The Power of Internal Branding

Have you ever noticed when walking into a company’s offices or warehouse for the first time, that within minutes, you somehow detect a refreshing level of enthusiasm and commitment among the people you meet? There is something positive animating the environment.

At least part of what you’re sensing is the employees’ collective, heartfelt loyalty to the brand.

The effort to consciously cultivate this experience is often referred to as internal branding—a concept predicated on the belief that your employees are a key audience just as important to reach as your customers and prospects.

As with all branding efforts, authenticity is key. If a company attempts to instill excitement around brand virtues that it really doesn’t possess, it actually generates cynicism among employees. Mission statement posters that claim one thing while management attitudes and behaviors say another end up breeding low-level negativity among employees—a passive aggressive attitude that ultimately seeps out into interactions with customers. It’s like a low-grade fever that passes from employees to customers and never quite gets cured.

On the other hand, brand loyalty is equally contagious. Customers can’t help but be swept up in the excitement of a company's employees living out the highest virtues of a company's brand. To create this positive flywheel effect within a business, internal branding must be reinforced three ways:

1.  From the inside out
2.  From the top down
3.  From the bottom up

1.  From the Inside Out

“Our internal branding is really all about our company’s culture. It grows from the inside out,” a colleague recently explained to me. “We set expectations from day one with all new employees regarding our brand values, beginning with an orientation that includes a dialogue with our chairman, president or the most senior leader at each hiring location.”

Another way that his company reinforces its brand is by sharing company-wide each Friday, how various customers have mentioned the positive experiences they’ve had with specific employees. “Our people thrive on this positive feedback. It encourages us all to be our best.”

2.  From the Top Down

Internal branding goes far beyond what an organization's marketing department creates. Unless an organization’s top leadership is actively and intentionally cultivating the brand within the organization, the effort will never reach its full potential.

For business leaders to assure that internal branding is given proper attention, it is good to periodically take a pulse on the company culture, and to talk to employees and customers about what they are experiencing.

Steve Jobs was known to occasionally listen in on customer service calls at Apple  so he could hear this kind of first-hand feedback. His commitment to delivering the Apple brand experience across all customer touch-points is what has made the company so fanatically beloved and so immensely profitable.

When consulting with company leaders on their branding or re-branding efforts, one of my exercises involves asking questions such as:

• What is the first word that should come to mind when people hear your company mentioned?
• What are the core brand values to which you are willing to hold fast, even if it means losing business?
• What is the greatest compliment your fiercest competitor would have to pay your organization?
• What is the most frequent compliment you hear from your customers?
• What behaviors are most rewarded in your organization?
• Would all your employees give the same answers to the questions above?

Simple questions like these provide much-needed clarity on the path to developing a coherent, authentic and relevant brand. It then remains to give creative expression to it, both within and outside the company.

3.  From the Bottom Up

There’s a world of difference between employees giving passive assent to a company’s brand virtues and actively finding ways to reinforce them in their daily lives. The sure sign of a company’s successful internal branding effort is overhearing employees talking about the brand's virtues in conversations with each other and with customers.

And because you’ll never find employees more receptive to imbibing the brand than when they are first hired, orientation is a crucial time to be highly intentional about internal branding. Rather than viewing this opportunity as some sort of  corporate “indoctrination” process, new hires should be encouraged to apply the brand in their everyday work, and even be empowered to challenge company policies, procedures and experiences that are inconsistent with the brand.

Keeping Things Simple

As with all marketing efforts, simplicity is crucial to success with internal branding. A complex mission statement will never fire the hearts and imaginations of employees. They won’t be able to remember it, let alone apply it. But a clear, simple brand is a clarion call that enables employees to reinforce it with customers every day.

For example, Ritz-Carlton’s legendary mantra—Ladies and Gentlemen Serving Ladies and Gentlemen—is a simple but elegant encapsulation of the hotel’s internal brand. Because it is so simple, it requires the conscious, intelligent application by all employees. It doesn’t tell people what to do. It tells them who they can be as employees of the Ritz-Carlton. You only need to stay at a Ritz property once to realize that this internal branding effort is working.

Perhaps the most powerful tactic in this area is to encourage employees to treat each other like customers. Such internal reinforcement of the brand among coworkers will inevitably result in a greater consistency of the brand experience for customers.

Ambassadors of an Embassy

Ultimately, the goal of internal branding is to make every employee an ambassador—someone who is loyal to the brand, who defends and promotes it to those outside the organization, and whose day-to-day decisions are defined by the freedom and true empowerment to apply the brand in every customer interaction.

Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos, sums it all up brilliantly:

“At Zappos, our belief is that if you get the culture right, most of the other stuff—like great customer service, or building a great long-term brand, or passionate employees and customers—will happen naturally on its own. We believe that your company’s culture and your company’s brand are really just two sides of the same coin. The brand may lag the culture at first, but eventually it will catch up. Your culture is your brand.”