Why your business should be “laddering” better (and how to do it)
Phrases like “laddering” and “laddering-up" are being banded-about to mean all sorts of things lately. I heard someone laddering up from a filter coffee to a flat white the other day... so confusing! This article outlines what we mean by it in the discipline of brand strategy and why it’s so important today.
Laddering creates a strong relationship between what you say, and what you do or deliver as an organisation. It means that your actions and behaviours support or “ladder up” to your overarching brand message. It's really important, but often overlooked, spoiling the credibility of messaging, coherence of experience, and damaging brand trust.
In a world where any kind of brand “washing” is maligned and authenticity is valued, strong laddering is key to a brand’s success. We should ensure all aspects of our brand experience ultimately deliver against our core brand essence.
Yet, despite laddering’s importance, it’s something that brand owners find tricky as they are often so immersed in operational detail, they can't pullout to see the red thread that can align their ‘say’ and ‘do’... so, it's a place where brand experts can add true value.
What does strong brand laddering look like?
An effective brand experience relies on ensuring all services, products, ranges and comms propositions “ladder-up” to the overarching brand message.
It's why Alpha Romeo can't do "For Life" (safety) and equally Volvo can't do “la meccanica delle emozioni” (desirability).
There should be a ladder from your product/service proposition to range proposition, then to brand proposition, and then up higher again to brand purpose, usually building from specific functional messages at the bottom of the ladder to the grander and more emotive at the top.
How can we create strong brand laddering?
The reality is creating a strong brand ladder is iterative. We whizz up and down it a bit to create coherence between the “say” and “do”. If your brand has a strong vision for the future you may work down the ladder to help identify what you need to deliver that meaningfully going forward.
An example would be in the case of a strongly logistics-led client organisation we know well. They have to think ahead every day, predicting what's needed, thinking strategically about what is required for their customers both tomorrow, and for the next 10 years. They also invest heavily in game-changing national infrastructure that will deliver the energy transition. This all ladders up to their brand purpose: Fuelling Tomorrow.
Or in the case of a grocery retailer we are advising, they have a great EVP that speaks to the volume of opportunity in their organisation, and they want our help to activate that EVP internally. But first we will be peeking under the bonnet to find out whether this messaging has been laddered up from what they are actually doing: their incentive structure, their benefits package, their policies and L&D programs etc. If they haven't laddered up from reality we might support them to fix that so it all matches up credibly – either laddering up to a revised message grounded in reality, or laddering back down to fix it organisationally and match their ambition!
Are your audiences “getting” the ladder?
When the messaging and experiences don't match-up, audiences don't always know it, but they definitely feel it. They spot inauthenticity from a mile off – and it damages trust. I spent a lot of time on innovation in one-to-one co-creation sessions with a well-known fast food client's customers. Every time we introduced something that wasn't grounded in the southern states, they couldn't tell me why they didn't like it or wouldn't buy it. But they were consistent in their mistrust of it. Even though the company dropped explicit reference to provenance from their brand name decades ago, their regular customers know the brand’s heritage – not least because they often play to it in messaging and innovation. So if it doesn’t feel like something the founder would have created, they reject it in favour of more authentic options.
So getting into face-to-face sessions with your key audiences to explore perceptions of your brand experience: identity, comms, products, interactive experiences is also key to laddering success...you can do it alone!
So....
Strong laddering ensures a coherent and consistent brand experience, establishes trust and builds brand equity. It means messages land and products and services fly!
Design consultancies like Six can support you to develop the message and the deliverables to deliver meaningful impact in your organisation.
Contact us if you want to learn how we could help you build stronger laddering in your organisation.
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