Product Employee Corporate
Employer
easy to maintain consistency in the individual product brand, because it is targeted at a less disparate audience, the customer.
(In practice, of course, there is ‘leakage’ in terms of the perception of, for example, shareholders and employees. It was share- holders, for example, who emphasized the discrepancy between product brand and product reality in one of the UK’s biggest high street retailers – a perception that resulted in the downfall of the chief executive.
Employer brand expression relates to the perception of current and potential employees about whether the company is a good place to work. Companies, such as British American Tobacco, which are in unpopular industries, can nonetheless attract and keep high calibre employees by screening out those, who have moral objections to working there, and by ensuring that they treat their employees exceedingly well in terms of salary, working conditions, development opportunities and the social environ- ment. The argument for having a strong reputation as an employer (often referred to as the employer brand) is difficult to challenge. It has clear and direct connections to ease and quality of recruitment, employee retention and workforce motivation.
Delivering the employer brand is a lot more difficult than defining and marketing it, however. For example, the bad odour that now surrounds the term ‘empowerment’ is to a large extent the result of employers promising benefits in the working environment, which they could not or were not prepared to deliver. Whereas corporate and product brand expressions require close co-operation and integration between public affairs and marketing; the employer brand requires close co-operation between public affairs and human resources.
Finally, employee brand expression concerns the interaction between employees and the company values – how the employ- ees’ attitudes and behaviours reflect, support and reinforce the brand expectations of the various external audiences and those of the internal audience itself. In order to be effective at managing this aspect of brand, companies need to establish high consistency between:
䊉 the values statement that typically goes with mission and vision (or, increasingly, replaces them)
䊉 the other three expressions of brand: corporate, product and employer.
At first sight it might seem that the ‘employee brand’ is simply an element of the employer brand (the kind of people who elect to work here), or of the product brand (because employee behav- iour is a key factor in the service offering), or of the corporate
brand (because the behaviour and speculation of the leadership is closely linked to the business reputation.) It is precisely because it has such universal influence that it helps to view the employee brand as an expression in its own right. Moreover, the employee expression of brand is the key to aligning and integrating the other brand expressions into one coherent, credible, deliverable set of characteristics that constitutes the total business brand. No matter how well articulated the brand messages are, they achieve reality only through what people within the business do. Only when employees and leaders both live the brand and its values do brand aspirations and brand reality become one and the same.
The total business brand demands that the organization both recognizes the various brand expressions and establishes con- tinuous dialogue between those who have ownership (or partial membership) of them. The aim of this dialogue is to ensure that all audiences – internal or external – accept and respect the organization for a shared and consistent set of values and differentiating characteristics.
Failure to create and sustain such consistency leaves employ- ees bewildered and directionless. A good example of failure in this respect occurred at the induction day for graduate recruits at an international financial services company. The published corporate values were explicit – really important personal obligations (such as the marriage of a good friend) took precedence over an urgent work task. But the product values (as professionals, the job always comes first) were more commonly applied, in the limited experience the graduates had already had with the company. The message they took away was live with and make the best of inconsistency in values.
The impact of the employee aspects of brand is seen most dramatically when companies attempt to launch a new corporate or product identity. Recent examples include a company that advertised itself nationally as passionate about its products. The employees were at the centre of this identity, but little or no effort went into enabling them to be passionate. Whenever there is a gap between the identity a company claims for its people and the experience of people dealing with the company, it will impact the business negatively. By contrast, businesses where the employees do behave fully in line with the customer promise tend to thrive.
These same conflicts in brand expression can very easily occur between all the four areas we have described. Many organiza- tions end up with a plethora of apparently conflicting brands, with the result that their identity is very confused – to the detriment of their positioning and reputation with both internal
and external audiences. Among the key questions all organiza- tions should ask themselves regularly about their brand are:
䊉 Where should the brand sit? In a company with a single dominant product or products with very close affinities, it makes sense to focus on the corporate brand and ensure that the products reflect this. Where there are many products, each with strong brand recognition and different identities, attempting to impose a common corporate brand may undermine their market presence. A handful of companies – usually small and quirky, such as the computer services companies Poptel and Happy Computers, or the market research company Leapfrog – have chosen to centre their brand expression around the employer elements. They believe that their policies as employ- ers will act as a significant differentiator that will both attract the highest calibre workforce and build client recognition.
Wherever the core of the brand is sited, however, it will be undermined if the brand expressions do not reflect the same values and priorities.
