No different when it comes to your health brands and customers. Your organization’s, product or service brand energy is directly proportional to that of your customers. Because your brand can only grow stronger if your customers do. It’s very much a symbiotic relationship.

In effect, customers are your brand’s “strategic brand partners.” You link your future to theirs, through the value that your brand delivers. The more they advance, the more you advance. Side note, this is why it’s so important to periodically take the pulse or your customers – their lives, how they view the category and your offerings, where and how you fit and how they feel about you.

Remember that your future’s are intertwined. Elevate your customers and you’ll elevate your brand. Ensure that your must do’s equal their needs. Your differentiators equal their wants. And that your true distinguishers equal their most important aspirations.

Our goal was to get about 25 cross-functional team members (across marketing, sales, finance, operations, innovation, customer service) on the same page about the importance of brand – and the sharpening of their brand – as an organizing principle for their organization.

The session consisted of a number of creative and participatory exercises designed to indirectly help define their brand vision, mission, values, value proposition and positioning. Importantly, the outcome of this work would also help the company prioritize its many growth opportunities.

There were a few key ideas that we discussed at the outset of the session that were pretty revealing for people (particularly those outside of marketing and sales) and got them charged up about the power of becoming a brand-led business. So I wanted to share those here.

1. What you sell is not what your customers are buying. Example of WiiFit.

2. While business is about what we do, brand is about how we do it. Example of Zappos.

3. Brand-building isn’t about a few things, it’s about everything. Example of Starbucks.

4. To transform your business, transform customers by being on their side and creating extraordinary value. Example of PatientsLikeMe.

We had a great session. The team was energized and excited about their future. A future that calls for creating new value for all audiences as a brand-led organization.

Westin Hotels and New Balance have formed a win-win global partnership to help guests overcome the hurdles of exercising on the road.

Beginning with ten Westin properties, guests have complimentary use of footwear, apparel and exercise program content. The program also includes “Wellness in Travel” tips on nutrition, inventive ways to combat jet lag and promote healthy living, as well as enhanced individual Westin property neighborhood running maps. The program is being rolled-out brand wide in 2011.

Here’s what we should appreciate about this program:

1. It’s different. It’s a first in the category and for customers, providing unique benefits that no other brand offers.

2. It surprises and delights guests. As in any relationship, these unexpected actions keep the spark alive (like DoubleTree Hotel chocolate chip cookies,  just healthier).

3. It’s important. This effort makes guests lives better. It offers something useful and adds value beyond mere communication (like Mayo Clinic meditation videos).

4. It lets people participate in the brands in entirely new ways (like Nike+iPod).

5. It’s sticky. Just like your personal fitness regimen and record at your health club, the same record can now be attached to your Westin guest profile wherever you travel across the globe.

6. It builds business.  Beyond image building, this wellness initiative drives incremental business for both Westin and New Balance.

7. The brand fit is strong. It reinforces the shared values of these leader hospitality and fitness brands.  The new fitness offering joins a host of wellness initiatives already introduced by Westin. Likewise, the partnership is part of an ongoing effort by New Balance to forge innovative partnerships with active lifestyle and fashion brands that share a similar customer base.

8. It challenges expectations. Raising the bar on (and redefining) the traditional  hotel experience.

Which brand(s) could you create a partnership with to create new game-changing value like Westin and New Balance?

You can read the full article here.

Do you need to build more relationship and financial value back to your health brand in 2011? Have the past couple of years sapped some of your brand strength?

