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?