The truth about branding
30 June 2008What happens in a branding program? A brand strategy or positioning change? Usually.
A new house style or logo change? Sometimes.
A business-wide transformation? Rarely.
Most marketers revel in a branding challenge. Successfully launching a new brand or navigating a brand through a major re-positioning can be the pinnacle of one’s career. But all too often, the excitement of the branding effort is stymied by the sinking realization that the challenge entails much more than anticipated.
We are now in the age of the experience brand. Brands are no longer just about delivering a product or service; they are equally about how the customer experiences the brand over time. The ability to create a unique and desirable brand experience is why some brands have surpassed others in the hearts and minds of customers. Gold standard brands like Apple, Virgin Atlantic, and Starbucks have made “experience” the mantra and ambition of every brand out there.
Consider the iPod. More than just a device to deliver music to your ears, the brand continues to ignite desire from the moment you first see the carefree, dancing silhouette in the advertisement, to when you browse through the Apple store (in person or online), to the time you feel the Click Wheel beneath your thumb, to the customer care you receive if and when your much-loved device malfunctions. At every turn the brand delivers.
So if you’re thinking about the effectiveness of any branding exercise—whether it’s a new brand, a major rebrand, or simply strengthening an existing brand—it’s important to consider the reach of your initiative. You still need a brilliant idea that sets you apart from the competition. You still need to express that brand promise in an inspiring and exciting way. But today you also need to think about making your brand promise part of your customers’ experiences.
And this is the brutal reality about branding: If your brand is going to provide a true customer experience, you need to do more than just make a great promise. You must make sure your company can keep it. How does your business actually take what you stand for and make it real for customers? How do you guarantee that your people, your products, and your processes will deliver on the promises you make?
Keeping the promise: internal engagement
Internal brand engagement is an imperative for any company with serious ambitions about becoming an experience brand. A truly effective branding initiative hardwires internal engagement into the process right from the start.
Simply put, internal engagement is the act of inspiring your people and your organization with an understanding of what your brand promises, and then providing the tools to deliver that promise through every facet of your business.
This process is not directly concerned with developing tactics for engaging external customers with your brand. Rather, it is about inspiring your organization and your employees to deliver on your brand’s promise. Many mistake internal engagement for getting employees to “live the brand.” This is ineffective and tends to inspire interminable hours of navel gazing and vague conversations about brand values. Instead, your focus should be turned around and aimed at finding ways to make the brand live.
A brand that is alive transforms the way your customers experience you. If your brand is about innovation, for example, your employees should be asking themselves what innovation would look like for the customer. Challenge them to think about products, services, and underlying processes with your customers in mind. Doing so injects tangibility and substance into a discussion that might otherwise seem soft and unconnected to measurable results. Few will argue with you about the need to deliver a superior and differentiated customer experience.
From this perspective, internal engagement reaches into every function of the company. It asks everyone to think about what has to happen to make the brand promise a reality. This might involve retraining frontline staff, reengineering manufacturing processes, or developing a new product or service.
The point is, if your business vision and brand vision are mutually supportive—as they should be—the process of internal engagement can catalyze the transformation of your organization. Your brand becomes the flag bearer of vision and purpose while inspiring change.
And you’ll reap the benefits. An aligned and motivated organization will get you where you want to go more quickly. Employees empowered to make improvements will be more productive because they will have a clearer view of the end goal. Customers will place more value on their relationship with you because their experience with the brand will be consistently great.
All this translates to bottom-line results. Take BDO, an international accounting firm. Following an internal brand engagement program where a key objective was to “switch on” the full potential of its international network, revenues increased significantly. And we can still point to the longstanding example of Southwest Airlines—a brand that believes its people are one of the most important elements of their business and brand success; it continues to excel despite increasingly difficult times for the airline industry.
Easier said than done
So how do you achieve it? Unfortunately, there is no quick fix. Putting your brand at the center of how you do things may require changes to operational processes, organizational structure, training, key performance indicators, employee rewards, and other areas of your business. It is not easy to make everyone in your organization—from the top of the management chain to the most junior employee, from frontline staff to R&D futurists—understand how the brand promise should serve as a decision-making filter.
