5 ways to empower employees to deliver your brand promise and drive your success.
How did the successful brand-driven companies of the world – the Apples, the Disneys, the IBMs – get that way? Sure, they were ahead of the curve in recognizing the power of brands to define the company’s purpose, anchor corporate strategy and create an irresistible attraction for customers.
But that’s just the beginning. A great brand strategy is basically a lot of thinking. Turning clever brand concepts into the real-world actions that create success… that takes people, and in the case of a large corporation thousands of people all pushing in the same direction. Brand-driven companies have learned how to engage their entire organizations so that virtually every action by every employee serves a brand purpose.
How do they do it – or more to the point, how can you do it? Here are 5 things you can do to make your employees the real power behind your brand’s success.
1. Get employees involved in the brand development process.
Brand strategy is about a company’s overall purpose and direction. That’s obviously a management-level concern. No brand development or repositioning effort will succeed without the full support of the CEO.
But that’s not to say the rank and file shouldn’t take part in the effort. For one thing, front-line employees, especially functional and departmental managers are often the best people for grasping customer insights and unearthing brand value hidden inside the organization. Making employees part of the process also makes it far easier for them to implement the brand. People will engage if they feel some ownership of the process and the result.
So don’t make the brand a secret project of the executive team – or even worse, the marketing team – and then suddenly reveal the results to everyone at the end. Involve the whole organization from the start.
2. Find new and different ways to communicate the brand internally.
Here are three key ways to make sure your brand gets through to employees:
First, communicate in a fresh and surprising way. A re-branding is a big deal, so don’t just plug into what employees already see every day. A new training module and an article in the company’s internal email newsletter won’t do the job.
Second, communicate through as many different channels as possible. The brand message is more likely to sink in if people can listen to it, read it, see it in pictures, hear it from leaders and discuss it with peers. Diverse inputs are mutually reinforcing, the more the better.
Third, repeat and repeat. Brands are more than just a set of facts and a slogan. They involve personality, culture, values and emotions. It takes time and repeated interaction for people to understand and internalize a new or re-worked brand.
3. Be a model of best brand behavior.
If corporate leaders don’t set a good example, how can you expect employees to deliver the brand effectively? Walking the walk will accomplish more than any amount of brand cheerleading or nagging.
It’s a good idea to check all executives’ prepared remarks, written and spoken, against the brand promise. And have a few key brand-essential phrases written down that everyone can pull out for impromptu meetings, encounters and speaking opportunities. If the CEO starts to sound like a talking doll, always saying the same thing about the brand… you’re on the right track!
4. Translate the brand into specific employee actions and behaviors.
It isn’t enough to tell employees to “live the brand”. “Be innovative!” is a poor guide to action. Employees need to understand what specific actions they can undertake day by day to deliver on the brand promise. To put a big ugly word to it, you need tooperationalize the brand.
Operationalizing the brand (we call it brand coaching to save syllables) means digging into all the various functions of the organization and explicitly aligning them with the brand promise. Start with HR functions such as hiring, onboarding and performance review. Move on to business planning, product development, and finance. Then tackle the brand-critical customer-facing functions such as marketing, sales and customer service. Each functional team can work out their own brand-supporting standards, processes and performance metrics.
Once everyone in the organization is on-brand in their daily operations, strategy comes to life.
5. Build in reward and feedback
Brand standards, behaviors and processes should be at the center of the company’s performance evaluations and incentive systems. Rewards and incentives for superior brand implementation should be clear, substantial and highly visible. And be prepared to provide remedial coaching for behavior that fails to meet brand standards.
Formal metrics are a must. Just as each team is tasked with identifying and codifying its own on-brand processes and behaviors, responsibility for evaluating brand performance should also lie with the team. Depending on the function, such metrics may be financial (revenues, market share), internal (efficiency, sales performance), customer-based (awareness, NPS) or cultural (commitment, motivation). At the corporate-management level, the various individual metrics can be amalgamated into a comprehensive brand performance dashboard, which can be a great management tool as well as useful measure of brand performance.
Driving Success
A brand strategy can be a powerful driver of success, but only if employees are empowered bring the brand strategy to life in everything the company does. This is especially true in B2B organizations, where people are the primary customer touchpoints.
We sometimes say that brands are like people: they’re complex, they have personalities, they evolve and grow. If you look at the way brands work within an organization, that’s not just a figure of speech: brands are people.
Photo by Alice Salles via Flickr
