Authentic brands are not about marketing. They are not products. They live inside the company. And they are held and enacted of the people, by the people and for the people!

Just like the Declaration of Independence created the foundation of a nation, so does your brand act as the foundation of your company. Its principles are the framework for thought and action by everyone in the company. Without it there is no consistency, no alignment between what you say and what you do, no synchronicity between who you are inside and the way you present yourself outside.

You may ask—“well isn’t that the same as culture?” The answer is yes and no. Authentic brands are in many ways the identity of the company culture. They help that culture become visible. They also embody the values and purpose of the company, giving all these things a face and a voice that can be seen and heard by everyone the company touches. But especially your employees. As the people who most keenly impact the day-to-day beliefs and actions of the company it is constantly amazing how little they are considered when brand is discussed.

It is employees who show the brand to be true or not. Authentic brands live or die with the people in the organization. If they don’t believe the brand, if they don’t feel it is their cause, no campaign or change program on earth will help it succeed. Authentic brands feel natural. There is no need to “educate” the employees—they feel it immediately. There is no need to launch the “new” brand on your unsuspecting customers—they have known it for years. When you are doing it day in and day out, saying it becomes almost superfluous.

This is exactly why you should want to find your authentic brand. Just imagine a brand that is enduring, that lasts beyond the next ad cycle, that is sustaining and sustainable, that feeds the soul of your company and makes the whole stronger. Imagine a brand that doesn’t cause disharmony inside your company, that doesn’t cause friction with the way you already do things.

This is an authentic brand!

Read the full Michael Hogan’s manifesto: We Need a New Word for Brand (600kb PDF file).

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As the people who deliver the brand promise are employees, making sure they understand and can deliver the brand to customers is vital—especially for companies within the service industry, where the relationship between employees and customers essentially is the product the company sells.

Re-branding takes time. The planning process that produces a new brand can take as long as two years. Educating employees about the new brand, and its implications on the company and their work, can also last years. That effort typically starts several weeks to several months before the new brand is unveiled to customers and continues after the official unveiling to external audiences.

The first step in getting employees on board is to get leadership on message. Once the leadership has been engaged, HR can begin to disseminate the new brand into lower levels of management.

The objective of the internal communications effort is to inspire employees to embrace and own the new brand. You want employees to hear first what their customers will eventually hear. The next step, training, even if it tends to be most intense in the months and weeks leading up to the external launch of the new brand, it does not necessarily end after the public unveiling.

Engaging events to commemorate a launch are often a component of internal re-branding efforts, and they usually occur immediately before the new brand is unveiled to customers and the public. When communicating about a new brand, there is no one way right for every person. So, deliver the message in as many ways as possible to reinforce the message.

The brand is about our client’s interaction with your company and your employees. It’s a small but crucial distinction. The aspect of the brand that matters most inside the company is an intangible one: how employees’ understanding of the company’s brand influences their behavior, whether they interact directly with customers or not.

Full article with details and examples, here.

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Your internal communications plan and branding is a huge step toward employee engagement and here is a list of eight things to do about it:

• Cultivate a culture that reinforces your Brand Contract and encourage employees to “live the brand”
• Measure the effectiveness of your internal branding strategy to maximize the ROI on your internal branding initiatives
• Insist that senior management models brand-focused behavior and cultural values
• Set communication alignment goals (are you even measuring the effectiveness of your internal communication
• Make positive examples of employee behavior that represents your values, mission, brand and business strategy
• Reward employees for demonstrating their commitment to your brand contract and values
• Show daily how commitment to mission and values is the touchstone that drives your decisions
• Harness the entire creativity of every employee in bringing the brand to life
• Involve all departments in branding, not just marketing – HR, operations, customer support, development, finance, and more

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As with any good marketing effort, it pays to begin by looking at the target audience. No doubt your internal audience has some awareness of your brand. Yet in many companies, especially ones that have recently reinvented themselves, employees may have no idea of what the brand stands for, where the company is going or even how the branded product or solution fits into customers’ lives or businesses. It’s a safe bet that if the employees aren’t sure what the brand essence is, the customers are wondering as well. (The paradox here is that some companies have to ask their customers what the brand stands for before they can move ahead.)

Many companies make fundamental strategic shifts in their businesses and assume that the rank and file will “get it” and “get behind it”. Of course, the reality is that a workforce with a wishy-washy understanding or, worse yet, a misunderstanding of the brand, its essence and its direction, will end up being a drag on company progress.

In the end, companies need to create a clear, consistent image for employees and recruits. The company image projected in the customer and employee marketplace should match up to what new employees experience when they are hired and on the job. The image should be communicated in terms that everyone understands. Letting recruits and employees role-play is a good way to introduce “real life” meaning to the message. Don’t take anything for granted with employees and recruits – communicate with them like customers and turn a buzzword into a powerful workforce enabler!

Read full Buzzwords are Branding Weapons: How Marketers Can Steer Buzz into Big Bucks

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Several surveys have been done to identify various corporate attributes which will attract talent. Here is a condensed list of 10 most popular (brand) attributes and are listed below in the order of their popularity.

1. For People Like Me
2. Fun place to work
3. Innovative Company
4. Training Opportunities
5. Attractive work location
6. Career growth opportunities
7. High Salary or other monetary benefits
8. Familiarity with tasks or Opportunity to do what I want to do
9. Expect success at the task
10.Work-life balance

The order of these attributes may vary a bit, but in an average most surveys have ranked them in the top-10. The top five attributes are universally applicable to both recent graduates and experienced employees, while the last five attributes are more specific to experienced employees.

