What’s in a Name?
Branding is a public relations technique designed to lure customers with a promise of reliability, says Peter Sealey, adjunct professor of marketing at the University of California at Berkeley. The promise of the name on the famously distinctive red-and-white can is that every Coke inside will taste the same. Branding also expands a customer’s associations with a product. When automakers brand their product, they’re hoping to sell fun, sex and adventure, along with their cars. Similarly, if your end users’ only image of your IS staff is as the people to call when their printer isn’t working, then they’re not thinking of you to help solve strategic business problems.
The challenge in branding an IS department is that there’s nothing physical to sell, says Bruce I. Newman, professor of marketing at DePaul University in Chicago. Without something tangible, like Coke, the emotional ties you build with internal customers take on added importance. That sounds touchy-feely, but getting your fellow executives to trust you should be the top priority in any CIO’s PR plans, Newman says.
Branding involves more than naming your department and making T-shirts. You must craft a message that isn’t gimmicky. CIOs have to lead the way, says Rubin. "[The CIO has] to be sure that the communication from IS sends the right message."
How to Build an I.S. Brand
Dolan got the idea to create Cablevision’s Corporate IS brand from one of his project managers, John Blanco, who had worked on a multimillion-dollar upgrade of the company’s financial systems. Blanco, now the vice president of Corporate IS in the Business Alliance and Strategic Communications (BASC) division, had been frustrated that the people working on the project didn’t appreciate its importance to the company. So Blanco branded the group, calling it Meta4, because the four-member team represented different areas of IS and the business side coming together to become "something greater than themselves," he explains. He made T-shirts with the slogan "One heart, one mind, one agenda" and created a special icon for users’ desktops that included the project’s brand name, the Compass Initiative.
Dolan, who felt that he was "dropping the communication ball" and that that was a large contributor to the company’s lack of confidence in IS, thought Blanco’s strategy could succeed companywide. So Dolan asked him to head a team that would be responsible for all communication from Corporate IS to the business units, and for branding all of Corporate IS’s major projects. In this manner, BASC was born.
