360 Branding
a shared script for marketers, Communicators and people managers
Phil Askham & Susannah Feeley
Senior consultants, Interbrand Inside

Scene 1
The Marketing Director rose to her feet, aware that the agenda of the Board meeting had so far focussed on cost-cutting. She delivered a slick proposal for a summer advertising campaign to increase brand awareness and to present her company as the provider, not just of leading products, but also of great customer service. The presentation went well. Lots of nodding heads, enthusiasm for the creative concepts and an understanding of the importance of improving brand awareness in the market place.

She completed her presentation, sat down, and
invited questions: Costs? Timescales? Target
audience? Conversion rates? Competitor response? Media and Analyst reaction? All good questions and all well answered.
The CEO had remained quiet up to this point. He put down his pen, sat back in his chair, looked at the Marketing Director and HR Director in turn, and asked: “and what percentage of this marketing budget do you propose to spend internally on involving and engaging our people to ensure we get a return on this investment?”

PAUSE…
Question: How often does this happen?
Answer: Not often enough.
It’s easy to get caught up in the language of brands as if they’re somehow separate from the organisations they represent. But brands are only sustainable when the things they stand for are consistently brought to life by the employee for the customer.
The truth is that investing in external brand awareness is a false economy if the customer experiences something different. In fact, it may well be escalating the pace of customer dissatisfaction. Attracted to the shop window by the promise created by PR and advertising, customers will naturally use that promise as the benchmark for judging the service they receive. What really matters is what happens inside the shop window. Where brand promise meets service reality. And in most markets customers will be unforgiving if the reality falls short.
That same benchmark applies inside the organisation. Unless the behaviour of the leadership team, the authenticity of internal communication and the draw of the organisational vision replicate the power and passion of the external promise to customers - then the result will be confusion and disengagement.
Indifference of staff is the cause of 68 per cent of customer defections - only 14 per cent defect because of product quality. Then look at the opportunities: a 5 per cent increase in customer loyalty equates to a 25-85 per cent increase in profits. In the war for customer loyalty, the companies that are in front are those that are nurturing a business culture that expresses their brand values every day, through a workforce that understands the brand, its value to the business and their role in delivering that value.

So what does it take to bring a brand to life for employees?
While there are no preset answers, a typical process of 360* brand engagement can be distilled into a clear 4-step journey:
*ensure that the top team know why they are embarking on the journey in the first place
* communicate a compelling story to employees which explains the importance of the brand and its delivery
* help people to experience the story and understand the role they can play in making it happen
* and finally, reinforce it through the processes you use to manage the business.
Very rarely does an organisation start down this path without some baggage. And organisational life is never as linear or mechanistic as this model suggests. So the journey needs to be adapted to the particular circumstances of the time and the place.
Here are a few more lessons learned through experience of 360* branding inside leading organisations.

1. Bringing the brand to life inside an organisation demands more than just integrated marketing.
It’s great to indulge our employees in a sneak preview of the new advertising campaign or an early sample of a next-generation product. But we shouldn’t delude ourselves into thinking that these things deliver anything more than brand awareness.
Sustained commitment to an organisation and the brand demands something more fundamental and ongoing in which employees:
— have a clear understanding of what their organisation stands for, where it is going, and what is their own personal contribution towards it success
— experience a sense of involvement in change and ownership of efforts to improve things for the better
— enjoy genuine confidence in their leaders
— feel supported by the management processes which define their roles, develop their careers and assess their performance.

2. Brand engagement cannot be conscripted - it can only be volunteered.
People perform at their best when they are given a framework and the space to make their own decisions, not when they are told how to act according to some preset notion of “on-brand behaviour”.
The challenge for the organisation is to shift the employee’s experience of the internal branding from a pre-packaged, off-the-shelf solution to a learning opportunity. It’s about creating the platform and providing the license for people to discover what the brand means to them.
When this is done well it invariably leads the employee to conclude not only that they belong to something worthwhile but that by belonging and contributing they will be helping themselves to achieve their own ambitions. Only then do employees become genuine brand advocates.

