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Corporate Character: Interviewing Professor Gary Davies

russian dolls personalityIf your company were a person, who would it be? Are you seen as ruthless, and is that good or bad? What is your corporate level of machismo?

Such questions are often used as part of branding exercises. At Manchester Business School, Professor Gary Davies and his team have taken this further, and devised their own personality test for companies as a way of measuring corporate reputation.

Companies, like people, are multi-dimensional, and the Manchester Business School measure enables your company character to be assessed in 7 different dimensions.

Corporate Eye recently interviewed Professor Davies to talk about corporate reputation and about how companies should portray their corporate personality online, where—necessarily, at the moment—the range of senses that can be engaged is narrower than in an offline experience.

Do listen: the interview also covers emotion, credibility and CSR, and ends by discussing the impact of western business culture upon China – and the future impact that Chinese brands will have upon us.

I’ve broken the interview down into bite-size pieces, so that you can quickly find particular points you’d like to hear about, but I’ve also included the whole interview and a transcript.

Part 1:Seven dimensions of the corporate character

Key topics:

  • corporate branding:product branding
  • measures of corporate character
  • seven dimensions of corporate personality

Soundbite:

“If I say that Company X is trustworthy, I’m giving you two pieces of information – I’m telling you how I think that company will behave towards me in the future, and I’m also telling you how I think I will behave towards that company”

[audio:https://www.corporate-eye.com/main/audio/mbs-part-1.mp3] Length: 14:57
Download: Professor Gary Davies interview: part 1

Part 2: Communicating corporate personality

Key topics:

  • mission, vision and values can express personality
  • current transactional nature of websites
  • building in enjoyment and pleasure

Soundbites:

“[The corporate website is] the easiest place to go to try and find out an answer to the question ‘Well, who are you?’…

“How many websites are a joy to use? Give you a real emotional buzz when you use them? Not many.”

[audio:https://www.corporate-eye.com/main/audio/mbs-part-2.mp3] Length: 8:24
Download: Professor Gary Davies interview: part 2

Part 3: Personification and the corporate story

Key points:

  • the appeal of the personality
  • making it personal: BG Group, Stora Enso

Soundbite:

“[The website] told me here’s the company, here’s the MD, the CEO, the founder—probably only a two-man business anyway—but recognising that the CEO literally personifies the company.”

[audio:https://www.corporate-eye.com/main/audio/mbs-part-3.mp3] Length: 3:27
Download: Professor Gary Davies interview: part 3

Part 4: Social media and companies

Key points:

  • learning from what people say about you and changing behaviours as a result

Soundbite:

“Start looking at what are people saying about you, and how they see you. And it’s no good saying ‘They are wrong’: they have their point of view”

[audio:https://www.corporate-eye.com/main/audio/mbs-part-4.mp3] Length: 3:53
Download: Professor Gary Davies interview: part 4

Part 5: Using emotion for credibility

  • credibility in a crisis
  • a lawyer’s response or a reputation management response?
  • dealing with emotion

    • Soundbite:

    “You can only, in my view, approach a crisis by recognising that the people that you’re talking to are in a state of high emotion and you’ve got to use emotion back. They’ve got to believe that you are as bothered about this issue as they are.”

    [audio:https://www.corporate-eye.com/main/audio/mbs-part-5.mp3] Length: 2:53
    Download: Professor Gary Davies interview: part 5

    Part 6: Impact of CSR on employees and customers

    Key topics:

    • should corporates have a social role other than maximising profit?
    • impact of CSR on employees: Marks and Spencer
    • building CSR into the business: Land Securities

    Soundbite:

    “The biggest impact of CSR reports and CSR actions – which is more important than the report itself – is on employees … We think there’s a chain effect here. CSR influences the employee and the employee in a service organisation influences the customer.”

    [audio:https://www.corporate-eye.com/main/audio/mbs-part-6.mp3] Length: 5:30
    Download: Professor Gary Davies interview: part 6

    Part 7: The human face of major companies

    Key points:

    • importance of video: talking head vs. interview/conversation
    • fun and the corporate brand: United Airlines, Zurich Financial, Virgin, British Airways
    • person to person interaction vs. online

    Soundbite:

    “If I go online and I can’t find anything from one of the heads of the organisation, I think ‘Well, why not?’ Because you go onto YouTube and you can find it … Why can’t we see the human side of the head of these large corporates?”

