs have a unique position within the organizational structure. Literally no one understands customers better, or has a clearer vision of how product development, marketing and sales must intersect. Because of this, a CMO can answer questions nobody else can, e.g.:

• Are we meeting the needs of our customers?

• Are we calling on the “right” customers?

• Is our value clearly articulated and differentiated from competitors?

• Are our development efforts focused on issues customers care about most?

If you can answer questions like these, your views will carry more weight. Others in the C-suite will come to you, and your personal brand will rise.

TWO: Clearly quantify marketing’s impact — and challenges.

Marketing is a visible group and, like most organizations, has a mix of things that work well, things that work less well, and things that don’t really work at all. As the marketing leader, your best policy is to provide complete transparency, about both positive and negative aspects of marketing initiatives, using terminology and metrics that are both meaningful and easy to grasp by others in the C-suite. The marketing trade press is full of advice on how to do this, as well as warnings about what measures to avoid. (ROI, for example, is problematic, while ROO — return on objective — is much more easily managed.) By developing a dashboard of metrics that tie to the company’s key objectives — e.g., growth — that is clear, honest and substantive, you will gain respect among your peers as a determined, serious C-suite player.

THREE: Foster alignment across the enterprise.

Marketing also has a unique ability to get people on the same page, something that is crucial to the whole company. Think of each person in the company as a vector, a force capable of affecting outcomes. If all vectors are going in the same direction, then strengths become additive. But if vectors are even slightly out of synch, productivity suffers and effectiveness declines. As a CMO, you can help eliminate silos and build greater alignment. You can ensure that everyone understands customers, knows what the competition is up to, and can envision how to work together to innovate and leverage new opportunities. Meld this understanding into a company-wide mantra, and it’s not hard to see the impact you’ll have: developers focused on real customer needs; products launched and promoted with compelling messages; and a sales team focused on the right customers, armed with the right sales tools.

FOUR: Embrace and drive positive change.

In business, change is inevitable, but for many people it is also one of the hardest things to embrace and leverage. As a CMO, you can use this tendency to your advantage. As a visionary CMO, you are likely to have the desired state clearly in mind — and a better ability than most to vividly paint that future state and its advantages. You can also engage your team to help others bridge the emotional gap between present and future. While change for the sake of change can be stressful, change that addresses where customers are going has a much more positive context. As the executive who understands customers best, a CMO is in position to explain that context and help everyone in the organization move in the right direction.

FIVE: Get an ally with an outside view.

While many executives can confide in their peers, few are as alone (or under more stress) than the executive in charge of marketing. For this reason, successful CMOs often seek outside advisors, people who have been in their shoes before, know how to deal with a changing environment, and are savvy about political issues that arise in dealing with other functional executives. An experienced advisor in your corner, someone with whom you develop close working ties, can offer perspective, collaborate on strategy, and serve as a sounding board on a wide range of issues. If you have an advisor, leverage that relationship to your best advantage. If you don’t have one, consider engaging someone who can serve you in that role.

Donald Friedman is principal and thought leader at Sequel. He has been a CMO and senior executive at some of America’s best-known companies, including, most recently, CA Technologies, and IBM.

According to Towers Perrin’s Don Lowman and Julie Gebauer (two experts on the subject who’ve published an in-depth study and subsequent book), engaged employees are, to put it simply, more valuable employees. They see problems and offer solutions. They take ownership of change and help bring it about. They happily seek out challenges (and in fact dislike not having them). Fully engaged employees also help colleagues and customers selflessly — and they speak highly of the company everywhere they go.

This last aspect is key, because engaged employees are marketing assets — the most cost-effective agents of viral marketing money can buy. From the golf course to the dinner party to the in-flight conversation, they are constantly spreading the good word — about the work they do, the people they work for, and the products and services they make and sell. Even more important, engaged employees embrace, live and breathe the brand, delivering on the company’s value proposition, increasing customer satisfaction, creating positive marketplace buzz, and creating a real competitive edge.

What does engagement involve? There are a number of obvious factors, including good pay, good working relationships, educational support and advancement opportunities. But other factors, equally critical, involve an employee’s emotional and intellectual engagement, including:

• Clarity about the company’s vision
• An understanding of how one’s work fits in
• Frequent and honest communications from management
• Feedback opportunities and input on decisions; and
• Pride in the company’s reputation, not only as a business, but as a corporate citizen.

Your internal brand, in others words, must be nurtured as much as your outside brand, and policies (and platforms) need to be developed and leveraged to increase employee involvement. It’s what ensures that people understand the company’s direction, strategy and objectives. It’s what builds a sense of shared identity, fosters enthusiasm and collaboration, and ensures that the best ideas (and practices) flow across your organization, instead of remaining siloed within individual divisions, departments or offices.

