Streamline Training & Documentation: Three Internal Branding Lessons

Friday, July 03, 2009

Three Internal Branding Lessons

On June 22, Morgan Daloisio published a straightforward article at brandchannel.com that extracts lessons for internal branding from the experiences of Virgin Media and Red Hat.

The basic goal is to have your employees effectively represent your brand to your customers. The three lessons Daloisio discusses (somewhat edited here) are:

Practice what you preach. "Employees only change their behavior when they see tangible evidence that the brand is infused into the way the business is run." Give priority to "areas of the business with the most power to influence employee behavior," namely, recruiting, training, performance management and incentives, and modeling of appropriate behavior by managers and executives.

Ensure brand managers and HR personnel are tight partners. For example, Red Hat formed "a permanent group called 'People + Brand,' which merged brand, design and HR under one executive ..."

Take care to create internal communications that engage employees with your brand. Specifically:
- "View every communication with your employees as an opportunity — embed your brand values in everything employees read and hear."
- "Find unique and different ways to deliver your brand message to employees."
- "Be honest, straightforward and timely when communicating with employees. That’s the only way to build trust and belief in the brand and in the company as a whole."

For another perspective on how to handle internal branding, you can see this earlier post on how Loews Hotels Corp structured the training portion of a large-scale branding initiative.

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Labels: Branding

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