If you take a step back from organisational branding for a moment, you’ll see that how employees understand it directly affects customers. Here, we consider the role that branding plays in organisations, mostly because we want your business to experience more success in this arena. We believe that it’s important for marketing agencies to help their client’s employees understand the relationship between their words and actions and the company’s brand objectives.
Branding in the Background
As a business leader, it’s important to help employees understand the core branding concepts that their daily actions will impact. Think of your organisation as an amalgamation of people. They work in a company culture with shared ideas that help to reinforce these core concepts. They can follow through on activities such as creating good content for the website and helping customers determine which products or services to choose if they embody these ideas each day. Recently, we were reading a Forbes.com article by Jayson DeMers explaining that a small company’s content marketing strategy should be based on research, but it should also include a set of objective targets. Employees should know why they write content for a social media campaign or rewrite most content on the official blog. Employees should understand the thinking behind other marketing activities that their company has planned for the near future.
What Leaders Do
Core branding concepts don’t just come out of thin air. It’s up to the senior leaders of the organisation to establish these concepts and then to set objective targets that employees will follow in every marketing activity.
Branding Doesn’t Always Make Sense
Another way to understand organisational branding is that employees are the brand. They help the brand to become stronger. When they make mistakes, especially when they mistreat customers or post poor content online, they can damage the brand. They must be careful so that they don’t undermine the company’s collective branding efforts.
Branding Rests on the Whims of Fickle Consumers
Employees may work very hard to carry out customer service functions and other activities that impact customers. Your personnel should be aware that consumers will judge the company based on their brand perceptions. Consumers make purchasing decisions based on emotions and, many times, based on false assumptions. These realities make it crucial that the organisation’s marketing and branding efforts are clear and well-executed. Consumers don’t use logic to react to information about a brand, and they can easily shift their loyalty to another company.
Organisational Brand Building Occurs Daily
Get employees to work hard at reinforcing your organisation’s key branding concepts. Building a brand is about establishing these ideas with target audiences and then supporting them in every medium. It’s hard for employees to grasp these concepts if your leadership team hasn’t sat down together and hammered them out. It’s hard for employees to represent brand concepts in their creative work if they aren’t well-defined. Employees look to their business leaders to understand how brand concepts relate to the actions of individuals, teams or departments, and the entire organisation. Some workers will find it hard to gauge their impact on customers if you don’t explain what their contributions to organisational branding should be.
Take a strategic approach to organisational branding. Post the key elements of the company’s brand on the website for everyone’s access. Help employees become involved with organisational branding efforts through different competitions. Their ideas are useful for planning new directions in advertising and marketing campaigns. Each person who works in the company has unique interactions with customers and can supply a fresh perspective. For more ideas on the role of branding and how to get the support of all personnel, please contact us today.
Fancy a coffee to discuss your creative brief?
Give Red Lounge Agency a Buzz on 02 9114 9810