Creating a brand that gets people talking is not just about external communication. Businesses can"t simply tell potential consumers and employees how good they are, they have to show them. In this way, creating a successful brand encompasses the culture and people within an organisation. Jerome Joseph, Group Account Director of The Brand Theatre consultancy, likens the process to cooking a dish.
You need all the right ingredients, he says. But the most important ingredient is your employees which make up that dish. Without paying attention to that crucial ingredient, chances are you will not have a strong internal brand.
Staff must be involved
Employees can be instrumental in building a brand - but they can also take a lead role in destroying it if they are not on board with the strategy. Joseph warns they need to be properly motivated and trained. Research has shown the number one reason customers leave a brand is because of the attitude or indifference shown by an employee.
He is not only speaking about front-line sales or service staff. Any business wanting to propel a brand image into the wider economy will need everyone on board.
Make sure you don"t turn off your employees - they are the biggest catalysts, he says.
One of my recent clients experienced this problem: its sales people were very nice and had the right "on-brand" behaviours. But when the customer was handed over to the engineers, who did not have the same people skills, things went badly. The engineers failed to continue building the relationship. Now, the client no longer wants to work with the company because of its engineers.
Many companies face this situation when the brand they hope to project is not consistently aligned across different areas of the organisation. Joseph says it is one of the key factors that differentiate strong brands from the weak.
Building up
Joseph enjoys helping managers and employees develop brands, but he knows it cannot happen overnight. He says it takes at least three months, and up to a year to establish a brand - and then many more years to develop and maintain it. The hard part is not changing the attitude but changing the behaviour; that is what takes time.
Knowledge is an important tool for Joseph and his first step in developing an internal brand is research. We spend time researching and gathering data within a company to determine how good or bad the situation is, he says. Knowing how much employees understand the brand, how loyal they are to the corporate brand and whether they can translate the brand into their work are crucial to making the brand stronger. Many companies have a nice vision and mission statement but most have no idea how to translate their mission statement into the business, behaviours and brand.
Joseph believes that talking to employees is the key to finding out how much they understand the brand. Your employees need to understand how they can translate the brand into their day-to-day activities.
This takes planning and set guidelines.
If part of your brand is passion, then you need to figure out how to incorporate passion into the everyday activities of your employees, says Joseph. Map out how employees can put passion into their emails and voice messages. Provide them with guidelines that outline how passion should be expressed so that there is consistency among all employees within the company.
Joseph says every branding exercise needs a platform from which to develop the image. Relook at your vision and values and plan the map you would like to follow. Then determine how you want to translate the values to your employees, he suggests.
Knowing what vision and values make up your brand will make it easier to internally incorporate those qualities. If one of your values is knowledge then make sure you incorporate knowledge into the structure of your company. Implement knowledge into the culture by making it a priority. This can be done by focusing on upgrading skills and creating a mentoring system.
Living the brand
It is easy for an organisation to say it operates according to its vision statement but enacting those visions takes practice and training.
Joseph says it is imperative that organisational leaders provide a good example. It is critical that managers know how to translate the brand and show employees how to "live" the brand. If one of your values is empowerment and your managers are not allowing employees to make decisions then employees will not stand behind the brand.
Now is the time
According to Joseph, having a strong brand during tough economic times is important. Customers will suffer if your workforce is disillusioned so now is a very important time to do branding, he says. Even in tough times business is evolving and managers need to keep up.
Employees are changing; they are getting smarter, says Joseph. This gives organisations a unique opportunity to use their employees" intelligence to build their brands. Companies need to realise that activities such as "blogging" are unavoidable and embrace them. By allowing employees to use new media, a company can use their material to strengthen the internal branding and corporate culture.
+ Jerome Joseph will speak as part of the Talent Management stream at HR Summit in May
+ www.hrsummit.com.sg