July 12, 2022: J.T. O’Donnell’s CAREER AMA (Ask Me Anything)
Come get your career and job search questions answered by our founder & CEO J.T. O'Donnell.
Hosted by: J.T. O'Donnell
Cost of Event: FREE
Sign up for this live event today!
July 13, 2022: How To Navigate LinkedIn Effectively
LinkedIn is not the easiest social media platform to navigate. If you wish you could make better use of this essential career tool, sign up for this event today!
What You'll Learn:
- The background and importance of LinkedIn
- How to get started with LinkedIn
- How to navigate the different areas of the platform
- Tips on how to get noticed on LinkedIn
Hosted by: J.T. O'Donnell & Christina Burgio
Cost of Event: $5.00/ticket
Buy your ticket for this live event today!
July 15, 2022: Networking Masters
Join us for Networking Masters (think Toastmasters but for networking)! During this interactive group session, you'll exercise your networking and presenting skills so you can be a more confident connector!
Hosted by: J.T. O'Donnell or Christina Burgio
Cost of Event: FREE
Sign up for this live event today!
July 19, 2022: CAREER AMA (Ask Me Anything)
Come get your career and job search questions answered by our team.
Hosted by: Christina Burgio
Cost of Event: FREE
Sign up for this live event today!
July 20, 2022: How To Get A Promotion (And A Raise)
It can be tough getting that promotion at work, especially when you're not sure how to show you deserve one. If you want to get a promotion (and a raise!), attend this live event and learn how to make the case for a higher job title and salary.
What You'll Learn:
- Indicate that you’re ready to take your career to the next level
- Tips on how to position yourself for a promotion or raise
- Demonstrate your unique value and advice on how to have this conversation with your manager
Hosted by: J.T. O'Donnell & Christina Burgio
Cost of Event: $5.00/ticket
Buy your ticket for this live event today!
July 22, 2022: Networking Masters
Join us for Networking Masters (think Toastmasters but for networking)! During this interactive group session, you'll exercise your networking and presenting skills so you can be a more confident connector!
Hosted by: J.T. O'Donnell or Christina Burgio
Cost of Event: FREE
Sign up for this live event today!
July 26, 2022: J.T. O’Donnell’s CAREER AMA (Ask Me Anything)
Come get your career and job search questions answered by our founder & CEO J.T. O'Donnell.
Hosted by: J.T. O'Donnell
Cost of Event: FREE
Sign up for this live event today!
July 27, 2022: How To Make A Career Change When You've Been Laid Off
Not sure if it's time to change careers, or how to make a career change when you ARE ready? Sign up for this live event to learn exactly how to make a career change when you've been laid off.
What You'll Learn:
- Determine if a career change is the right move for you
- Identify a career path that aligns with your passions
- Develop an effective job search strategy that serves you
Hosted by: J.T. O'Donnell & Christina Burgio
Cost of Event: $5.00/ticket
Buy your ticket for this live event today!
July 29, 2022: Networking Masters
Join us for Networking Masters (think Toastmasters but for networking)! During this interactive group session, you'll exercise your networking and presenting skills so you can be a more confident connector!
Hosted by: J.T. O'Donnell or Christina Burgio
Cost of Event: FREE
Sign up for this live event today!
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I have seen organizations stand up tactical teams before a data strategy was defined, with the identified pain points and opportunities. The results were mixed at best. Data strategy should drive all subsequent steps.
Standing Up The Data Governance Committee
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To get organizational buy-in to treat data as a strategic organizational asset and value driver, a committee should be formed to guide the data governance tactical program(s), including the day-to-day management of data. It is vital to obtain C-level top management support to ensure that the program achieves the proper funding and enterprise support levels.
The C-level executives sitting on this data governance committee should include functional and user base leaders: the chief data officer (or the chief data analytics officer), chief risk officer, chief financial officer, and depending on the size of the firm, the chief operating officer, and the CEO. Leaders from heavy data user groups, such as marketing, digital, and operations, should also be part of this group. While this group will tackle enterprise issues, sub-committees can be formed to address specific business line needs. Committee participants should be engaged, data literate, contribute best practices, and challenge the team to uplift and mature capabilities.
Designing The Data Management Framework
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Once the committee is set, we can progress governance by setting up a data management framework. This playbook defines the people, processes, and technologies related to governing data.
So far, so good—most organizations get to this point…but ignore the overall business case. A business case spells out the success metrics and ROI of investing in and governing data.
