Build lasting connections with customers to prosper

EXPERT ADVICE: Attendees take notes during the Providence Business News summit on "Growing and Protecting Your Brand" Feb. 25 at the Crowne Plaza Providence-Warwick. / PBN PHOTO/RUPERT WHITELEY
EXPERT ADVICE: Attendees take notes during the Providence Business News summit on "Growing and Protecting Your Brand" Feb. 25 at the Crowne Plaza Providence-Warwick. / PBN PHOTO/RUPERT WHITELEY

Growing a company’s brand requires making a lasting connection with customers beyond just the usefulness of a single product or service, according to the four panelists at the Providence Business News summit “Growing and Protecting Your Brand,” held at the Crowne Plaza Providence-Warwick on Feb. 25.

“Your company’s mission, its values, its promise to the world and your employees, it’s raison d’etre, its reason for being, that’s your brand,” said Chris Ciunci, founder and managing partner at TribalVision, a Warwick-based marketing department for hire. “If someone sees it, your name or product on a billboard, what emotional reaction do they have? A brand goes far beyond logo or tag line; it goes to your culture and that’s how you differentiate yourself in the marketplace.”

The summit covered a wide range of topics, including creating impactful marketing plans, what marketing initiatives provide the highest growth of return, what intellectual property is and how to use it to create powerful brands, and strategies to counteract the influx of foreign counterfeit products.

Making a brand personal with the consumer is essential, said panelist Jane Ritson-Parsons, group executive in the global marketing organization of one of Rhode Island’s and the world’s best-known brands: Hasbro Inc. in Pawtucket.

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“Does your brand have a purpose, a relationship, what part of the consumer world is that brand going to be touching?” she asked. “What journey is the consumer going on with you as they touch that brand?”

Also on the panel was Daniel Holmander, chair of the Intellectual Property Services Group at Providence-based Adler Pollock & Sheehan P.C., and Tim Hebert, CEO and president of Warwick-based Atrion.

Holmander told the 200 attendees that protecting a brand – whether through trademarks, copyrights or patents – required a purposeful evaluation of a company’s assets and that the process should start as soon as possible.

“A lot of brands are being built today,” he said. “And over time, the brand grows. Those early decisions you make are going to reap benefits down the line.”

Holmander stressed “consistent, continuous branding” which “makes it easy from a protection standpoint.

“If you change the trademark and branding constantly, it makes it difficult from a marketing standpoint and enforcing it,” he said.

Hebert spoke to one of a company’s most important brand managers – its employees. They need to be both participants and believers in a company’s culture, reinforcing it both inside and outside its office walls.

“What are our anchors? We have amazing people who clients trust, and our wisdom and expertise of over 30 years,” Hebert said of a company that in that time grew in revenue from $27 million to $150 million. “How do you go to a company that doesn’t know you and wants to know why you’re different from 15 others? We have to prove we have amazing people.”

And that starts at the human resources level of a company, Ciunci said.

“They have to be smart marketers,” he said. “We’ve helped organizations recruit top talent and there are 20 different ways to do that, but once you’re there, what are you doing to make sure you’re communicating with your teams? We’re finding ourselves marketing with HR teams as much as any other in a company, we’re focusing strongly on this. The way you differentiate yourself is with your people. You attract and retain the best people.”

“Brands and people are the two most important assets,” added Ritson-Parsons. “We spend a lot of time training our people to value the brands. Our employees are also our customers, so we want that same authentic relationship with the brand at work and home.”

The panel also discussed the vast reach and immediate impact of social media as a way of branding and marketing. Hebert said he was in New Orleans recently trying to figure out at which of two side-by-side restaurants to eat. He did a Yelp search and found negative reviews for both.

“One responded, the chef and GM apologized for the customers’ experience,” Hebert said. “The other said nothing. We’re not the only ones talking about our brands. You have to monitor and protect your brand by responding.”

At Hasbro, where Ritson-Parsons said the phones are answered “by humans, we want you to talk to a person,” everyone reads reviews, including executive teams.

“If you’re not listening” to consumers, she said, “you’re not managing your brand.”

She showed a slide of social media’s impact at Hasbro: It had 846 million minutes watched on YouTube last year, and logs 70,000 conversations a day on Facebook, Instagram and others.

“The world’s changed over the past five years,” Hebert said. “Today, you can target who to talk to, you have broad messaging of this billboard. You need to make sure the right message goes to the right level.” •

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