Identifying the competition is an important starting point for a company trying to decide which attributes it should emphasize at what stage of the recruitment process. Traditional recruiting focuses on functional employment benefits, such as job security; opportunities for creativity and individual growth; and compensation. But an employer’s intangible, emotional associations—”it’s fun to work at this company,” “we have a passionate and intelligent culture,” “there is a strong team feeling here”—are just as important to recruits as similar associations with branded consumer goods are to potential buyers. So companies would do well to compare themselves with their peers on both functional and intangible dimensions.

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Tag: internal branding

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Employee branding is a process by which employees internalize the desired bran dimage and are motivated to project the image to customers and other organizational constituents. The messages employees take in and process influence

• the extent to which they perceive their psychological contracts with the organization to be fulfilled
• the degree to which they understand and are motivated to deliver the desired level of customer service

In so doing, they drive the formation of the employee brand. The messages employees receive must be aligned with the employees’organizational experiences if the psychological contract is to be upheld. Therefore, the conscious development of organizational messages is the fundamental building block in this process.

The messages must then be delivered through appropriate message sources.The following guidelines provide a starting point in this process:

1. Organizational messages should be carefully thought out and planned in much the same way mission and vision statements are thought out and planned.
2. The organizational messages should reflect the organization’s mission and values.
3. Messages directed toward external constituencies must be in line with the messages sent to employees.
4. Messages directed toward external constituencies should be sent internally as well.
5. The design of recruitment and selection systems should incorporate messages that consistently and frequently reflect the brand and organizational image.
6. The compensation system should incorporate messages that consistently and frequently reflect the brand and organizational image. For instance, managers in organizations that value training must be held accountable when they fail to train and develop their employees.
7. Training and development systems should help managers and employees internalize their organization’s mission and values and help them understand how the mission and values pertain to their roles in their organization.This should enable them to more effectively articulate messages that consistently and frequently reflect the brand and organizational image.
8. Advertising and public relations systems should communicate messages that consistently and frequently reflect the brand and organizational image.
9. Managers should be taught the importance of communicating messages that are consistent with their organization’s mission,vision, policies, and practices.
10. Performance management systems should address inconsistencies between practices and policies to minimize violations of employees’ psychological contracts.
11. Accurate and specific job previews should be given to new employees so that realistic expectations are incorporated into their psychological contracts.
12. Corporate culture (artifacts, patterns of behavior, management norms, values and beliefs, and assumptions) should reinforce the messages employees receive.
13. Individual output should be measured and analyzed to determine if there are message-related problems at the departmental, divisional, or organizational levels.
14. Individual messages should be continually examined for consistency with other messages.
15. Message channels should be examined to ensure consistency of message delivery.
16. In the event that messages need to be changed or psychological contracts altered, organizations must take careful steps in rewriting the messages.
17. Measures should be used to assess outcomes such as customer retention, service quality, turnover, and employee satisfaction and performance

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Related posts:
Internal Brand – 8 Principles
Building an Internal Brand
The Internal Impact of External Branding
Internal Branding: Get Yout Employees Behind Your Brand

Tags: Internal Branding, Employees Branding

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Succesfull companies do not see one single department as custodian of the customer relationship and do not rely only on market reasearch data to get to know their customers. They seek a better understanding of customer’s values, and the ways to customer relates with their brand. Then, they seek to spread this understanding at an intuitive level throughout their organisation. They build a shared understanding of the desired brand experiece and how it delivers value to the customers, emphasise trust among employees and what people must do not what people must not do.

The key principles that an organisation must follow in order to create a strong brand through its people can be summarised as follows:

1. Emphasise freedom not control

Effective brand management requires the organisation to agree to a set of firm priciples its true, but beyond that, the staff need to be trusted to get things done.

2. Decentralise

Organisations who succeed in delivering strong brands, tend to roll back the frontiers of head office.

3. Do things differently

Emphasise uniquely owned processes and practices rather than generic best practices.

4. Communicate your own brand positioning to your own people before you communicate it to your customers

This entails building a deep intuitive understanding of the brand among organisation’s own employees before communicating the brand promise to consumers.

5. Keep it simple

This applies both to the language and the processes the organisation use.

6. Operate across functions

Having a department as custodian for the brand and another one as custodian of the people simply does not fit the world-class brand buiding. A networked cross-functional way is more appropriate.

7. Think long term

Great brands are built overtime. Brand building needs to be viewed as a seven to ten year planning cycle.

8. Measure

Measure the things that really matter to the brand and one crucial thing about measurement is what happens to the results and the extent to which they are fed back to the front line staff in a way that drives actions.

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One increasingly important claim for contributing to sustained corporate success is to build bridges between the HR and the marketing function and to draw from its literature and practice on branding. Thus building, or just as often defending, a brand has become a major concern of organizations in all industries in the private sector. In addition to the for-profit sector, increasingly public sector and voluntary sector organizations are coming to realise the importance of branding, investing significant resources in building brands and trust relations with their clients and customers.

Despite the historically weak links between the marketing and HR functions, there is a growing realisation by companies and by HR professional bodies that aligning the external, corporate image of organizations with internal employee identity or engagement provides a key opportunity for HR to earn greater voice in business. This is especially so given the importance to many international companies of global branding and the role that branding and branding communications plays in strategic decision-making and such functional alignment can be viewed as part of the globalisation process.

The study concludes that advancement of the HR occupation’s status by linking it with the brand management or corporate reputation process has to demonstrate positive and objectively verifiable links between the particular expertise they bring to the ‘party’, in terms of their specialist and unique understanding of the employee identification process, employer branding and how it can be aligned with external image building. It is within such a context that HR may have to redefine its role in an increasingly globalized marketplace. The logic for doing so lies in the ability to create a corporate brand image and internal identity that cuts through national boundaries and resonates with local cultures.

Read the full study: A New Performance Discourse for HR?