At the end of the rope farthest from the building, standing just off the curb was the youngest of the men – a man we will call The Dreamer. His place in the pecking order symbolically represented by his position at the end of the rope — he was completely disengaged from both the task at hand and the rest of the people trying to accomplish it. He was not pulling on the rope at all.

Standing approximately six feet apart from each other on the sidewalk, each holding on to the mid-section of the rope, were two men we will call The Confused. These two men were half-heartedly pulling on the rope but actively engaged in disagreement about a topic I could not identify from my car.

The fourth man was only visible from behind, as he stood hunched over the opening of the basement pulling vigorously on the rope. We will call him The Busy. While I cannot be sure, I am willing to bet that he was tugging away under the impression his co-workers were tugging on the rope as hard as he was — which, of course, they were not.

Into this scene walked a fifth character we will call The Salesman. In a familiar New York City scenario, this man was walking down the sidewalk trying to sell something in a medium sized brown cardboard box. He didn’t bother trying to sell it to The Busy. He tried, instead, to engage The Confused, but they were too involved in their debate to pay any attention to his offer. He soon gave up, ducked under the rope and continued to walk down the sidewalk.

Around this time our traffic light changed and the driver began to pull away and head for the airport. As we pulled away, I began to think about this scene and how it related to the topic of the speech on Internal Branding and Engagement I was to give in San Francisco the following morning.

Of course, companies that spend millions of dollars and countless valuable resources marketing their goods and services to consumers often devote few if any resources to inspiring employees or educating them about where the company is going, why it is going there and how it will get there. When we consider that employees, in a certain way, actually are the brand, it would seem that clueless employees would almost certainly lead to clueless customers and wasted marketing, R&D, capital and other resources.

Traditional branding is focused on customers and shareholders. Great minds and considerable resources are deployed to make sure that the branding message is fine-tuned and that it is deployed in communications channels that impact the intended target.

“Targeted brand marketing” means reaching your customers with a message they understand and can relate to, in a medium that they’re used to and are comfortable with. If you do your job right, the message and the delivery will be so spot-on that customers won’t feel like they are being sold to (Nike’s “Just Do It” campaign, for example). It’s a mammoth, high-visibility endeavor that defines companies in the public eye.

But, if you think about it, employees actually are the brand. And lately, companies are awaking to the need for raising the bar on internal and recruitment branding — increasingly known as “employer branding”. It’s the critical, and often weak, link in the corporate communications chain that ensures an informed, happy and motivated workforce and a steady stream of qualified and energetic recruits. So, what are companies doing to make sure they have the maximum impact in this important area?

Internal Branding
As with any good marketing effort, it pays to begin by looking at the target audience. No doubt your internal audience has some awareness of your brand. Yet in many companies, especially ones that have recently reinvented themselves, employees may have no idea of what the brand stands for, where the company is going or even how the branded product or solution fits into customers’ lives or businesses. It’s a safe bet that if the employees aren’t sure what the brand essence is, the customers are wondering as well. (The paradox here is that some companies have to ask their customers what the brand stands for before they can move ahead.)

Many companies make fundamental strategic shifts in their businesses and assume that the rank and file will “get it” and “get behind it”. Of course, the reality is that a workforce with a wishy-washy understanding or, worse yet, a misunderstanding of the brand, its essence and its direction, will end up being a drag on company progress. “We knew that we could never be successful with our data solutions business unless we migrated our sales force away from just selling hardware,” says Bruce Stapleton about customer data powerhouse NCR.

Hoping to erase habits and perceptions that are reinforced everyday through on-the-job experience is a tough job – maybe too tough for the usual ads and videos that “tell the story”. Is it enough to rely on passive forms of re-education when the employee’s day-to-day work experience is telling them that nothing has changed?