Branding From the Inside Out: Transformation Begins Within

If you’re a CMO you know how it goes; you’re planning a marketing campaign to support business objectives. It must engage target audiences, hit key performance indicators and drive bottom line results. Where do you start?

Identify your target audiences and profitable intersection points?

If so, you wouldn’t be wrong. That’s an excellent place to begin. Follow that with customer journey research that yields insight into behavior, pain points and opportunities for your brand to solve their problems and meet their needs.

If you’re doing that, keep it up. But, if your own employees aren’t one of your target audiences, your campaign could fail to achieve desired results.

Branding Success Builds from the Inside Out

Internal marketing is not a new concept. Sure, it has gone by different names over the decades. Employee engagement is really just another prism for internal branding. It’s natural to think of customers when you engage in marketing; after all, they are your target audience. But, your employees are the “body” of your brand.

I’ve often said that a brand is a living organism – a soul of sorts. If your brand is the soul of your company, your employees are its hands, and feet, and mind, and heart.

Your employees are the ones who will make your brand come alive for your customers and prospects. They are the ones who will speak the brand messaging. They will live its values. They will keep, or break, its promises.

If you are overlooking, or worse – ignoring, your employees as a key audience in your marketing strategy, you are destined to achieve lackluster results.

Smart CMOs and CEOs understand this.

The successful brands my agency has worked with occupy wildly different industries, spanning manufacturing, construction, education, technology, healthcare, banking, and insurance. But they all have one thing in common – they have strong, resilient and authentic internal cultures and they value their employees above (or at least alongside) profit. They understand that any business must be profitable to grow, but they never forget that their employees are the difference between surviving and thriving.

They invest in their branding, ensuring the message they share externally is believed, owned and lived internally.

Internal Branding is Intentional

People outside of marketing believe advertising is magic; that there’s no way to explain why some creative works and others don’t. Consistent success isn’t achieved by happenstance. It’s the result of intentional decisions to invest in customer research, internal branding and ongoing product or service improvement.

Your brand is your experience. Let that sink in. The experience you provide customers – from start to finish—is your brand. And in order to ensure that brand is lived out, there must be both internal and external focus on the brand. One cannot exist without the other. Aligning your brand strategy to the operations of your business means that your employees are the living breathing vessels who share your brand.

That’s why I believe all successful brands are built from the inside out. Consider an insurance client OBI Creative guided through a rebrand.

GuideOne Insurance – Internal Branding Exemplified

GuideOne was founded in 1947 to serve religious organizations. While it had always been a fierce advocate for its customers, as the niche it served grew increasingly crowded, it began to lose market share to competitors.

While the brand expanded its coverage area, it struggled to make connections with prospects. Seeking a refreshed, reinvigorated and reimagined identity, the insurance company knew it was time for a rebrand.

Qualitative and quantitative research with leadership, customers and team members uncovered a common desire – less focus on insurance products and more on the people benefitting from it. A transformation ensued. Yes, there was a new messaging platform, logo, sales materials, signage, website and swag, but the rebrand began inside and moved outward. The culture that had made the insurance company successful for so many years was not forgotten in the rebrand.

From the head of operations to the facilities manager, the brand was shared and understood and bought into by the entire organization before it launched externally. This is what I mean when I say the best brands are built from the inside out. Aligning your brand purpose to the daily operations of the business is essentially to gain the buy-in required to have a meaningful – and profitable – brand.

The company headquarters was overlaid, on the inside, with the new brand, and internal sessions were held, both gaining employee feedback and training employees on the new messaging, identity and values. GuideOne leadership understood that without a powerful emotional connection to the products they sold, and the end result of those products – changed lives, employees would likely undermine the brand promises being communicated externally.

Moving from Misalignment to Reverence

When misalignment happens it is not necessarily nefarious. Often, employees may miss the mark on the new messaging simply because they haven’t been exposed to it; sometimes, they don’t understand it. Avoid this by making sure employees, vendors, partners and customers all understand the why, or purpose, of a brand, for that is how they will be able to live it. People must find meaning and purpose in a brand in order to embrace it. People are unified and motivated by a common cause that they believe in and feel passionately about.

For your employees, this common cause and shared identity can be the brand. Your brand promise should be the higher purpose all employees from the CEO to the hourly mailroom worker are working together to fulfill. That honest, authentic reality has to be understood at all levels of the business, or it just plain won’t work.

Unfortunately, at most companies, internal marketing is neglected, overlooked or performed poorly. Executives must do more than pay mere lip service to the brand. Rebranding in a vacuum and then presenting it in 15 minutes at a quarterly meeting is not enough. Such an approach is not only insufficient, but is also disrespectful to the individuals who built the business from its beginning to what it has become today; to the customers who sustain it; and to the employees who deliver day in and day out for the brand.

If you want anyone to have reverence for your brand, you must first have respect for those who engage with it.

Employees Make the Brand Visible, Tangible, to Customers

Brands aren’t meant to collect dust on a shelf. If that’s all the brand is at your business, your company will eventually wind up collecting dust on the shelf of bygone businesses, all of which formerly thrived but ended up dead or dying in obscurity.

Why go that route? You have other choices. All leaders want to build a legacy that will outlive them. Your brand can be that legacy when you build it from the inside out.

Engage your entire organization in your branding, or rebranding, effort. Have brand champions in HR, operations, IT, finance, sales and fulfillment. Don’t leave the job to marketing alone – let them lead and sponsor the hard work it takes to uncover the true meaning behind your brand. That is their area of expertise.

Then, instead of broadcasting the brand to your employees, engage them in it. Help them first understand the real meaning behind your brand, and then you can share the what and the how. Convince them of the value of its purpose. Show them the difference they can make in the lives of other employees and customers through the work they get to participate in each day at the office.

Instead of telling employees what your company is doing at annual meetings and quarterly updates, sell them on the ideas you’re striving to make realities. Think of your employees as another target audience whom you are trying to convince of the value of your brand. Seek to build affinity internally while you do so externally.

When employees live the brand vision, customers are much more likely to see it in action.

Link Internal and External Communications

It’s not uncommon for insurance and financial companies, such as banks and credit unions, to have separate departments for external and internal communications. Distinction isn’t necessarily detrimental, as long as there is connection, coordination and synergy between the teams in each department.

Make sure they work together to ensure all communications ultimately tie back to the brand identity, values and promise. Make sure employees are not told one thing by management and hearing an entirely different message in company advertisements and marketing materials. If the brand communicates that policyholders are the number one priority, but internally, employees are told to sacrifice policyholder experience at the altar of cost reduction, employees will become disenchanted and eventually, disengaged, which will reverberate outward in their interactions with customers and prospects.

A successful internal branding campaign can change how employees think about everything they do – from how they name products to how they fulfill orders to how they answer the phone. As this happens, external messages ring true and the brand’s authenticity skyrockets.

Arming your people with the brand essence and reinforcing it in all you do operationally is a recipe for success. Use your brand as the guide post to direct all major decisions within the organization. Whether it be in how you treat one another, how you treat customers or how you determine the quality level of a component for your raw materials, err on the side of your brand, and you will attract customers and employees that are the right fit for your business.

So now what?

Perhaps you’re convinced at this point of the value of internal branding. The next step is to invest in it. Consider investing in customer research that will reveal the voice of your employees – their attitudes, desired experiences and expression of the brand. From that bedrock, design a brand strategy and messaging platform to effectively communicate the purpose, position, value, vision and promise of the brand to employees. Then, execute upon it with the right array of tactics to move employee, and customer from awareness to advocacy to raving fan.

Remember that the responsibility to make employees care about the brand rests on your shoulders and is absolutely essential.