What are you worth?

The title of this piece no doubt piqued your interest more so than had it been called 'marketing your function'. Yet as chief audit executives your worth is directly linked to the way your department is perceived, the brand of your department.

OK, so this is about marketing your internal audit function, the importance of brand and positioning. It is also about your worth as a leader and that of your team as a collective.

A strong brand plays a major role in delivering shareholder value. It can also be a powerful tool for internal audit because according to the late Jeff Bezos, CEO and co-founder of Amazon 'your brand is what other people say about you when you’re not in the room'.

This piece focuses on branding and how to create a powerful one for your function. Only once stakeholders understand the value of internal audit can they start to value the people that deliver it.

 

Importance of brands

A brand showcases a product or service through the use of imagery, logo, colour, words, taglines, experiences, story-telling and advocacy. Marketing executives understand that good communication is about the head and the heart - product facts talk to the head while branding often talks to the heart. Why do some people buy Nike rather than Adidas? Is it the tread of the trainer or that they connect more with ‘just do it’ than ‘impossible is nothing’? Advertising guru, David Ogilvy once said “a brand is the intangible sum of a product’s attributes”.

The concept of branding is about deliberately trying to create a positive perception in the mind of another; it transcends industry sector and business size. A position perception can also be controversial; Ryanair customers typically have low expectations of the experience they are buying following years of defamatory quotes from owner O’Leary, yet those same comments have also created a legion of customers willing to sacrifice artificial perks for cheap flights.

A brand evokes emotion - it’s an experience, a memory or a feeling. What does your brand say about your function today? Are your internal audit clients genuinely engaged in audits or tolerating your presence? Do you hear things through other people, informal culture, before you’ve been formally notified of news?

Branding can be applied to a person, a product or a company - a chief audit executive, an audit report or a function.

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Characteristics of a successful brand

There are a plethora of marketing theories on what makes a successful brand, including the notion that there is no theory just trial and error - not the most helpful philosophy for guidance on branding.

The following table provides insight on good brand qualities from a variety of sources.

Developing (refreshing) your brand

Creating a brand does not have to be complicated. Like any project it can fit the resource available. Depending on your team size and budget, it could be outsourced to brand experts, a major team project over a number of months or it might require a few conversations and a team day.

The approach to creating a brand can be distilled into four big steps:

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1. Research

Identifying internal audit stakeholders

Using an analysis model to understand which ones to focus on - it’s not just about the audit committee.

 

What is it that stakeholders need, want or demand from internal audit?

• Need is very basic, the essentials to exist, such as obtaining assurance over regulatory compliance.
• Want is something better than what you currently have, for example obtaining assurance over completion of low level agreed actions not just high priority ones or having access to counsel to fix a known issue.
• Demand is created when stakeholders have the means to secure what they want; funding for outsource resource, secondee to backfill resource being used or offer of subject matter expertise to support audit. Internal audit should seek to satisfy needs and demands. CAEs should also be mindful of when demands represent attempts to use influence or power to affect the audit plan.

Who is the competition?

Which colleagues share the same stakeholders? Who gets priority for limited diary time? Consider the relationship that external audit has with the business how does it differ to internal audit? What is the position of other assurance providers (second line)? Particularly quality roles, efficiency teams, process reengineering teams, profit protection, process efficiency, fraud investigators or specialist assurance such as clinical or stock audit. If you co-source or outsource for skills there is also direct competition to consider.

What is the brand today?

Regardless of intentional marketing activity the function will already have a brand. Feedback received to date. Welcomed, tolerated or put off attending certain meetings. Invited to or find out about events. Frequent cancelled or shortened meetings. Sought out for counsel or advice, to provide training. Nominated for awards. Team members promoted into the business. There will be many indicators.

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2. Storytelling

It is no longer enough to expect a product to sell just because it has good attributes. Marketeers create stories around a product to compel you into purchases; think about your last encounter in an estate agents, car showroom or furniture stores. Why do we give to one charity over another? It is their stories that compel us into action.

In writing your story it is important to link to the sentiment of the mission for and definition of internal audit set out by the Chartered Institute but not the words. This is about your story, your words to express the experience of internal audit that you offer.

• Write down the past, present and future of your internal audit function. Maybe members of the team see this differently, explore that, understanding this is important.
• Develop a statement to sum up internal audit in your organisation. Think about what matters to your stakeholders? Why do you exist? How are you making the organisation better? This might end up being your tagline.
• Write your brand story. The statement is the beginning. Aim for a one page of A4. Be succinct, be true, be authentic. People engage when there is clear purpose underpinning a story and it is easy to read, conversational not corporate. Share your passion and aim to inspire. Everyone in the team must believe in this story, learn it and live it.
• Decide your promise, what is it your stand for, this may already be part of your story. If not build on your story to create it. They must link. A promise goes to the heart.
• Create a tagline. Your statement might work for this if not work on it. It’s the elevator pitch version of your story and will be on emails, reports, presentations. Stakeholders will quote this.

