One of the most overlooked elements of branding is how your employees brand (internal branding) your business to the community at large.  The degree to which your employees support and live your company’s brand through their actions and statements can have significant impacts on:

• How the community views your business
• The type of potential employee you will recruit
• The number of referrals your current employees recruit
• Employee satisfaction
• Customer satisfaction…..and more importantly, customer loyalty

You may be assuming your employees are intimately familiar with your company’s brand and messaging. We recently worked with a company to test this very assumption. Senior management believed their employees were living the brand and could recite key elements of their branding pyramid (after a significant messaging campaign by senior management).  When impromptu 1-on-1 informal interviews were completed with employees (using an unaffiliated objective interviewer), we found that this was not the case much to the surprise of senior management. 

This presents unique opportunities for company’s to re-message their brand themselves from the inside out.  Any new branding effort should begin internally first then go external.  This approach also provides a more cost effective way to build your brand given today’s economic environment. This approach also has implications throughout the organization, through:

• Training/organizational development
• HR recruiting and employee retention
• Employee engagement
• Customer service
• Sales and marketing

We will explore each of these areas in more detail in future postings. In the meantime, we encourage you to share ideas and experiences you’ve had in internal branding efforts.

If properly messaged, your employee’s will be your biggest brand advocates to the community and to your customers.