Your Brand from all Angles

Chapter 2, Part 1 - Corporate Brand Personality

Your corporate brand will be portrayed by many factors and some of those quite possibly areas that you haven’t considered as part of the branding strategy.  In fact, important areas of brand can also be overlooked during your efforts to engage all employees with the brand messaging. This Chapter will look at how your brand is projected from all angles and help you to bring some of the less obvious areas back under your control from a consistent messaging viewpoint.

Including:

·               ‘Old-style’ branding and why it’s not enough anymore

·               Hidden elements of brand messaging

·               Internal culture

·               3rd party danger zones

·               Communication is King

Corporate branding today is mostly about multiple stakeholders actually interacting with your brand, and its success therefore is largely dependent on your employees attitudes and behaviours in delivering the brand promise. Your brand image as a company creates expectations from all of your stakeholders. It defines who you are, how you operate, and how you are different from your competitors. Your brand image is a promise that you must keep and are expected to keep, and whether your positioning of your brand is successful or not remains in the hands of your employees and their behaviours.

The end result or the customer experience is the fulfilment of that promise or guarantee.  This experience cannot be left to chance and it should be consciously and continually monitored, managed and controlled in alignment with the image you want to project. It therefore needs to reinforce the brand messages consistently across every touch-point. Every person who directly or indirectly has an impact on the customer experience is a key player.  Service brands in particular remain vulnerable because of their reliance on your employees.  Your brand image and brand investment is at risk if your brand promise or guarantee is not fulfilled, and it will not be easy to get it back on-track. 

THE TRADITIONAL APPROACH IS NOT ENOUGH

Typically in a re-brand process, you bring in a brand agency to create a brand and work on how that brand is projected in the traditional ways, such as advertising, sponsorship and product packaging. In addition, sometimes brand experience specialists are hired to assess, create and address the full customer experience element too. Both are much needed services and well worth the investment.  However this alone is not enough anymore.

There is often more resource applied to these ‘non-human’ elements than those areas that really create the memory of the brand in the customers eyes; the personality of the brand projected via the interaction they have with the people in your organisation. Frequently, executive teams do not pay enough attention to just how powerfully their corporate brand is projected to the outside world by people alone, both positively and negatively.  

On speaking to many CEOs and Directors of large organisations on this point, they will verbally agree whole-heartedly that this is crucial to the bottom-line and market share. However, all too often customer service training programmes are still focused on the transactional elements of customer service rather than the authentic and outstanding experience, that goes beyond the expected, that we want and need the customer to go away with and talk about. This all-important experience will inevitably come from the softer skills, emotional intelligence and natural intuition of the member of staff in assessing a situation to influence thinking and subsequent behaviour.  

I often speak to companies where they will tell me they have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars, or much more, on their ‘new look’ brand or new customer facility, and yet when it comes to gaining budget approval for the real personality of the brand training, the element that will ultimately make the real difference and that drives the results, inevitably the budget is not there and is often not found. It’s akin to designing and building a fabulous new sports car and not putting an engine in it!

In addition, even if the people behaviour element of the brand is addressed to the level it should be for client facing frontline staff, it is rarely in my experience considered internally as important for those members of staff who work in the ‘back office’ functions such as IT, administration support, legal departments and accounts payable.   These people are considered not to be client facing therefore are often over-looked when it comes to customer-service or behavioural training programmes. This is a potentially dangerous over-sight.

MAKING THE BRAND STICK AT ALL LEVELS

It’s essential for employees at all levels of your company - from the senior leadership team to your most junior member of staff, to understand the big picture view of the customer experience and the overall corporate objective. What makes it really stick for them is if they can see the specific brand touch-points that they carry out every day and how this all fits into the overall goal. This is critical, not only for frontline staff but is as important for back-office employees, who often believe they have no impact on the customer experience. Making the connection for them, to help them to see that what they do behind the scenes in their everyday roles has as much impact on the customer experience as what their frontline colleagues do, is crucial for consistency of brand.