    [audio:https://www.corporate-eye.com/main/audio/mbs-part-7.mp3] Length: 8:03
    Download: Professor Gary Davies interview: part 7

    Part 8: Western influence on Chinese business

    Key topics:

    • Entrepreneurs in China
    • Cultural weight carried by brands
    • Cost of establishing global branding

    Soundbites:

    “That’s one reason perhaps why there’s so many Chinese in the West now, just trying to understand how we think. Because we will be the consumers for their brands that are going to follow in the next wave.”

    “Deng Xiaoping, I think, had this lovely saying…’We’re crossing a river and we’re feeling for the next stone under the water’. Lovely metaphor. So we know which direction we’re going in, we’re not too sure about our footing.”

    [audio:https://www.corporate-eye.com/main/audio/mbs-part-8.mp3] Length: 6:53
    Download: Professor Gary Davies interview: part 8

    Part 9: Culture shock and loss of control

    Key topics:

    • Showing people the power of the media: Tiananmen Square; Egypt
    • The power of the internet mob: Cooks Source

    Soundbites:

    “Of the 1,000 students doing Masters degrees at Manchester Business School this year, 400 will be Chinese.”

    “When companies could assume that if there was something that they were trying to hide they could at least hide it for a year or two, you can’t now rely upon hiding it for a minute or two.”

    [audio:https://www.corporate-eye.com/main/audio/mbs-part-9.mp3] Length: 6:48
    Download: Professor Gary Davies interview: part 9

    Here’s the whole interview, for you to listen to while driving home, or while jogging in the park; and the transcript, for those who prefer to read.

    [audio:https://www.corporate-eye.com/main/audio/prof-gary-davies-full-interview.mp3] Length: 1:01:25
    Download: Professor Gary Davies interview (whole interview)
    Download: Transcript (PDF)

    Many thanks to Gary for taking the time to talk to Paul.

    Who were we speaking to?

    Professor Gary DaviesGary Davies is Professor of Strategy and Director of the Reputation, Brand and Competitiveness research group at Manchester Business School (MBS). He is currently Director of Post Graduate Taught programs (all taught MSc programs) at MBS. He joined MBS from Templeton College, University of Oxford in 1992. Before entering an academic career in 1975, he had commercial experience with British Aluminium and the Mars (now Master Foods) Group. He works as a freelance consultant in strategic analysis and corporate reputation.

    Gary teaches strategy, corporate reputation, marketing strategy and crisis management, and his current research interests focus on reputation management, branding, employer branding and spillover effects from corporate to product branding.

    Addressing the Corporate Website

    Wouldn’t you want to keep all roads open to your website?

    I visit many corporate websites a week, and am frequently surprised when brought up short by an error message, or by ending up somewhere unexpected, requiring me to rethink my route to the website.

    Usually it’s a browser error message:

    Oops! We couldn’t find companyname.com. Did you mean www.companyname.com?

    Well, of course I did!

    Sometimes it’s an unfriendly server message in bright red: Server Application Unavailable

    Occasionally I see an unassuming text-only message saying ‘I am sorry – please call us on 01234 567890 if you keep seeing this message’. Unexpected enough to raise an eyebrow if it is a major listed company I’m trying to reach…

    And I have seen a redirect to a completely different company. Now that is unnerving.

    You might think this was a tiny problem, and not one that affected big companies: you’d be wrong. In a quick scan of FTSE 100 companies this morning, I ended up at a roadblock in over 15% of cases by not putting www. in front of the company domain name.

    This matters because it is one more block in the road to your website, and these routes should be swept clean and made welcoming…

    There’s one simple thing you can do to avoid putting this particular roadblock up for your visitors, and that is to make sure that whether they type www.yourcompanyname.com or simply yourcompanyname.com, they end up at the same place.

    Go on, try it: type in your domain name without the www, and see what happens.

    If you end up at your home page, that’s great. But if you end up somewhere unexpected, have a word with your web team: see if they can redirect all your traffic to the same place.