Ok, now to set up the framework and the function:
- Data management is a living, breathing framework, not a one-off project focusing only on one aspect, such as regulatory compliance. I've seen organizations get so focused on one part of data management that they lose the forest for the trees and never get to the vision laid out in their data strategy. This often keeps data management and data governance in the organization's basement only to meet specific near-term needs. If we don't think about data holistically and the broader use cases, leadership will eventually ask about unfunded data that can be monetized. This conundrum boomerangs on the CDO, who is then faulted for not taking a broader view of data when they were only funded for a limited scope.
- Formulating the data management framework: The first step after completing the data strategy, which requires business input, is to lay out a policy document that spells out how and who will govern data. You can then lay out the elements of the data management framework. Right now, many firms have an enterprise data management framework, but it may have been drawn up quickly with only one or two data domains, such as risk or finance.
The Elements Of An Exemplary Data Management Framework (In No Particular Order)
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- Restate the data strategy to codify it into the DNA of the organization.
- The guiding principles, policies, and standards for managing data in your organization. Every organization will have a different slant depending on the business model.
- Identify to whom and to what the framework applies.
- Ensure compliance with risk governance and set the policy for compliance and controls.
- Monitoring data (including its quality) throughout its lifecycle.
- Ensures consistent data definitions, standards, and policies.
- Secured and classified data by its risk level and the type of information—typically aligned to an information security policy.
- Data governance must align with privacy policies and regulations.
- Specifies the roles needed to govern data within a data management organization and businesspeople’s function through stewardship and ownership.
- Identify the need for data controls and enforcement policies.
- Provides for a data governance literacy program: includes standard definitions.
- Creates master data: the relationships between data elements and entities in the firm.
- Creates a metadata repository: data about data, the definition of a data element, and where it comes from.
- Creates reference data: detailed data about each data element. Values and attributes.
- Creates a data catalog: all data is documented in terms of what sources it comes from.
Once again, it is time for a sanity check: Are all of these elements tied back to an enterprise data strategy? What are your thoughts about data governance and management? What has been your experience? Let me know!
Next Post: Standing Up For Data Management And Data Governance Teams
Let’s review the five brand pillars and how to implement them within your organization.
Purpose
Brand purpose is "why" you exist. It's the reason for being beyond making a profit. A great brand purpose will always put the consumers first and manifest itself in everything it does.
Knowing the deeper "why" your company or brand exists provides the foundation on which to build everything else.
Simon Sinek, author of the book Start with Why, introduced the idea of defining brand purpose to a global audience in his 2009 TED talk.
"People don't buy what you do; they buy why you do it. The goal is not to do business with everybody who needs what you have. The goal is to do business with people who believe what you believe."—Simon Sinek, How Great Leaders Inspire Action.
Here are some key questions to ask yourself to get at the "why" when developing your brand purpose:
- Why does our company exist?
- What drives our brand?
- What is unique about our business? What is our secret sauce that no one else has?
- What problem are we trying to solve?
- Why would our ideal customer choose our product/service?
- What are we exceptional at?
- What inspires us day in, day out?
- What do we want our legacy to be?
- What are we most proud of as an organization?
- Where do we want to be a year from now? Five years? Ten years?
Brand purpose is critical in today's market as it shows your customers, employees, and competitors that you're bigger than just turning a profit.
Positioning
Brand positioning is the process of positioning your brand in the mind of your customers based on your brand purpose and values that gives you a competitive advantage.
What do you think of when you hear "search engine"? Did Google come to mind? This product is positioned to dominate its category. What about a company that provides "overnight shipping"? FedEx owns the transportation category even though other companies provide overnight shipping.
A well-developed and implemented brand position provides a sustainable competitive advantage, communicates value to customers, is a vehicle to help manage brand consistency, and impacts the bottom line.
Here are five steps to consider when creating your brand positioning.
- Evaluate Current Standing:Evaluate your current brand positioning. Is it working? Does it reach your target audience? Is it helping to achieve your business goals? If not, you may need to look at repositioning your brand.
- Research Your Competitors: You can't stand out from the crowd if you don't know what the crowd is doing. Conduct a competitive analysis to evaluate your competitor's brand position by looking at their social media feeds, company websites, marketing & advertising materials, and customer service. Look at who they're targeting, what their messaging is, their unique selling proposition, and their positioning strategies. For more information on how to gather competitive research, check out my article.