Start with this 10-point brand checklist for reexamining and refreshing your brand:

1. Customers. Step back to understand what they really want, and whether you’re still feeding their desires and enticing their participation.
2. Brand Idea. Do you need to refine the big idea that defines you, helps you stand out from the crowd and really matters to customers (both inside and outside the organization).
3. Brand-Business Alignment. Is your business thinking and acting differently based on #2.
4. Brand Positioning. Is it focused, compelling and distinguishing, and grounded in #1 and #2.
5. Experience. Are you delivering an “on-brand” experience (pre-during-post use) that reflects your brand story.
6. Engaged Employees. Do they understand how they can contribute to building the brand, and do they possess the motivation and tools to do so.
7. Marketing. Does your marketing reflect this positioning through every possible medium you have at your organization’s disposal.
8. Design Execution. It needs to be brilliant. Make sure you have guidelines in place to drive brand expression.
9. Creating New Value. How can you create more value for your customers — identity value, social value, time value, utility value, etc.
10. Shareholders. Are you using the power of your brand to build shareholder confidence and drive behavior.

Make 2011 the year that you unleash the full power of your brand (and your customers).

Creativity is the most important leadership quality. Leaders expect to make deeper business model changes to realize their strategies. To succeed, they take more calculated risks, encourage others to drop outdated approaches, invite disruptive innovation, find new ideas, and keep innovating in how they lead and communicate.

The most successful organizations co-create products and services with customers, and integrate customers into core processes. Globalization, combined with dramatic increases in the availability of information, has exponentially expanded customers’ options. CEOs said that ongoing engagement and co-creation with customers produce differentiation. They consider the information explosion to be their greatest opportunity in developing deep customer insights, and have made customer intimacy their number-one priority.

Recommendations (partial list from study)

a. Creativity

Reach beyond silos. Pull creative elements of your organization out of compartments and integrate them into the mainstream. Proactively exchange knowledge and cooperate with internal and external stakeholders, eliminating every communication barrier to improve your ability to handle the unknown.

Exemplify breakthrough thinking. Practice and encourage experimentation at all levels of the business. Forge ahead with rule-breaking innovation that sets your organization apart from the crowd. Study and question what others do — scour technology and customer trends. Build scenarios to plan responses to a range of possible futures.

Act despite uncertainty. Fight the natural urge to wait for clarity and stability; taking calculated risks — while others hesitate — can pay off. Find a creative way to turn complexity into an advantage. Rely on deeply felt values and a well-defined vision to provide the confidence and conviction to exploit narrow windows of opportunity.

Borrow from other industries’ successes. Learn from and be inspired by creative achievements from outside your industry. Regularly discuss case examples from other industries in your management team meetings. Stay abreast of customer and technology trends that are transforming other sectors and consider how you could apply them.

Use a wide range of communication approaches. Supplement top-down organizational communication with less formal, more innovative channels. Accept that for customers and employees alike, blogs, Internet presence, instant messaging and social networking are more credible — and often faster — than traditional top-down communication.

b. Customer Value/Co-Creation

Establish an unprecedented level of focus. Starting with the CEO, every employee in the organization must be hyper-focused on customers. Make customer value your number one value. Ensure every employee is responsible for and assessed annually on a customer satisfaction or customer value metric.

Heighten customer exposure. Make it easy for customers to connect with the right person in your organization. Every employee must have the information needed to engage with customers appropriately and effectively. All employees must understand the link between the work they do and the value it brings to customers.

Measure what customers value. Genuinely know what motivates current and potential customers to choose your product or service. Surpass today’s standards to proactively verify that you are providing what customers want and delivering it in ways that matter to them. Understand your customers’ business goals and help them succeed.

Make customers part of your team. Enhance customer relationships by finding new ways to communicate, new roles they can play, new questions to ask them, new ways you can listen, new ways to evaluate their feedback and leverage what you learn. Make — and deliver on — customer commitments.

Solicit customer wants. Engender loyalty by directly involving customers in defining emerging needs. Constantly tune offerings to their rapidly changing preferences. Make sure you are providing what customers want tomorrow, instead of what they wanted yesterday.

Co-innovate and interact with customers in new ways. Collaborate across different channels to create new products and services. Maintain a running dialogue that includes face-to-face and social networking interaction. Involve customers before and beyond the sale, including care and service.

The full study can be found here.

Kimberly-Clark is working with their core customer, and the fastest-growing sector of entrepreneurs – women – by investing in their incubating innovation ideas.