    Whoever Gets Their Positioning Right Wins a Prize: Survival (And Even Profit)

    I recently invited Karen Jones from BioEngagement to write a guest post for us about how best to position new technologies. Over to you, Karen!

    Let’s say you have a new technology platform to sell. Should you describe it as “new and never been done before”, or “just like those other guys, but better”?

    Positioning: Create a New Market or Segment an Existing One?

    positioning
    Positioning your new technology can make the difference between success and failure, case in point: Research in Motion (RIM) and TiVo, as described in this excellent post by Steve Blank.

    In 1997, RIM decided to describe their new handheld communication device as an “interactive pager”, even though it was actually the first wireless email device, because pagers were something that people could understand at the time and therefore it needed very little explanation. There was a ready market there for the taking and RIM succeeded. The device is known as the Blackberry. RIM sales were $15 billion in 2010. In the last ten years they’ve made over $9 billion in profit.

    TiVo, on the other hand, hated the idea of describing their technology as just a better VCR and instead carved out an entirely new market of digital video recorders, which took ten years of marketing slog and a loss of $400 million to achieve $240 million in sales in 2010.

    So, “new and unprecedented” is not always better.

    Technology Innovations: Are They ALWAYS For a New Market?

    I mention this because in my field of life science, heralding a new technology as “unique and unprecedented” appears to be the default. Perhaps if the inventors and their shareholders took the guts to swallow their pride and describe their offerings in terms more familiar to their customer base, we would see some improvement in terms of time to adoption and profitability.

    Take 23andme, for instance. This cleverly branded startup gained $22M in Series C funding in September this year (a feat in itself) and aims to help people understand what their genes mean by indexing them and highlighting significant findings. Naturally, it didn’t hurt that they got a leg up from Google, but my point here is that instead of harping on about their ground-breaking genome-scanning technology, their home page distills their direct-to-consumer offering as a simple saliva test. Something that everyone can understand.

    Pay-As-You-Go Chemistry?

    Newly launched Molplex follows a similar approach, on a fraction of the budget. Under the hood it contains unique virtual chemistry screening technology that allows researchers to identify potential new pharmaceutical compounds or compound fragments that bind to new therapeutic targets and to assess their pharmacokinetic and other critical properties without ever having to leave the desk. On its website it simply calls it “discovery on demand” and lets the researcher walk through its product offerings as if he or she was about to order a new chemical compound from a catalog. We’ll see if this works, but I’m pleased that their complex semantic web-based technology isn’t the first thing you read about when you land on their site.

    A Better Antibody Generation Technology

    Highly interesting biotech start-up Kymab enters the market with its next generation antibody technology which involves transferring a huge chunk of human genome sequence into a mouse in order to fully replicate the complete diversity of the human immune response. If they get it right, they will be able to tackle the most intractable of human immune diseases and attract technology licensing deals with pharmaceutical giants as well as develop their own antibody therapies. It’s an extension of existing technology which they are calling the “7th generation antibody technology” – i.e. same as the other guys but better. I hope they succeed.

    A New Market Requires Education Before Adoption: Is There Time?

    There are many life science companies that gone down the route of developing a new market before selling their wares. I worked in the genomics industry before the “biotech bust” and saw huge promise squandered, as it took too long to educate the market and encourage early adoption by the pharmaceutical industry that isn’t known for taking technological risks. Huge databases of human genetic variants known as SNPs, created before anyone had a chance to understand what they might be used for; gene microchips that could be used to identify the differences between disease and normal tissue, yet the market couldn’t recognise a common application. Failures of positioning.

    So the next time that you see a new technology that puts its cleverness ahead of a simple and recognizable application, remember the Blackberry and the TiVo and reconsider whether it really is that clever.

    Thanks Karen!

    Dr Karen Jones is the founder of BioEngagement Ltd, helping lifescience companies to commercialise their innovations through smart business development, marketing and communication strategies. She holds a PhD from UCL, post-doctorate education at Harvard Medical School and over 12 years’ experience in sales and marketing of global life science companies. Follow Karen at @bioengagement.

    Willpower and Corporate Communications Success

    I invited Graham W Price, a chartered psychologist and coach, to write a guest post for us, discussing ways to help us each reach our business goals.