3. CEO stands for Chief Engagement Officer.
The contribution of leaders is crucial. Leaders must care enough about a brand’s values that they are prepared to talk about them, live them and to create an environment in which others can make them real.
A necessary part of leadership is the public performance. As a leader, you have to be conscious of your behaviour because everyone else is. People watch closely how their leaders behave and will pick up on any mismatch between words and action.
It’s all too easy for brand engagement to fall apart because the clarion call to do something different (such as “get closer to customers!” or “innovate more!”) is not convincingly demonstrated by people at the top. Leaders need some support in this process - don’t assume they are clear about what they need to do (or stop doing) to bring the brand to life.

4. An engaged organisation is a talking, listening and learning organisation.
Effective engagement breeds a sense of community. Widespread engagement in values implies shared values, and values, which are shared, bind individuals to a group.
Likewise, organisations that are good at communicating internally find it easier to engage in the brand. Brand engagement is at its heart a personal journey. A journey which is fuelled by an open and responsible dialogue between employees, the people who manage their performance (line managers) and the people who chart the organisation’s ultimate destiny (leaders).
After leaders, your line managers are the critical group in driving the engagement process forward. They sit at the crossroads of two-way dialogue and set the mood for the working day.
So, how strong are your channels of communication and your internal feedback loops? And how competent are your middle managers at communicating up, down and across the organisation?
On such fundamentals rests the success of your brand engagement.

5. Employees who choose to buy your products and services can be your best ambassadors.
How many of your people buy your products? And how many go to your competitors? Do you know? Ask yourself. You are trying to persuade others to use your product. But would you choose it for yourself? If not, why?
You also need those who don’t spend their money on the company to be your most constructive critics. But do they care enough to tell you why they don’t purchase what they produce? And do you create the kind of environment where they feel safe to tell you?

6. The problem with too many values programmes is that they don’t distinguish one organisation from another.
Research has found that over 90 per cent of all corporate value sets are drawn from 12 generic words or phrases, including the old favourites - customer focus, innovation, quality, integrity, teamwork and results.
The fact is that actions always speak louder than words. And customer service is also the hardest thing for a competitor to emulate. The key to market differentiation lies not in what you TELL people are your values but in HOW you and your people bring those values to life and reinforce them day to day through the way they behave.

7. A new alliance is forming inside leading organisations between the Marketing, Communications and HR Departments.
Interbrand has always argued that strong brands grow from the inside out and that, as any organisation’s most important and sustainable asset, they should be the central organising principle of strategy. But they cannot float above and beyond the employee’s experience of work or capabilities. They only become truly compelling and inimitable when they are grounded by the organisation’s distinctive strengths and rooted in their unique culture.
The convergence of the employee and customer worlds is increasingly reflected in the way that the Marketing, Communications and HR communities are working, putting forward a combined business case to do something of sustainable value for their organisations.

8. You can demonstrate the value of people programmes in words - and numbers - that your Finance Director will understand.
The return on investment from people programmes is often likened to a holy grail - probable but not provable. But that’s just not true.
There is now extensive research, which confirms the bottom-line value of effective leadership and the right culture, making the connection between the employee’s commitment to work, the customer’s loyalty that it builds and the financial returns that such loyalty generates.
You can now take evaluation even further upstream to understand what drives changes in your employees’ commitment or, more specifically, what your employees thought of a recent communication or leadership programme. And by combining web-based research and statistics, you can have answers to such questions resolved within a few days.
So now, when you go to the keepers of the corporate purse with requests for funds, you don’t have to rely just on generic theories but on something much closer to home.
And so we return to our fictional Board meeting…

Scene 2
…the HR Director leaned forward, and responded: “This external marketing campaign plan is aligned with an internal plan to involve and engage all of our people - including third party suppliers - in our vision, to link the internal and the external brand to one company brand, and to creatively identify how we all as individuals, and how we as a company, can ensure the return on this investment by converting window shoppers to committed customers. 10 per cent of the ad spend looks a sound investment…”

So the challenge goes out to…
1. HR Directors - are you getting your 10 per cent of ad spend to involve and engage people?
2. Marketing Directors - are the internal and external brand messages aligned so as to deliver what is promised?
3. Finance Directors - are you investing in your brand internally as well as externally?
4. CEO’s - is your leadership team working in partnership to enable your people achieve a return on investment?

Phil Askham and Susannah Feeley are both senior consultants at Interbrand Inside, a management consultancy based in London and part of the worldwide Interbrand Group. Interbrand Inside helps their clients create people- powered businesses. They are currently working with organisations in the UK, Europe and India to bring their brands to life.

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