Your employees are the very people who can make your brand come alive for your customers; they are an extremely powerful asset – but they can only have a tangible effect if they have a powerful emotional connection to your products and services. Without that connection, employees are likely to undermine the expectations set by your brand. For instance, they might not understand what you have promised the customer, so they end up working at cross-purposes. Or it might be they don’t believe in the brand or feel disengagement towards the company. What is clear and proven is that when employees care about and believe in their company’s brand, they’re often motivated to work harder and their loyalty and advocacy to the company increases. Employees that are unified and inspired by a common sense of purpose and identity deliver more in profits; in the 2022 Gallup report, it stated that “businesses with an aligned employee brand proposition are on average 23% more profitable than those without”.

We often find when we work with organisations on their internal brand that opportunities to enhance this emotional connection and build the brand from the inside occur.

A moment in time

Most employees have limited interest in change initiatives – branding and visioning exercises are no exception. But at certain turning points, there are times when organisations are experiencing some fundamental challenge or change, employees are seeking direction and clarity on what the future holds and are relatively receptive to these initiatives. A common rebrand question sums this opportunity up nicely:  Is this a change of symbol or a symbol of change? These moments of change can create either positive or negative energy—enthusiasm for new programmes or negative comments of “we have seen this all before and nothing has changed”. Turning points are ideal opportunities for an internal branding campaign; employees’ energy can be directed positively by clearly articulating what makes the company special. We’ve found that internal branding campaigns launched without the momentum of a key moment nearly always fail. Without a natural and authentic turning point, companies seeking to boost the brand internally may need to manufacture this kind of moment, perhaps by launching a new marketing strategy.

Creating this clear cohesion encourages adoption and fans of new thinking, new direction and new ways of engaging with the brand.

The arrival of new CEO is another great moment for internal rebranding. Employees expect to hear from a new leader and are usually open to new ideas at such times. Often a new CEO signals a new strategy and a new vision and that can be communicated and linked to an internal brand building campaign.

Internal and external messaging should be connected

Your people need to hear the same messages that you send out to the marketplace. At most companies, however, internal and external communications are often mismatched. This can be very confusing, and it threatens employees’ perceptions of the company’s integrity and can leave employees spotting a lack of cohesion and mismatch of both communications and experiences.

Enabling employees to deliver on customer expectations is important, of course, but it’s not the only reason a company needs to match internal and external messages. Another reason is to help push the company to achieve goals that might otherwise be out of reach. A strong internal campaign can align brand thinking, it can change the way employees think about everything they do, from product names to how products are sold. A successful joined-up  campaign can give employees a sense of direction and purpose, which in turn can restore their belief in a company’s ability to adapt to the future and become a market leader.

Internal marketing becomes stronger because it can draw on the same “big idea” as the overarching brand. Consumer marketing becomes stronger because the messages are developed based on employees’ behaviour and attitudes, as well as on the company’s strengths and capabilities. By taking employees into account, and on the brand journey, a company can avoid creating a message that doesn’t resonate with employees or, worse, one that builds resentment.

But while their messages must be aligned, companies must also keep external promises a little ahead of internal realities. Such promises provide incentives for employees and give them something to live up to.

Bring the brand alive for employees

The goal of an internal branding campaign is very similar to that of an external campaign: to create an emotional connection to your company that transcends any one particular experience. In the case of employees, you also want the connection to inform the way they approach their jobs, even if they don’t interact with customers. You want them to have the brand vision in their minds and to consider whether or not they are supporting the brand in every decision they make. How do you do that? Much the same way you create the connection with external audiences. You need to plan and execute a professional branding campaign to introduce and explain the messages and then reinforce them by weaving the brand into the fabric of the company. The messages should be directed at employee “touch-points,” along the employee journey, the day-to-day interactions that influence the way people experience the workplace. By communicating the brand vision and values into these employee touchpoints, companies, over time, embed the vision into the employee experience to the extent that on-brand behaviour becomes instinctive.