䊉 Where will the greatest differentiation be achieved?Companies like Poptel, Happy Computers and Leapfrog in the UK and Sol in Finland, have made a conscious decision about the personality they want their customers to see. Other companies, such as Ben
& Jerry’s and Patagonia in the USA and Body Shop and Benetton in Europe have similarly established a differentiating identity by linking their products and/or the corporate brand with social or environmental causes. In research we carried out into oddball companies in the late 1990s, it became clear that companies with distinct personality have a competitive advan- tage over those whose persona is bland and difficult to distinguish from the pack. Marketeers have been telling us this for years, but the solutions they propose are typically market- ing solutions. In reality, sustainable differentiation comes about by changing factors deep inside the organization – its ways of thinking, its ways of making hard decisions and, most of all, its underlying philosophy. Truly differentiated companies see and react to the world differently to the norm. Changing the company name, the design on its trucks, premises and notepaper, and the customer promise is like spending a day in a makeover salon. You may emerge with a new look in face and hair, and a radically different wardrobe, but it does not take long for acquaintances to recognize that it is still the same you underneath! To put it another way Brand definition gets weaker the vaguer the corporate personality. Conversely, The stronger the differentiating personality, the less need the company has to market itself. (The more you stand out from the crowd, the less you
have to advertise your presence – a lesson exemplified in previous decades by the UK retailer Marks and Spencer, until it allowed its personality to be eroded.)
䊉 How well are the four brand expressions integrated?If there is any conflict between the brand expressions, you have a problem of identity. It is like saying, ‘Fred’s a very kind man to his colleagues at work, but he beats his children’. An inconsistent brand perception, especially where one expression of brand is deeply negative, will detract from the whole.
Problems frequently arise when companies attempt to sustain brand values which are in conflict with business imperatives, such as a company whose corporate brand centres around providing excellent quality products but which faces the need to reduce materials costs, or whose external brand depends on delivering excellent customer service while financial pressure is forcing it to cut back on customer service staff. In some cases this tension can drive forward excellent innovations such as effective online handling of standard queries, but too often it simply results in obvious inconsistencies – ‘listening’ companies who keep customers on hold for as long as an hour before dealing with their enquiries, or supposedly ‘quality’ products produced from excellent designs but using shoddy materials.
Integrating the brand expressions may mean taking and implementing some very tough decisions. Are you prepared to drop a profitable product or area of activity, because its characteristics do not completely fit the brand? Will you remove very senior people, who have a track record of sales success, if aspects of their behaviour are contrary to the brand values? If the answer is no, then you are unlikely ever to achieve the level of brand differentiation you desire.
Managing the brand, therefore, requires an integrated and proactive approach, led by top management and incorporating high levels of collaboration between marketing, corporate com- munications, HR and employee communication. The internal communicator should take responsibility for gathering the feedback that identifies:
䊉 The extent to which employees are willing and able to ‘live the brand’
䊉 The barriers that prevent them from doing so
䊉 The extent to which they believe the leaders’ behaviour exemplifies the brand values
䊉 How well they believe the organization is living up to the brand
䊉 The extent to which they see the four brand expressions as mutually supportive and non-contradictory.
Although brand management does involve – particularly in the brand design process – a high level of listening to external, and sometimes internal, audiences’ perceptions, it is primarily a one- way communication process. It is also primarily an externally facing process. While companies are increasingly paying atten- tion to ensuring that employees at least understand the corporate and/or product brands, they rarely put much continuing effort into understanding and managing the brand perceptions of employees. Yet creating dialogue on these issues is essential, if employees are to translate awareness into behaviour change.
Internal communicators can help HR and other functions plan the communication elements of the change programmes, which will bring the four brand expressions into line. They can also help top management articulate and demonstrate to the internal audiences that there really is only one brand, assuming that is the case. The message internally must, of course, be consistent with that given out externally, so there is also a great deal of liaison and checking to do with the externally facing functions.
When it comes to a re-branding campaign, the internal communicator can add value by ensuring that employee percep- tions and behaviours are factored into the process at an early stage. They can make the case that, instead of being an add-on activity, funded grudgingly when the main expense of designing the new identity is completed, communication with the employ- ees should be the starting point for identity change. From item’s experience, we can state categorically that Corporate identity changes should NEVER be communicated to the external world until they have been accepted internally and employees have already begun to put those changes into action in their behaviours and the organization has learnt how to support them in doing so. In practical terms, this might mean delaying the public announcement of identity change two years or more, until it is part of the operational reality, rather than an aspiration that will not reflect the true customer experience.
Finally, there is a role for the internal communicator in recognizing and intervening when different parts of the organiza- tion create initiatives that are likely to instil brand confusion. For example, an oil company’s operations function launched a company-wide quality programme based upon a set of very sensible customer values. At the same time, the HR function was busily developing a set of behavioural values in support of the corporate brand. Although there were some similarities between these two values sets, there were also elements based on very different philosophical standpoints. Neither function would back down, so the compromise solution was to produce a third document that demonstrated the links between the two sets of
values. Had there been an earlier intervention, the two initiatives could have been integrated and could have given substantial support to the brand. As it was, both were weakened by the sticking-plaster approach.