From A brand to OUR brand

What do successful brands like Zappos, Google and New Belgium all have in common? Their employees exhibit passion and energy for their company, their brand and their ability to deliver on the brand promise.

At Zappos, they position their brand to be “a service company that happens to sell shoes among other things.”  However, providing great service requires a customer-focused culture. So their number one core value for the company is “Deliver WOW through service.” They train and empower their employees to live and deliver “WOW,” and make “WOW” part of the every day vocabulary.  All new hires at Zappos.com Las Vegas headquarters, “including accountants, lawyers and software developers,” are required to go through Customer Loyalty training.

At Google, they realize that in order for employees to be champions of the brand, they must also be champions of their own products.  It is a culture norm for all employees to use Google’s products daily in their work, and there are ways to easily relay feedback and share ideas for the innovation process.  To make sure the “Google blinders” aren’t on, employees also try out all of their competitors’ products.  Through this practice, employees stay up to date on continuous product iterations and innovations that occur each day, and most importantly, know first hand what sets the Google brand apart from everyone else.

New Belgium is a microbrewery in Colorado with a large and loyal following. New Belgium has built a brand based on sustainability, which they preach internally as well as externally. After one year of employment, all employees gain an ownership stake in the company and a customized New Belgium bicycle, which symbolizes the company’s commitment to sustainability. Employee ownership also empowers employees to carry forth the brand on their own, without a mandate from above. In 1998 employee owners voted unanimously to turn New Belgium into the first wind-powered brewery. In addition, 1% of all revenues go to environmental non-profits.

All of these examples show great practices in internal branding, which can be defined as programs and tools to inspire and engage employees to “live and deliver” the brand. As many successful brands have learned, employees can be your most passionate and powerful brand champions.  However, brands can also fail because they lack the organizational buy-in, energy and momentum to achieve a sustainable and recognizable position in the marketplace.  Studies show that, on average, only about one-third of employees are actually highly engaged champions of their brand. This means, that many brands, new or existing, are at risk of failure.

Lessons

We recently worked with a company to develop a strong, recognizable brand and positioning and faced this very challenge – how to engage the entire organization to be champions of the brand.  Based on this experience, we wanted to share our learnings with you, because not all brands are like Google and gain instant brand enthusiasts in the hiring process.  When we started this work, we were focused on two important steps: 1) creating an effective and compelling brand strategy and 2) effectively launching the brand in the market.  However, there remained an extremely important step in the middle – launching the brand internally.  To do this, we first thought about our biggest organizational obstacles.  For any company embarking on an initiative to brand internally, here are some important questions to consider in determining the challenges ahead:

•    Do senior leaders believe enough in the importance of branding and the brand itself to stand behind it and invest in its success?
•    What is the current mindset of employees at the start of this initiative? Have there been failed branding initiatives in the past that may cause employees to be more skeptical?
•    How large and spread out is the organization geographically, and are functions and regions well aligned and in close communication?
•    Has the company ever had a customer centric mindset that lends itself to the importance of branding, or is there a “build it and they will come” mentality?
•    How well do employees believe in the strength of the current offering and its potential?

Even if your answers to these questions make you skeptical about the outcome of an internal branding initiative, our recent work in this area has unveiled some key initiatives that will increase your chances of success.

•    Have it come from within
•    Build circles of influence
•    Don’t just tell…inspire
•    Educate and engage
•    Make it more than words on a page

Have it come from within. When developing or revitalizing a brand, it is important to make employees feel like they are part of it.  When people feel responsible for the brand’s origin or direction, they have a lot more passion and ownership, versus when they are told by Marketing or the powers above what the brand is to be.  Methods to instill ownership of the brand range from a simple employee wide survey to gather opinions, to one-on-one interviews with various stakeholders, to having people from key regions and functions react to iterations in the brand’s development.

Build circles of influence. This is particularly important for large, complex organizations, in which Marketing is limited by the reach and number of people on the team.  Before a new brand strategy is rolled out to the entire organization, it’s important to immerse select employees in its development.  These individuals could be:

•    Organizational leaders: Senior management or individuals with strong influence within the company
•    Early pioneers: Individuals or groups who will be the initial implementers of any new brand strategy “proof points” in the market
•    Motivators: Employees with a natural skill to inspire others in the organization around an idea and who have strong passion for the potential of the company
•    International counterparts: Individuals in offices around the world that serve in one of the three roles above

Don’t just tell…inspire. In sharing the brand strategy with employees, it is important to take measures to inspire them to believe in the brand and its promise. This is important because emotions help people care.  When people are emotionally engaged by an idea or initiative, they are more likely to become part of it and take action.  Some methods to inspire include immersion workshops to generate excitement around the possibilities of the brand, or creative forms of media to communicate the meaning and essence of the brand.  These could include an object for their desk that illustrates the soul of the brand, a compelling brand film that conveys the emotional promise, or mocked up visuals illustrating the “imagine ifs” for the future brand.

Educate and engage. Knowledge is power, so it is important to create a central forum to educate the organization about the brand and all of its elements.  It is also important to clearly connect the brand strategy back to the role of every individual in the company.  Concepts that stick in an organization are clear, not abstract or ambiguous. In order to make something clear and easy for others to understand, you should explain it using concrete images that take advantage of existing schemas in the audience’s mind.6 Without this information, employees, especially those outside of Marketing, are disengaged from the brand.  An individual who works in Accounts Payable is not likely to realize that her actions and dialogue with customers, partners or vendors can speak volumes about the brand.  Many brands address this through a creative and inviting brand website that is accessible to employees, vendors, partners, etc. and contains information, guidelines, role play scenarios, etc. as well as a place for open dialogue and questions.

Make it more than words on a page. Depending on past experience with the organization or previous employers, many or some employees prefer to reserve their efforts and go into “wait and see” mode when a new brand strategy is launched internally.  Without tangible proof points that the company is making impressive changes in its approach to align with the new brand, they might feel as if they are wasting their energy on something that will never come to fruition.  This does not mean that a company has to spend millions changing its entire go-to-market approach to turn employees into believers.  In fact, new branding efforts that are broad and spread too thinly across every aspect of the organization lose their meaning and commitment and are usually unsuccessful.  Instead, the best approach is to identify select initiatives within the company that will have the biggest initial impact for the brand relative to the level of required investment, and start there.

Conclusion

“A brand that captures your mind gains behavior. A brand that captures your heart gains commitment.” When implementing a new brand strategy, employees can be your toughest customers, however, when the organization is rallied around the brand, it can be a formidable force in the market.  We have seen this through the incredible success of brands like Zappos, Google and New Belgium, all of which have enviable brand ambassadorship.  By capturing employees’ hearts, giving them the tools and information to engage, and proving leadership’s commitment to execution, an organization can succeed in creating powerful brand champions.

Sources:

Brandeo. Brands: Zappos Brand Based on Great Service Not Lip Service
Building a Customer Focused Culture, Presentation by Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos
Interview with Google employee
www.newbelgium.com
“7 great places to work” CNN.com
Employee Brand Engagement: It’s Not a Myth—Happy People Make Happy Businesses.
Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, Dan Heath and Chip Heath
Scott Talgo, Brand Strategist
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