Internal Branding: Get Your Employees Behind Your Brand

Your advertising. Your packaging. Your corporate business cards. Even your product itself. They all reflect your brand, and your brand is your company’s single most valuable asset. And although it is nurtured and managed by your marketing department, your brand is represented by your entire organization. From the receptionist at the front desk to the customer service rep staffing the phones. That’s why a strong brand requires that everyone in your organization has a complete understanding of, and ability to express, your brand positioning and attributes.

When your employees are aligned behind your brand identity, you maximize the strength of your brand. An effective brand communications program consists of six steps:

1. Awareness
Most likely, your marketing department has a thorough understanding of the brand, but others in the organization need a general awareness of the corporate brand and what it stands for.
For this you can use existing communications vehicles and tools like new-hire orientations, all-company meetings, corporate e-mails, training videos, corporate newsletters, the company Intranet, newsgroups and other internal communications vehicles to generate greater employee awareness, and constantly ask yourself : Are our internal communications on-brand?

2. Education
Once everyone in your organization is aware of the brand, they need to understand the values and visual components that comprise the brand, how it is communicated, and what constitutes on-brand and off-brand qualities.

3. Buy-In
Establishing a brand-related goal in each employee’s personal goals and objectives for the year will make sure they think about their roles in building the corporate brand. Ensure that managers understand how to develop brand objectives for their staff. It is essential that all managers have a complete understanding of the brand, and that they express the brand clearly, consistently, and constantly.

4. Actions
By participating in brand contests and other ways to express the corporate brand, your employees take more and more responsibility for the brand — they become invested in the brand. They’re proactive in nurturing the brand. They support the brand in all their day-to-day activities. They remain on-brand in everything they do, they find creative ways to promote the brand.

5. Results
Communicate with them about the state of the brand. Share brand research results, showing how each organization within the company is doing with overall brand objectives. Spread the word about recognition and awards from outside organizations. And even more: Strong Brand = More Money. That’s an equation everybody can understand!

6. Recognition
One of the best ways to reinforce positive brand actions is to reward them. Give special recognition to employees who live the brand.

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7 Important Factors in Building Brand Value

Professor David Jobber identifies seven main factors in building successful brands:

Quality

Quality is a vital ingredient of a good brand. The core benefits must be delivered well, consistently. Research confirms that, statistically, higher quality brands achieve a higher market share and higher profitability that their inferior competitors.

Positioning

Positioning is about the position a brand occupies in a market in the minds of consumers. Strong brands have a clear, often unique position in the target market. It can be achieved through the combination of brand name, image, service standards, product guarantees, packaging and the way in which it is delivered.

Repositioning

Repositioning occurs when a brand tries to change its market position to reflect a change in consumer’s tastes. This is often required when a brand has become tired.

Communications

All elements of the promotional mix need to be used to develop and sustain customer perceptions. Initially, the challenge is to build awareness, then to develop the brand personality and reinforce the perception.

First-mover advantage

In terms of brand development, first-mover means that it is possible for the first successful brand in a market to create a clear positioning in the minds of target customers before the competition enters the market.

Long-term perspective

This leads to the need to invest in the brand over the long-term. Building customer awareness, communicating the brand’s message and creating customer loyalty takes time. This means that management must invest in a brand, perhaps at the expense of short-term profitability.

Internal marketing

Management should ensure that the brand is marketed internally as well as externally. By this we mean that the whole business should understand the brand values and positioning. This is particularly important in service businesses where a critical part of the brand value is the type and quality of service that a customer receives.

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Make Your Small Business A Big Name

Brand building is simply a new label for a collection of functions that have always been necessary to make a business successful, requiring ongoing effort in several areas to increase the public’s awareness of your business name and logo as well as to build a strong company “essence” that inspires loyalty and trust in your current customers and provides a level of familiarity and comfort to draw in potential customers.

A carefully built brand is worth more in actual dollars than all the tangible assets put together and is what will reap monetary rewards when you’re ready to sell your company. The first thing you have to do is decide how you want people to perceive your business, and then figure out what you have to do to get there.

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Positioning – what’s new?

Since we discussed earlier that positioning is one key element in creating a winning brand, there’s a another wave of opinnions which consider that rise of sophisticated and knowledgeable consumers, is the main reason for the fall of positioning. Instead, companies are adopting a new strategy that recognizes the impact of the Internet and globalization on purchasing and business behavior. Consumers now buy based on research and personal value, not how on companies seek to position their products.