Achieving engagement takes money, of course, but that investment is relatively small, certainly when compared with the ROI, which the Towers Perrin study makes clear. The study, involving 40 global companies, finds a strong correlation between engagement and results, including substantially higher operating margins, net profits and earnings per share. It also shows a correlation between employee engagement and employee retention — that is, a willingness to stick with the company, even when other good offers come in.

Of course, in the current job market, that’s something you may not be worried about. But when job opportunities grow, you’ll be glad your employees are engaged and on your side.

Wendy Blattner is a Sequel principal responsible for marketing and communications strategy as well as client relationships.

In light of current economic doldrums, marketers are forced to find more innovative ways to develop or refine their brand messages and visual identity. Only those initiatives generating quantifiable business value are given the green light. Marketing campaigns tied to new customer acquisitions, or net new sales, are more apt to get high priority in today’s environment versus brand- or image-building campaigns that are designed to give audiences a momentary case of the “warm and fuzzies.”

This has proven challenging for brand managers and marketers, who hold fast to the belief that every communication is an opportunity to build — or detract from — your brand. So how are some doing it?

Today, we’re helping clients to use a wide range of hidden opportunities to renew the brand so that it remains in synch with the evolving customer mindset. In dong this, we’ve identified some high-level steps you might consider to seize these “backdoor” or “bottom-up” opportunities and get more branding bang for the buck.

1. Apply “brand thinking” to traditionally nonbranding projects: For example, use a corporate website refresh or a new capability launch to ask big-picture branding questions, among them: What do we stand for today? How has our customer’s mindset changed in the current economy? How do we see our business or industry changing tomorrow? These questions create a strategic brand-related dialog, and this creates opportunities to evolve the brand through a range of tactical projects.

2. Pay constant attention to delivering on the brand promise: No matter how you promote your company, make sure you can deliver on your claims and promises. A brand that says what it means and does what it says builds credibility and customer loyalty, and boosts the brand. A brand that does only one of them well, on the other hand, translates into lost credibility and damage to the business.

3. Use one-off campaigns and web projects to evolve and update visual brand styles: Changing times often require evolving your brand perspective, and tactical projects give you a handy opportunity to introduce them. To ensure continuity, of course, make sure the new attitude bears some connection to the past. At the same time, ensure that new styles are different enough to be noticed and have the breadth to accommodate expanded branding and promotional campaigns going forward.

Remember, the trick these days is getting the most possible value from both agency partners and internal marketing resources. By embedding strategic branding methodologies and objectives into results-driven, tactical marketing initiatives, you have the opportunity to do just that.

John Nishimoto is creative director and leader of Sequel’s brand development practice.

Here’s what you need to ask:

Reputation

Questions: What are customers, analysts, employees and others saying about you in the outside world? How are constituencies rating you — as a source, partner, employer, corporate citizen? Especially today, what is the buzz, online and across social media? Because one thing is clear: Your company needs to have a handle on the chatter.

Insight: Remember, it doesn’t matter what you think. What counts is what everyone else thinks. And these days, your brand’s reputation can turn, literally, in a day. To manage perception, you need to keep abreast of what’s being said about your company — especially in a world where opinion can hinge on the latest tweet, blog post, or Facebook chat.

Action: If you don’t have a clear sense of market sentiment, get it ASAP. Begin with research (surveys and audits) for a clear sense of what stakeholders say. Also, continue to monitor talk across social networks and industry media. You may not be able to control the conversation, but you can’t join it if you don’t know what it is.

Business-to-Brand Alignment

Questions: Are you doing business in a way that supports your brand promise? Would your stakeholders agree that, as a company, you “say what you mean, and do what you say”?

Insight: A brand is much more than a logo and a catchy phrase on a homepage or truck. In the final analysis, experience is the brand, and you must be able to deliver the experience. This is why it’s essential that your culture, policies and business practices support the brand — in short, that they’re brand-aligned. This includes everything — from the design, features and benefits of your products, to the functionality of your website, to the way you treat customers when they call on the phone.

Action: Audit your organization to see how brand-aligned you are — that is, how your culture, policies, procedures and behaviors are (or fail to deliver) on your brand’s value proposition. The research needn’t be complex: It may consist of customer and employee surveys that reveal the disconnects. And it can lead to internal workshops that begin the process of real alignment. Beyond this, surveys and workshops may reveal why past marketing and branding initiatives just didn’t stick — and give you a basis for making changes that will do a better job of building the brand.

Continuity/Consistency

Questions: How consistent is your brand expression from touchpoint to touchpoint? Across various lines of business? Across regions? Inside and outside?