    How to boost your willpower to make your corporate communications succeed

    Willpower to succeed
    The best laid plans of mice and men… we all know the saying and the chances are we’ve uttered it many times. We all have great ideas and good intentions that could make a real difference to our corporate communications (and our careers), but sometimes we just don’t seem to make them a reality.

    We can make excuses such as “a lack of time”, or “other things got in the way”, but really it’s about lacking the willpower to stick to our goals and make them a reality.

    So how can we boost our willpower to carry through those intentions that are going to positively impact our work and our lives?

    Chartered psychologist and success coach Graham W Price has ten top tips to boost our corporate communications willpower:

    • Goals: Set goals, write them down, make sure they’re SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, reasonable, time-based). Write down a time by which you plan to achieve each one.
    • Motivation: Write down the benefits of achieving each goal. Visualise it as being achieved – make it a clear, strong, vivid visualisation.
    • When-then games: Spot any unhelpful when-then games you may be playing (“when I’ve been here another six months and understand the company better, then I’ll take action”; “when I’m 100% sure of success then I’ll make a start”). Drop them now and start taking action.
    • Commitment: If the goal is important and challenging, make a commitment (a promise to yourself that you can share with colleagues) that you’ll do whatever you need to do to achieve it.
    • Act as if:
      • If you believe you might need more ‘get up and go’ to achieve the goal, think of someone you admire who’s achieved something similar, or could easily achieve it. Ask yourself what they’d be doing in your situation. Then do it
      • If a lack of self-belief or any other limiting belief is holding you back, ask yourself what you’d be doing if you had a more positive belief. Then do it
    • Bold action: If a one-step-at-a-time approach isn’t working, take bold action. Do something courageous or imaginative.
    • Time management:If it’s a big important goal, set some time aside every day to move it forward, irrespective of whatever short-term priorities may be competing for your time. Talk to your manager and drop tasks that don’t need to be done and won’t contribute significant benefits.
    • Accept the feeling, choose the action: If uncomfortable feelings get in the way, accept the feeling (be willing to experience it and tell yourself it’s just a feeling that needn’t stop you and won’t do you any harm) and do whatever you’d be doing if you didn’t have the feeling. Doing this repeatedly will unwind the unconscious beliefs that are driving the feeling. If you’re fearful or anxious, and you know your reticence isn’t justified by any real danger, accept the feeling and do whatever it is that’s making you anxious. Use this same approach to deal with any other recurring uncomfortable feelings.
    • Focus on contribution: If you’re stuck on a goal, ask yourself whether it’s because you’re just focusing on your own needs, wants and perceived limitations. If so, try rephrasing the goal in terms of what it will do for others, your boss, your employer or your customers. This can take the focus away from your own so-called limitations and gives a new impetus to the goal.
    • Take control: Identify anything that’s mediocre in your life (both business and personal) and take steps to eliminate it. Get fit, spend more time with the kids, eat healthily, create a sensible work-life balance, lose weight, keep the desk tidy, quit smoking. Use the nine tips above to make it happen. This will raise your self esteem, confidence and will power.

    These tools aren’t universally applicable. Some ‘when-then’ games may be sensibly cautious. Taking some bold actions might be unduly risky. But utilising the tools appropriately will give us the willpower to achieve our goals and enhance our success – not just our own success but the success of the work we deliver within our organisation.

    Thanks Graham!

    About the author:

    Graham W Price is a chartered psychologist, therapist, coach and development trainer. He is an accredited member of the British Psychological Society (BPS), the British Association for Behavioural and Cognitive Psychotherapies (BABCP) and the United Kingdom Council for Psychotherapy (UKCP) and a registered practitioner psychologist with the Health Professions Council (HPC).

    He is author of “What Is, Is! The Power of Positive Acceptance” published by HotHive, outlining all the above tools and others needed for achieving satisfaction, resilience, improved relationships and success.

    For more information about Graham see www.abicord.com/graham-price

    Google Previews Your Corporate Site

    Have you noticed Google’s “instant preview” feature?

    If you run a Google search for your company, you should see at least one result; ideally, you’ll see several pages from your site. Each will have a small magnifying glass to the right hand side… if you click that, you’ll see a thumbnail snapshot of the page.

