Internal Branding: Patch the hole in your branding effort

Branding is an expensive and significant undertaking of a business. Nevertheless, employees are rarely considered to be an important variable in the branding process. Google, Zappos, Apple and Star Bucks are a few examples of the brands that understand the role of the employees in fulfilling their brand promise. They incorporate their employees as a core variable in their branding equation. But most of the companies, small or big, fail to have their employees recognize what it means to be working towards fulfilling a brand promise. Moreover, they do not have their human resources department involved to align culture and structure to support their brand, which leads to a long-term erosion of a brand value. Internal branding is an important concept that patches this hole in a branding effort.

Internal Branding is a process where an organization aligns their internal culture to match that of what their brand resonates so that employees are enthusiastically working towards meeting customer expectations created by a branding effort. Ceridwyn King and Debra Grace in their study ‘Internal branding: Exploring the employee's perspective’ write “through the internalisation of the brand, employees are better equipped to fulfil the explicit and implicit promises inherent in the brand and, therefore, expected by customers”. The opposite is equally true. A disconnect between the employees and the brand is likely to create an environment where a service gap – a difference between service expected by the customers and provided by employees, is too wide. Moreover, lack of a unified culture that resonates the brand message leads to inconsistency in service delivered by the employees. It is rare for a customer to walk into an Apple store and be greeted by a person who does not share an excitement or joy of a new iPhone. Driven by their culture, the Apple employees effortlessly replicate their service quality to meet the hype created by their brand. How is it possible?

Organizational culture is a magical thing if amalgamated with an external profile – summarized as the brand. However, both marketing and human resources department should come together to work the magic of strong brand culture. Timothy W. Aurand, Linda Gorchels and Terrence R. Bishop in their study ‘Human resource management's role in internal branding: an opportunity for cross‐functional brand message synergy’ stress that internal branding demands change in organizational culture where people are excited by the brand, motivated by brand building and rewarded for expansion of the market. This colossal change requires an active involvement of a senior management across all function. They write, “The brand values must form part of the recruitment guidance, the training programme, the reward structure and the motivation of employees… without the involvement of HR, it will be impossible to deliver on this aspect of brand management – marketers can develop the strategies but implementation requires HR involvement and input”.

Similarly, the following holistic model for internal branding developed by Christoph Burmann and Sabrina Zepin ascertains the role of HR as one of the key levers for generating brand commitment, and cultural and structural the context factors in internal brand management.

Besides colossal branding effort, a leadership has such a strong sense of brand ownership that they take a personal responsibility to promote their brands at every given opportunity. However, they fail to share that ownership with their employees. In an interview with Inc. magazine, Richard Branson states “if the person who works at your company is … proud of the brand and you give them the tools to do a good job and they are treated well, they are going to be happy”. Happy employees fulfill the brand promise. Thus, internal branding can be an important tool to find coordination between the organizational culture and brand promise, and HR and marketing department, which can be a reason for the enriched brand value and growth. Moreover, it is important to increase employees’ brand commitment and performance by enhancing their pride in the brand.