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15 Things to Know About Building Winning Brands

Author of Brand Aid: An Easy Reference Guide to Solving Your Toughest Branding Problems and Strengthening Your Market, Brad Vanauken, points out 15 most important things to take care of in building a winning brand:

1. Brands are Personifications of Organizations, Products, Services and Experiences
In this way, they are the primary sources of relationships with customers, promises to customers and customer loyalty.

2. Top Management Support is Crucial
The toughest obstacles that brand champions have encountered in creating brand building organizations, three of the top nine involve the lack of top management support.

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7 elements of brand valuation

The [tag]Interbrand[/tag] model of brand strength is a useful framework to consider the performance of your own brand. Consider these seven points and you should get a better sense of the strength of your own brand, as well as some ideas on how to move forward.

Market: 10% of brand strength. Brands in markets where consumer preferences are more enduring would score higher.

Stability: 15% of brand strength. Long-established brands in any market would normally score higher, because of the depth of loyalty they command.

Leadership: 25% of brand strength. A market leader is more valuable: being a dominant force and having strong market share matters.

Profit trend: 10% of brand strength. The long-term profit trend of the brand is an important measure of its ability to remain contemporary and relevant to consumers.

Support: 10% of brand strength. Brands that receive consistent investment and focused support usually have a much stronger franchise, but the quality of this support is as important as the quantity.

Geographic spread: 25% of brand strength. Brands that have proven international acceptance and appeal are inherently stronger than regional brands or national brands, as they are less susceptible to competitive attack.

Protection: 5% of brand strength. Securing full protection for the brand under international trademark and copyright law is the final component of brand strength in the Interbrand model.

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Brand new… branding

Even if it’s 4 year old In a article published on darwinmag.com, it’s still actual through the subjects discussed by four branding specialists.

Ten years ago, the average person thought of branding as that creative thing you do with the name of a product.Or it meant designing a new wrapper. Or maybe it was the print or television advertising that relayed the brand message.

Today, [tag]branding[/tag] is everything—and I mean everything. Brands are not simply products or services. Brands are the sum total of all the images that people have in their heads about a particular company and a particular mark.

Branding has become a religion in most corporations, and it’s very hard to dislodge it, because people believe that the brand itself is something that changes consumer behavior. We tend to think that branding comes first and the company’s success follows. In fact, when you look at most businesses, the products came first.

Historically, a brand has been a promise that says, “If you buy this product or buy from my company, you can rely on me because of the attributes attached to the brand.” We’re going to see a new kind of branding emerge, a much more customer-centric branding where the promise is, “I know you as an individual customer better than anyone else, and you can trust me to assemble the right products or services to meet your individual needs.”

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Create a Brand that Sticks

Most people, when they hear the word branding, think logos – but in fact, branding is really much more than that. A brand involves blending the image, purpose, and focus of your business, with your core marketing message, and coming up with something which will stick in the minds of people who encounter it. As a business or an independent professional, it is who you are and what you do, packaged neatly, clearly, and memorably. A [tag]logo[/tag] is only a tangible representation that works to reinforce a brand.

So – what kind of personality does your business have? Is it conservative and solid? Outgoing and fun? Or robust and strong? And, what is your business focused on doing? Whom do you want to work with? How does your business differ from the competition? And what makes it so special, after all? Do not try to name every special quality or unique selling point – you can actually build a brand on just one unique quality! Once you can answer these questions, you can begin to create your brand. The question is what you want YOUR brand to leave behind in people’s heads.

More about How to Create a Brand that Sticks

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Brands and Branding

Branding: yes, you need a brand.
First, branding is a key defense against commoditization – a situation in which a company’s products and services become perceived by buyers as being interchangeable with those of other companies, so buying decisions become driven by price. With the trend toward instantly and globally searchable competition across all product and service categories, the pull toward commoditization is now an elemental force in marketing. The value of branding – intelligent, relevant, branding that effectively differentiates you from your competition – has never been higher.

Branding will not create a spike in cash flow or market share.
Quite the opposite in fact: it costs time and money to build brand equity whether you’re launching a new brand or re-launching an old one.

If you’re [tag]rebranding[/tag], by the time you’ve spent enough time and money on advertising and marketing, the conditions that triggered your quest to rebrand will have changed. Rebranding as reflex action to stem losses in market share is stupid.

At a certain point, sales is branding: the more sales you have, the more market share you have, the more people see and hear of you, and the more they will think of you. Without sales and market share, branding accomplishes nothing.

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