Twelve entrepreneurs, chosen from 400 submissions, now make up the first class of Huggies “MomInspired” grant recipients, receiving $15,000 each to fund their “unique baby or childcare product ideas that address unmet parenting needs and make life easier for moms and dads.”

According to Steve Paljieg, Senior Director, Corporate Innovation for KC "our most important consumer is mom, and we felt the launch of Huggies MomInspired delivered on the brand's mission of providing simple solutions to help parents enjoy each and every day (beyond diapers or hygiene) and also encourage the business success of moms by giving them access to educational and financial resources."

Here why this program creates new value for both brand and customer:

– it delivers on the brand mission
– helps create a bigger brand idea (and potentially new revenue streams) beyond diapers and hygiene
– creates a more meaningful kind of brand-customer relationship beyond Huggies' core business
– connects women (and men) together, through Huggies, around their most important agendas
– engages and ignites pride on the part of those who work on the Huggies brand
– generates great PR and positive word-of-mouth for Huggies and KC; and
– ultimately builds loyalty and (presumedly) more Huggies sales

The only real sustainable goal for your business is to enrich your customers lives, not to sell them more x or y. But if you don’t have any real context for understanding their lives, how can you really do this?

The impetus for this post is a new Trajectory client. The Brand Manager responsible for the portfolio of brands we were just assigned had spent three days in an important market at the local fair. Not just any fair, but a “hugely” important annual event drawing a crowd of thousands.

For three days, ten hours a day, he spoke with (actually mostly listened to) prospective and current customers. The topic of conversation wasn’t so much about his products. Rather, the focus was on these people lives – their challenges and their priorities. He said he heard things he never heard before. Learned how they make their decisions. Learned how these products fit into their lives or better could in the future.

This was a good lesson for why you shouldn’t outsource your eyes. There’s simply no substitute for the clarity that comes from seeing things yourself, and for the insights gained from face-to-face conversation. In the end, it’s the only way you can really create superior value for your health brand customers.

Blogging gives you that ability. The ability for a searcher to enter a keyword phrase, land on your post (written by a real person), which can lead to dialog, and a connection beyond what other social vehicles can provide.

Here are seven specific benefits of your blog to your healthcare organization:

1. Creating Attraction (starting with search)
2. Creating Value For Your Audiences (on their terms)
3. Building Trust (sorely lacking yet vital to building strong healthcare brands)
4. Creating and Strengthening Brand Relationships (between you and your audiences)
5. Energizing Employees (which leads to happier customers)
6. Building Transparency (a highly sought after characteristic)
7. Creating Separation Vs. Others (community building, access to customers, volume and revenue)

Are there other benefits that you’d add to this list?

Brian wrote a post last week titled New Brand Glossary: update 4. It’s worth holding on to this glossary. Because it doesn’t resemble much of the current (old) thinking about brands and their holds on customers.

Here’s a snippet of his introduction:

Traditional brand glossaries usually assume a passive customer “audience” for brand messaging campaigns, where the brand aspires to be a “belief system” that serves the company’s interests. In this view, brands aim to be timeless (static) “icons” worshiped by “consumers,” who are positioned as little more than sheep with credit. Traditional brand glossaries are therefore largely glossaries of control. The brands they describe really don’t do much for customers—except to keep them in place.

In contrast, this is a glossary of value-based brands and of brand innovation. It contains concepts, terms and definitions for a new era of brands designed to foment new business by creating new customer opportunities. The essence of these brands is collaboration, not control. These brands create proactive new customers who leave old brands—and old companies—far behind.

How do you find most health brands stack up against these new definitions? How about most health brand marketing?

Value that is defined on your customers terms and reflects their agenda. Value that transcends your messaging and your one-way communication about your organization and your offerings.

Ask yourself these three questions:

1. Is your marketing really adding value to your customers lives?
2. Are you helping them do something they want to do, or solve something that helps them achieve more than they could on their own?
3. If you were your customer, would you find you indispensable?

Make your customer agenda your agenda. You’ll create greater value for both of you.