An internal engagement initiative promotes an ongoing conversation about what is “on-brand” and “off-brand.” If your brand is about being “the friendly, neighborhood choice,” the sponsorship manager may decide to align the brand with local soccer leagues rather than Formula One racing. And the call-center manager may choose to rewrite scripts to remove all corporate speak (or indeed, toss the scripts out and instead invest in improvisation training).
Above all, it’s important to remember that you can only ask employees to do things they are enabled to do. Delivering a brand is as much about business strategy and operations as it is about employee behavior.
The two faces of internal engagement
The best internal brand engagement programs require two elements: inspiration combined with a practical component that grounds the brand in day-to-day activities and tangible outcomes.
First, a generous dose of creative and viral internal communication is a must. This gets people on board and passionate about your brand. Show them what their future could actually look like—BDO used an internal magazine called Business Futures to achieve this. By creating a publication dated three years into the future, BDO laid out what it had (hypothetically) done to bring its brand vision to life. Or, you may want to place physical reminders in the work environment to provoke conversation and debate about the brand. BP placed aloe vera plants in its headquarters to act as a metaphorical reminder of the company’s commitment to finding alternative energy solutions. BP also honors employees who uphold its brand values through its annual Helios Awards. The point is to keep the brand alive and relevant over time, so that it provides fodder for ongoing internal dialogue about what is considered on-brand delivery.
Second, provide pragmatic tools. These help people understand their role in delivering the brand through the customer experience and may spark solutions to current problems or generate ideas for innovation. Try mapping out the customer experience to help people envisage what on-brand (and, indeed, off-brand) delivery might look like. By engaging its product development teams in this way, a major European mobile phone company introduced the idea of flexible and simplified pricing plans that directly reflected its brand strategy.
Brand as change agent
Far more than just a chance to repaint an airplane or launch new advertising, a branding exercise is an opportunity to create real change within an organization and reap the rewards of a stronger bond with customers.
Once it’s accepted that you must look inside to deliver on your brand promise (and that it is just as important as above-the-line communications, if not more so), all the talk about creating an experience brand becomes a possibility.
By rallying your people around the brand promise and focusing on the customer experience, you not only help them “live the brand,” they in turn help you transform your business. Your people become your most powerful asset for delivering the brand.
And that’s the truth.
Five ways to do it wrong
1. Thinking internal brand engagement is just for employees
Senior management cannot afford to think that brand engagement is a process done to employees. This is as much about engaging leadership teams as it is about helping employees understand how their decisions and behavior affect the brand experience. If you have a limited budget, invest in creating a dialogue with the management team.
2. Losing focus
If you bring people into a vague conversation about “living the brand values,” you will end up with vague output. Engage people in a conversation about what those brand values look like when delivered to a customer, and you’ll get a roadmap for brand delivery.
3. Treating it as a one-time event
Brand engagement does not start and end with a brand launch, it’s an ongoing process and conversation. You can never truly tick the box and say “job done.” Don’t expect the journey to be complete once the first couple of initiatives prove successful. This is about bringing the brand into the business, and it should spark all sorts of conversation (and activity) around organizational and process alignment, product innovation, and people policies.
4. Keeping it quiet
To keep momentum going it is important to show your people a few strong signals of brand-led change early and often—whether that change is focused on product, process, or people. When people begin to see change actually happening, they will believe that the organization takes it seriously. They are then more likely to commit themselves to the new vision, rather than laying low and hoping it will all pass quickly. And don’t forget to keep celebrating and showcasing the successes as they happen over time.
5. Making a promise you won’t keep
Your brand ambition should only be as big as your business ambition will allow. The most effective way to waste your investment in internal brand engagement is to start off with lots of words and a big visionary promise of what the brand will deliver without a serious activity in place to activate the promise. As we all know, a good strategy delivered is much more effective than a great strategy that never leaves the presentation deck.
About Landor’s internal brand engagement offer
Landor’s global team of internal engagement experts makes sure that your brand works as hard inside your company as it does out in the marketplace. Using a combination of creative communications, strategic tools, and interaction, our internal engagement programs help everyone in a company—from leadership to frontline employees—understand the brand, be inspired by it… and know what to do about it.
Lori Rosenwasser
Global Director, Internal Brand Engagement at Landor Associates
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