Insight: Strong brands deliver a consistent experience wherever they’re encountered — in large part because communications across all touchpoints are on the same page. Conversely, brand identity and messages are undermined by two common problems: (1) Lack of shared ownership and understanding among those who speak for your company; and (2) lack of dialog before, during and after the launch of a rebranding effort.

Action: To gauge consistency, try an exercise we call “Connect Four.” Take four major communications — say, your homepage, a brochure, a sales presentation, and your latest web campaign. Are messaging and design aligned and coordinated, or does it seem as if they come from four different companies? If the latter, look at all branding and communications from the outside in. See what customers see as they interact with your company across all the different touchpoints. This larger perspective will help you see how touchpoints fit together and can be better aligned — and inform the development of guidelines and templates that will guarantee the consistency you’re looking for.

Engagement

Questions: Are you striving to work with customers to solidify relationships, increasing engagement and maximizing up-selling and cross-selling opportunities?

Insight: In the new economy, customers are careful and buyer skepticism is high. So you have to make sure your value is clear — and, if anything, add more value. Gone, possibly forever, are the days of “build it and they will come.” These days, the question is: “What have you done for me lately?”

Action: Look for opportunities to deliver value above and beyond your products or services. For example, increase engagement by offering thought leadership content on your website or providing access to tips and insights that will make customers’ lives better. Begin by seeing how the service you provide maps to what customers actually care about. Then reinforce your relevance to meet immediate and unmet needs.

Remember, in the new economy, customers are tough and their loyalty must be earned. Knowing where you stand, and acting on that knowledge, is more important than ever.

John Nishimoto is a creative director at Sequel who has directed branding programs for many Fortune 1000 clients. This article was originally published In the B2B magazine Corp!.

It seems that marketers are finally starting to realize that delivering valuable, relevant content to consumers has some merit. In truth, this has been going on for years, and we’re surprised that there continues to be a debate about it.

Beyond welcoming content from your brand, today’s consumer expects it — whether it comes in the form of how-to guides and videos, a consumer electronics video blog, or an iPhone app that helps you remove stains.

This shift is something that we’ve been talking about at Sequel for a long time. There’s a saying we have when speaking with new clients: “You’re now in the content business.”

It’s interesting to see almost the reverse happening in the world of publishing. As titles continue to implode, magazine and newspaper brands have realized (some too late) that their brand needs to stand for something more in the digital world than just content. To remain relevant, even to survive, publishing brands now need to create digital products and services that deliver on their service mission. Put another way: They need to deliver more value around their content.

While there’s a realization in both camps mentioned here of the landscape of changing expectations and opportunities, we at Sequel understand the challenges that our clients are facing there: culture, infrastructure, and monetization. Product and service companies are not by nature content publishers. And content publishers are not by nature product and service developers.

In just a few short years, defining brand value has radically dimensionalized. Today the journey between value proposition and value must be instantaneous.

David DeCheser is a creative director at Sequel, responsible for leading the firm’s interactive engagements.

Life has a way of closely reflecting business, and vice versa. Lately, I’ve been thinking that many of our clients — especially rising mid-cap companies — must experience growth much like a child’s coming of age. Not yet big but getting there, they are brimming with possibilities. And they’re not just building assets; they are creating excitement and buzz. The excitement draws interest and, over time, the number of constituents grows. These constituents are a bit like relatives — as family, they want to see what the company becomes.

To the investment community, a mid-cap business may become a portfolio mainstay — still small enough to offer big opportunities but large enough to balance risk. As such, it needs to communicate its value to a considerable audience, one that demands to know about the company and its markets, its model and strategy, and what its leadership thinks.

Customers of fast-growing companies also tend to have lots of questions — particularly when the company in question is on an acquisition spree. Old customers need to know that the brands they’ve trusted still stand for something lasting. New customers must be assured about new owners or products, and given reason to come aboard. Rapid growth may also entail a lot of new partners, sometimes worldwide. To these allies, the company’s brand must be clear, well communicated and backed by action. This is key to building trust — to increasing confidence that partnership is a good and profitable idea.

Vital to outsiders, the brand is just as critical to those on the inside, including thousands of employees, both long-standing and added through various acquisitions. Internal brand-building and employee engagement may seem pursuits for large companies, but mid-cap companies ignore these activities at their own peril. As my colleague Wendy Blattner recently wrote, engaged employees are strategic assets. Management may set direction, but engaged employees do the rest, from driving earnings and spurring innovation to building reputation wherever they go.

A fast-growing mid-cap, in other words, soon finds itself squarely on the radar. This means that brand-building and brand maintenance now become a priority.

Brett Gerstenblatt is a principal of Sequel responsible for business and creative strategy.