Connecting all employees to your brand
Have you ever spent hours applying for a job, only to never hear a peep? Or – worse still – actually been for an interview, followed a week or two later by an impersonal email informing you that you didn’t get the role?
What happened next? You probably told your friends and family all about it – and not in a good way. And this real, personal experience will hold much more weight in their minds than any marketing campaign. In short, it’s damaged the brand.
Now multiply that by the hundreds (sometimes thousands) of applicants a company might receive in any given year. All of a sudden, that damage starts to look quite significant. At the very least, it’s eating into the goodwill built up by Marketing, meaning that more money have to be spent to balance it out. Which means that these negative experiences are literally costing money.
And this scenario is just the tip of the iceberg. What about all the suppliers who are being paid late? And the people who come in for meetings and don’t know where to go? Or the new starters who don’t have a laptop ready on their first day? What’s their experience like? Because you can be fairly sure that if it’s disappointing or bad, they are telling other people about it.
But the good news is that if their experiences are great, they will shout about it too. And you can use this as a powerful tool to help build up brand equity. And the even better news? So few companies are paying attention to these ‘non-brand’ touchpoints that you can really stand out if you start to consider how your brand experience plays out across the board.
But how do you do this? Brand experience must become a mindset for everyone working in your business. It’s impossible to make it the sole responsibility for a handful of brand custodians, attempting to keep tabs on every touchpoint in your organisation – believe me, I’ve tried!
The only way to make it an everyday part of your working culture is to embed it into everyone’s role, so that no matter which department people work in, they are clear on what the brand stands for and how their specific role connects to that. They can make independent decisions more easily and they feel motivated because they are connected to the vision and mission of the business.
It's usually not quick, and often not easy, but taking it step by step – prioritising the big wins and working with the leadership team to build an authentic culture – really pays off in the end and helps you build a stronger brand with each day of trading.
READ MORE: How to build brand equity every day