- Identify Your Target Audience: Understanding your target audience is critical as this information will define every strategy you execute. Your goal is to define your target audience into a simple statement: Our target market is (gender) aged (age range), who live in (place or type of place) and like to (activity). For more information on how to develop your target audience, check out my article.
- Identify Your Differentiators:Just like everyone is unique and different, so is your brand. It's your job to find those characteristics and differentiators that will make your brand stand out from the competitive crowd. List all the things that your competitors do well. List all of the things you do well. List what your customers want. Now start comparing your most unique angles against your audience's needs. Are there any needs that haven't been filled? Is there anything that you provide that your competitors can't easily copy or reproduce? Check out my article on how to develop your unique differentiators
- Craft Brand Positioning Statement: Here is a template to follow when crafting your brand positioning statement.
Personality
A brand personality can be defined as the set of human characteristics associated with your brand. It’s communicated through tone of voice, visuals, and even policies. They’re expressed as adjectives that convey how you want people to perceive your brand. For example, is your brand cheerful, funny, friendly, youthful, innovative, spirited, dependable, responsible, credible, sophisticated, rebellious, cunning, powerful, honest, and so on? Here is a list of 200+ adjectives to get you started.
Let’s look at an example: Coca-Cola is considered real and authentic while Pepsi tends to be young, spirited, and exciting, and Dr. Pepper is seen as nonconforming, unique, and fun. Source.
A brand can also be described by demographics (age, gender, social class, and race), lifestyle (activities, interests, and opinions), or human personality traits (extroversion, agreeableness, and dependability). Source.
There are three approaches on how to find your brand personality.
- Jennifer Aaker’s Dimensions of Brand Personality framework contains 15 traits organized into five factors (Sincerity, Excitement, Competence, Sophistication, and Ruggedness).
- Carl Jung’s Brand Archetypes Framework believes that archetypes are models of people, behaviors, or personalities, thus making them more recognizable and relatable to target audiences. Jung identified 12 archetypes. The idea is that any brand can relate to one of the 12 archetypes that help define the brand.
- There is the Combo Brand Archetypes & Brand Personality Framework. This model combines the Brand Archetypes and the Dimensions of Brand Personality frameworks mentioned above.
Perception
The first three brand pillars, purpose, positioning, and personality, are driven by the brand through targeting, messaging, and execution. The fourth brand pillar, perception, is owned by your customers. It’s how they view and experience your brand. Jeff Bezos famously said, “Your brand is what people say about you when you’re not in the room.”
When you’re starting your business, list out the traits and characteristics that you want your customers to associate your brand with. If you have an established brand and want information on how your brand is perceived, gather customer, employee, and/or vendor feedback:
- Online reviews/ratings
- Testimonials
- Social media listening
- Live chats
- Emails
- Customer service calls
- Research (polls, surveys, focus groups)
You can also gain further insights into your brand perceptions by asking customers, employees, and/or vendors questions through various research tools (i.e. polls, surveys, focus groups, etc.):
- How do you perceive our brand? How would you describe it?
- What do you perceive our value to be?
- What terms or adjectives would you use to describe our brand?
- What do you consider to be our brand strength?
- What problems or challenges does our brand solve?
- What do you think of our competitor’s products (list them)? Have you used them?
Your goal is to evaluate customers’ perceptions to see if you need to make changes to your brand strategy. It’s important to create a positive perception of your brand that aligns with your mission, vision, and purpose.
Promotion
Brand promotion is a way to inform, persuade, convince, and influence consumers by driving their decision-making process towards purchasing your brand.
A strong brand promotion strategy places your brand in the right place, at the right time, and in the right context for your customers and prospects.
The goal of brand promotion is to increase brand awareness in order to drive revenue and convert consumers to loyal customers, building long-term, lasting relationships.
To start identifying how to promote your brand, consider asking the following questions:
- What is your current brand awareness?
- How are you currently promoting your brand?
- Where do your customers expect to find you or your competitors?
- How are customers interacting with you online and offline?
- When do your customers need you?
- What kind of experience do you want your customers to have with your brand?
- How do you handle bad experiences?
- Who are your greatest brand ambassadors?
Final Thoughts
Brand pillars are the foundation of your brand. They help you define your brand for your internal and external customers, ensuring you capture your audience and convert them to brand loyalists. Start building your brand leadership today. You’ve got this!
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