Internal Branding
If a brand is a collection of experiences, then the success of your brand lies largely in the hands of your employees.
Whether employees are interacting directly with customers, collaboratively developing new products or composing marketing messages that align to the brand promise, they are creating the ‘brand experiences’ that build brand equity. They are the ambassadors of your brand, which makes it critical to help employees ‘live the brand’.
Internal branding is a set of strategic processes that aligns employee behaviours to the brand promise and empowers employees to consistently deliver branded customer experiences.
The benefits of successful internal branding are two-fold:
- increased customer loyalty through branded customer experiences, further entrenching the brand promise in customers’ minds;
- increased levels of employee attraction and retention, and;
- improved team collaboration.
Internal branding processes include:
- The identification of key employee experience drivers
- Buy-in from senior leadership, mid-management, and front-line employees
- Training, orientation and performance management support
- Collaboratively identifying on-brand employee behaviours
- Ongoing internal communications – intranet, video, podcasts, employee story-telling
- Measurement – innovative, customized employee surveys and focus groups; senior management interviews and facilitation