Today every single touch-point becomes as important as the next in providing building blocks that get talked about as a consistent brand experience. Your team members in the back-office areas of your business could seriously dilute all the great things being done at the front end of customer service, if they are not on-board with the brand messaging and understand what it truly means to the same extent. If in their role they cannot easily appreciate the big picture and brand objective and the part they play, then a significant gap could appear in the overall experience that your customers, stakeholders and suppliers receive. Consider the effect of a poor billing process, or a CRM system that fails to record information consistently, or even the legal department giving advice to the supplier-facing employee that shows little appreciation for the reality of the supplier situation or needs.

It’s worth remembering that your clients have their own customers to service also. If their life is made difficult because of complex processes and ‘jobs worth’ mind-sets within your organisation, that means that their customers in turn could be provided with a less than satisfactory service, and they will likely leave you. Brand reputation is affected by many areas of your business, and significantly so in the apparently invisible areas too.

Back-office processes and people are just as important as your front-line customer service employees and systems when it comes to your brand reputation.  If your employees are able to put themselves in your customers or suppliers shoes, and consider how their behaviour and internal processes can make the customers or suppliers lives as easy as possible, then you achieve greater consistency with the experience provided. You can only achieve this level of appreciation with the right training and the right environment and culture internally to encourage it.

Visibility into the customer experience helps everybody in your organisation to see your company as your customers do. For companies to win the loyalty of devotion of their customers, they need to experience their brands from the outside in.

Peter Cheese , CEO of the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) in the UK, told me that he believes in order for individuals to be fully immersed and engaged in reinforcing the corporate brand, there also has to be alignment. “Individuals need to be, not just engaged but aligned to the purpose, outcomes and objectives. They can be engaged but this could be in the wrong direction”.  This is an interesting consideration – are you really measuring true engagement and alignment to the brand, or just engagement per se?

Individuals need to be able to see how what they do specifically in their role relates to the overall corporate or team objectives. What purpose do they fulfil?

In order to effectively engage people to the level needed for them to be their best and do their best at work you need to consider three core elements:

Empowerment

Support

Purpose

Empowerment – most people have the ability to make the right decisions but sadly many are stifled by their direct line manager. An individual needs to feel valued and respected for the role they do and what they bring to the overall team objective in order to get on with the job in hand and operate to their full potential. Every individual has an inner drive and this needs to be exploited to allow full potential to be reached. I believe that everybody wants to come to work with the intention of doing the best job they can, but they need the environment and encouragement to enable this.

Support – it’s not enough to just say that you empower people to make the right decisions; you also need to support this actively to give them the confidence to operate in this manner. You and your line managers throughout the business have a responsibility to help them to develop and progress. Generation Zers will expect and demand this level of support also, so it’s no longer an option to ignore it.

Purpose – people need to understand why they are doing something and what difference it makes to end results.  Without a clear purpose or direction, none of us is inspired to work hard to make a difference and influence change.

These three core components should be part of your everyday agenda with your employees. Added to this, employees need to be given the tools to develop their own Personal Brands encompassing these core elements. The complete combination of these four areas provides you with true engagement of your staff. When we look at Personal Brands in Chapter 5, we will address the challenge of allowing people to be their best selves authentically in more depth.

#TrueEngagement #Empowerment #BrandAwareness #CustomerExperience #CorporateBrand #LeadershipBrand #BrandPersonality #CustomerLoyalty #DigitalMarketing #CustomerService #BusinessSuccess #MarketingStrategy #BrandReputation #ClientEngagement #SocialMediaImpact #CustomerFirst #TrustAndRespect #CorporateCulture #BrandCommunication #CustomerFeedback #BusinessGrowth #LeadershipConsultant #KeynoteSpeaker #BusinessInnovation

Copyright Lesley Everett 2024