Brands are defined by people so it’s your staff who determine how your organisation is viewed, both internally and externally, therefore they can build or destroy your brand, and ultimately this can influence your profitability, your market share and your success. If your employees live the brand promise they are your most powerful advocates as brand consistency throughout helps drive an organisation to grow and prosper. The benefits are enormous - strong brands can drive an increase in sales, and organisations with a strong brand culture are better placed to attract and retain the best employees, and attract potential investors.
To deliver the brand promise everyone in the organisation needs to know what the brand means and the values of the brand and how this translates into everything the organisation says and does externally and internally. Brand alignment is a behavioural approach to brand management and it is a ‘discipline’ that ensures that your brand promise is consistent in everything an organization does and says – be it new product development, marketing, sales, recruitment, or even management. We operate in a dynamic world so the brand and its alignment across an organization need regular review - having a great set of standards that everyone works to isn’t enough.
Brand alignment is a behavioural approach to brand management that involves marketing and HR working closely together to align the brand through management and staff behaviour. Your brand promises your clients or customers a particular experience and branding from an employee perspective should promise that same experience. The brand should be consistent across the organisation’s culture and values, it’s people management, its strategy and its policies. It takes time to effectively build a corporate culture that mirrors your brand and to train your employees to articulate and deliver that brand. Together marketing and HR need to work across every level within an organisation so that everyone understands that the brand experience for employees is just as important as that to your clients or customers.
It takes time to effectively build a corporate culture that mirrors your brand, to get staff buy-in, to train your employees to articulate and deliver the brand and bring all internal activities such as appraisals, performance targets/measures, policies etc into alignment with the brand. Not every organisation has the resources, skills or passion in house to undertake such a project. Because the brand is so central to the success of an organisation putting the project on the back burner will have detrimental effects on the performance of the organisation. Outsourcing is a prudent solution.
SFM Consulting can provide you with the skills and resources to:
SFM Consulting works closely with a number of marketing consultants should there be weaknesses in the communication of the brand externally.