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3. Visual Ideation

Ideation is the formation of new ideas. Visual ideation is taking your brand story and turning into visual ideas.

One way to do this is to take an important word and create a word cloud around them. The words should be visual, colourful and emotional.

Other techniques include:

• Collaging with a wide selection of materials.
• Collaborative sketching, one person starts a sketch then passes it on until everyone has contributed.
• Sensory experiences, drawing what water sounds like, the smell of paint, the feel of velvet then drawing a visual of your brand concept.

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4. Construction

• Create a logo. Grab the crayons,, go outside, put on a blindfold, whatever works.
• Decide a colour pallete, which colours work for your story, this may have come out naturally from the visualisation exercise.
• Typography, the font you use, should come from the shape of your logo. You may be constrained by corporate guidelines in which case either roll with it or argue for independence!

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Delivering your brand

Having developed your brand, it needs to be used and maintained. Things to think about include:

• Refresh your internal audit charter, bring it to life with your brand. 
• Incorporate logo, colours and typography into templates, reports, presentations etc.
• Update/create internal audit’s presence on the corporate intranet.
• Regularly share successes, set up an award program.
• Update feedback tools (survey, questionnaire, interview) to reflect branding.
• Agree standard department email signature incorporating logo/strapline.
• Create a pamphlet to leave with internal audit clients/issue ahead of audits.
• Personal impact - timeliness, language, gravitas are all things that should reflect the brand.
• Include audits on the plan to demonstrate the value being offered - be the change you want to see. 
• Broaden audit scopes to include areas that demonstrate the value being offered. 

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Measuring success

Peter Drucker once said, 'you can’t manage what you don’t measure' so it follows that to conclude the branding of your function some measures need to be put in place. As with anything, what you put in place should be appropriate and proportionate to the other measures you track, the size of your function and the maturity of ways of working. The following are ways in which you could expect to see the success of your branding campaign over time:

• Reduction in cancelled, shortened, postponed meetings.
• Improved feedback scores after each audit review.
• Increased visits to intranet site/source of information/contacts.
• Increased requests for advice/counsel and support. 
• Improved access to information, audit clients more open. 
• More invitations to key events/meetings/committees.
• Increases in ‘quality’ time spent with stakeholders, taking an interest in what matters to them not just what’s important to internal audit.
• Improved quality of findings meetings, less semantic disagreement more engagement. 
• Timely completion of agreed actions that have been genuinely bought into.
• Secondment requests for internal auditors to join projects.
• Willingness by business to release guest auditors/secondees to support audit activity.
• Promotion of internal auditors into the business.
• Engagement with concepts such as control self-assessment, risk workshops, assurance mapping etc.
• Invitations to talk about internal audit at events and meetings both internal and external.
• Attraction of talented individuals into the function.

It would be impractical to measure everything or to expect everything to happen overnight. The challenge for chief audit executives is to ensure that whatever is measured is relevant to the promise and story created, that it is meaningful.

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Closing thoughts

The internal audit product is delicate. Time is taken to carefully craft the audit opinion before it is presented yet without a credible brand behind it the true worth of that opinion might never be realised, regardless of whether it is accurate, complete, timely, relevant, valid and reliable.

 

"There are two ways to share knowledge; you can push information out, you can pull them in with a story"

Anonymous

 

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Supplementary information

Generic stakeholders to consider

• Assurance providers, 2nd line of defence, compliance teams
• Audit Committee Chair and Audit Committee members (or equivalent)
• Board/CEO (or equivalent)
• Employees
• Executive Management
• External Audit
• Government bodies (central and/or local)
• Local Community
• Members of subcommittees, councils, boards that are key decision making forums
• Operational Management
• Professional Community
• Regulatory bodies
• Risk function
• Whistleblowing – anyone with accountability for process or as a nominated contact

Questions to consider asking to evaluate your brand – asking yourselves as internal audit and asking of stakeholders

• What does internal audit mean to you?
• What would you say is internal audit’s mission?
• What is it about internal audit that makes it unique?
• What is the greatest value internal audit provides to you?
• What are internal audit’s greatest strengths?
• What are internal audit’s greatest weaknesses?
• What opportunities have internal audit missed?
• What need does internal audit do for you?
• Why does the organisation need internal audit?
• What are the threats that internal audit faces e.g. competition, outsourcing, co-souring?
• What could make internal audit obsolete?
• Do you trust internal audit?
• What will the internal audit function need to look like in 5 years?
• Have you seen the internal audit charter this year?
• Do you think internal audit qualifications as important as other specialist qualifications, accountancy for example?
• What was the last audit review to take place in your area?

Obviously you don’t have to ask everything of everyone, these are suggestions. It might be possible to use this as an ‘agenda’ to discuss with groups of stakeholders in meetings. Questions could also be adapted into a multiple-choice questionnaire for simplicity, however, once options are provided to respondents their thought process changes to look for the ‘correct’ answer rather than providing a natural unprompted answer. The decision is yours.