Brand Leadership Advisor SOS Children's Villages International
Joining hands
It is about courage, trust, a long-term perspective and most of all about joining hands for delivering our joint vision. It all started with the creation of the brand model and its official presentation during the General Assembly back in 2008.
Some years later, the federation decided to meet to do a review of our strategic plan. For me, in my role as brand advisor, it was the first time I recall people from all across the planet sitting together to jointly work towards making our global strategy even more efficient. Together with a colleague from the network, I had taken on the responsibility to facilitate the brand part of the review. Our key goal was clear: to change the perception of brand work from something additional towards something of everyone’s daily business. The first line of action taken was to organise a very fruitful interaction with the groups working on our main objectives ONE child, ONE friend and ONE movement. Joint sessions with other relevant groups were highly inspiring and we identified several big topics within programme, fundraising and human resources work. No sooner had we started than we discovered the confirmation that brand has its place in all of them and that the brand perspective is really an added value.
So back to our little working group and following fierce discussions, the network and the representatives from national associations decided to take a bold step. A bold step which would make the future brand focus come directly from the member associations and naturally integrated into their everyday work: we suggested to “visualize brand integration” by removing brand work as an international strategic objective from 2015 on and to put full trust in our co-workers worldwide to steer the process. By doing so, we set the stage for jointly working with functions to integrate actions intended to influence and harmonize stakeholder experiences with SOS Children’s Villages in their respective plans.
Hence, in order to enable countries to identify required brand actions and to bring them to the strategic plans, the global brand network is currently initiating an approach to actively shape stakeholder experiences that supports the planning process done by national associations. This is based on the understanding that no matter how we support the child at risk across the planet, we as a global organisation have a lot in common and need to constantly build on our unifying strengths to be perceived as one global movement.
Markus Claus Egger
joined SOS CV 1998 with a journalism / interpreting background and a passion for foreign culture.
After a couple of years as Team Leader of Language Services at the Hermann Gmeiner Academy, he moved to the umbrella organisation in 2009.
Now he mainly dedicates his work life to contributing to the implementation and further development of the global branding approach as Brand Leadership Advisor in the Office of the Chief Executive Officer. Focusing on the communication within the network, he has managed to broaden his horizon towards a global perspective and has been able to gather experience in managing networks, developing and steering projects, working with managers and training co-workers.
Markus was born in Innsbruck in 1972 and raised in a typical small-sized European family. He is married and has a daughter and a 4-year-old son. He has a very endearing person dream which he puts so: “I dream of moving from our apartment to a small house one day, either in Tyrol or somewhere in France”. And as a member of society, he dearly pleadges to do his little part, which is to make the world (and SOS CV!) focus on what binds us together rather than what tears us apart. By the way: this is also what the SOS CV brand is about – despite the different solutions to the child at risk SOS Children’s Villages is offering across the planet, we have a lot in common and need to constantly build on these strengths in order to be perceived as one powerful global entity. We as co-workers play a major role in this process which aims to sharpen our one identity and foster our reputation. The way we interpret and live what the federation stands for is ultimately how SOS CV is perceived and judged by others.