    Does your site look attractive at this scale? Is the page complete? Does your logo stand out? Is your branding recognisable?
    Cairn Energy

    These previews aren’t always flattering to the corporate site. Zipping through some of the FTSE 100 companies, I did spot some issues:

    • some sites are displaying with blank sections, where, presumably, part of the page hasn’t loaded before the snapshot was taken
    • I also saw one with a ‘down for maintenance’ display; I expect that this will be overwritten the next time the site is spidered
    • sites with a Flash-based home page (or elements on the page) don’t display well, showing just the plugin-jigsaw-piece image where the Flash should be.

    Search Engine People found that sites with popups, where the page dims to highlight the popup, look bad, though this isn’t usually something that corporates use; something to bear in mind if you’re adding in a site survey popup, perhaps. Do go and read the Search Engine People post if you haven’t seen it yet, as there’s a lot of good examples and discussion there.

    The good news is, though, that some sites look great at this scale, clear and attractive, with strong branding messages. The Cairn Energy preview shown above, for example, looks bright and vibrant, helped perhaps by the home page being short and wide rather than long and thin.

    And some sites have text highlighted – see the screenshot for the Kingfisher home page, where the highlighted text happens to be a positioning statement. The company should be pleased with that!

    Kingfisher

    If your site has words displayed, are they useful to the visitor and helpful to you? This snippet is generated based on what the searcher is looking for, and the text on the page, so may be little that can be done to improve this other than ensuring that all content on the page is carefully honed. We can see that this varies, because if, for instance, I search for Aviva Group, and then for Aviva plc, and look at their About page, different text is highlighted in each case.

    Aviva plc

    Searching for Aviva PLC..
    Aviva group

    …and for Aviva Group.

    This may not be something that you need to worry about. I expect that the images will get updated regularly, so if your site had a bad hair day, it may not be visible for long. I imagine that not many people will use this feature when looking for a corporate site; after all, if you know which company you’re looking for, you’re probably not going to be tempted into visiting a different organisation. However, if people are likely to search for your products and services, this may matter a great deal.

    It is possible that people will use this feature when looking for information usually found on a lower level page, to cut out navigation within the corporate site. The extent to which people will use it is, as yet, unknown, but it will be interesting.

    What do you think: will this matter? Is it a feature you’re likely to use much yourself when searching?

    Clearing Your Clutter

    new-broomWhen the internet first appeared, many didn’t foresee the prominence it would have in our everyday lives and more importantly, how it would overtake all other channels as a source of information. So implied the article ‘over-hyped.com’ which appeared in the Guardian in the year 2000. Writer John O’Farrell explored the few uses of the internet, surmising that “the usefulness of the internet has been hyped out of all proportion.”

    So it’s no surprise that corporate websites initially entailed some information thrown together for anyone who was interested. As the internet’s novelty value never wore off, over the last decade companies have had no choice but to expand their sites, adding more, adding microsites, adding new features, investing in makeovers, new skins… and the result of this gradual build-up is sometimes, well chaotic.

    One almost thinks it would be easier to start from scratch then from a decade’s worth of ill-coordinated content accumulation. It is one thing to have a wealth of information out there, but having this content consistent and organized, having information together in one place in a navigable fashion is another. Many sites, due to lack of planning and haphazard growth have ended up with the first scenario.

    Another issue which adds to this, is the fact that different departments may be responsible for their own sections of the site. So, while the site may be consistent in colour palette and other such aesthetic qualities, the style, tone, level of detail and so on may vary from section to section. On top of this, things like staff turnover add to this ambiguous responsibility for content. It certainly makes sense to ensure each department has designated publishers who are wise in the ways of the corporation’s communication style. It is also a good idea to have a chief editor responsible for tweaking and okaying any content before it goes live.

    But these of course are preventative measures. If a website is already cluttered it can be hard to know where to begin in culling content. I’ve often thought that the only way to get rid of homely clutter is to move house (even trying to stage a pretend move), so that the question becomes what to keep rather than what to throw away.

    Of course the website equivalent of this is creating a new shadow site, copying over the useful bits, and then switching over. The old junk is lost and you haven’t had all the deliberation of pressing delete.

    Move house or spring-clean?