Internal Brand Building: Living the Brand

Increasingly, organizations are finding it critical to gain their employee’s understanding and enthusiastic support of their brand’s essence, promise and personality. They know that they must achieve integrity between what the brand says about itself and how it actually behaves. The bottom line: they understand that consistently delivering the brand promise at each and every point of customer contact is critical to their success.

Organizational Support Critical to Brand Strategy Success
In 1998, The Conference Board conducted a study on “Managing the Corporate Brand.”  In that study, they discovered four organizational support factors were critical to brand strategy success. 

They are:

•CEO leadership and support
•A distinctive corporate culture that serves as a platform for the brand promise
•The ability to obtain support from a broad spectrum of employees
•The alignment of brand messages across functions

These factors are clearly more dependent upon the human resource function than the marketing function.

The Importance of Front Line Employees
At the Institute for International Research’s December 1999 Brand Masters Conference in Palm Beach, Florida, Sixtus Oechsle, Manager, Corporate Communications & Advertising, Shell Oil Company, indicated that in a study of sources of brand favorability, Shell Oil found that interaction with company employees had the greatest impact (much greater than brand ads or news) on brand favorability. Indeed, most organizations have discovered that the ‘moment of truth’ in the delivery of the brand promise almost always occurs in customers’ interactions with front-line employees.

At the Institute for International Research’s The Branding Trilogy conference in Santa Barbara, California, Kristine Shattuck, Los Angeles Area Marketing Manager, Southwest Airlines put it well when she said, “Enthusiastic employees spread enthusiasm to customers.  Market to your employees as much as your customers.  If your employees don’t ‘get it,’ neither will your customers.”  This can only happen if top management aligns all of its organization’s processes and systems in support of its brand’s promise.