Brand From the Inside

Eight Essentials to Emotionally Connect Your Employees to Your Business

Libby Sartain, Mark Schumann

• Publisher: Jossey-Bass
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN: 9781118964460, 9780787981891
• eBook ISBN: 9780470419557
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Management
• Index: Business

In Brand from the Inside, Libby Sartain and Mark Schumann, branding experts who helped to build employer brands at Southwest Airlines and Yahoo!, describe this secret weapon for a business. The book gives leaders across an organization step-by-step instruction on how to motivate employees to consistently deliver the experience the customer brand promises. By building the employer brand from inside the business—ensuring consistent authenticity, substance, and voice throughout the business—any organization can unleash a powerful tool to emotionally engage employees and recruit and retain the best people.

PART ONE

GET SMART!

CHAPTER ONE

ESSENTIAL #1: DISCOVER

We, the authors, are brand dependent.

And we admit it. We love to discover brands.

We each begin each day sipping or gulping a certain brand of coffee, showering with a specific brand of soap, eating a particular brand of yogurt topped with a selected brand of naturally healthy cereal. Nothing gets between us and our brands.

We are emotionally connected to our brands. And we come by this brand dependence naturally.

Our childhood memories are filled with brand images. The smiling face of a cold pitcher of Kool-Aid. The roar of Tony the Tiger. Our sadness at learning that Trix are for kids, not for rabbits. Mark running down a suburban street wearing Keds and a Davy Crockett coonskin cap. Libby playing with a Barbie doll.

Our mothers were classic brand consumers of the 1950s and 1960s. Mark’s mother would serve only vegetables by Del Monte, catsup by Heinz, and soft drinks by Coca-Cola. Libby’s mother would emerge for the day with makeup by Frances Denney, a permanent by Toni, and nail polish by Revlon. Our fathers got into the brand act, too. Mark’s family only drove Chevrolets; Libby’s family, only her father’s Oldsmobile.

We were lucky to grow up in an era of great brands that instantly commanded respect and passion. Imagining the grand images of air travel of Pan Am and TWA. Trusting the family car to the men who wore the Texaco star. Watching a fatherly Walt Disney on television (before cable) introducing his Wonderful World of Color and telling us about the latest rides at Disneyland.

Laughing at Lucy and Ricky as they smoked their favorite cigarettes (provided, coincidentally, by the sponsors of the show) while chatting with Ethel and Fred. Hearing Dinah Shore sing that we should “see the USA in your Chevrolet.” Wondering if we needed an application to join the Pepsi Generation or if we really could teach the world to sing in perfect harmony by drinking Coca-Cola. Watching McDonald’s dot the nation with fast food, Sears and JC Penney becoming gateways to anything a consumer could want, and Macy’s putting on a parade long before businesses plastered their names on stadiums. We defined our lives through our brands. And we learned, first hand, how to emotionally connect to everything a brand represents.

With such branded beginnings, it’s no surprise we would land in branded experiences in our early professional work. Libby would spend her early HR years in the hallways of the legendary Mary Kay, two words that instantly evoke images of pink Cadillacs and successful saleswomen. Mark would write copy and stage new product events for, among others, Minute Maid and Quaker Oats—where he came up with the idea to introduce a new cereal to employees before the debut for customers. After all, he reasoned, “If we want customers to eat the new cereal we should first let employees experience the taste.”

We learned from these early years, as brand users and workers, just what a brand can do. How people react to brands. How brands provide emotional connection. How brands simplify. And we picked up valuable lessons that, years later, would help us capitalize on the power of this most intense business tool to create emotional connections.

So for you—someone interested in what an employer brand can do for your business—your first essential is to focus on your observations, in general, of what brand can do. The power. The language. The simplicity. Starting with the brand will help you apply its mystery to the realities of your business. So you can first absorb the fundamentals of how brands work and what brands can do, so you fully realize the potential of brands to create emotional connections with the people who make a difference to your business. Your employees.

Here is the short course: fifteen key lessons we have learned over the years for you to keep in mind as you build your employer brand from the inside.

FIFTEEN THINGS TO LEARN ABOUT BRANDS

1. BRANDS ARE ELUSIVE, MYSTERIOUS REALITIES OF BUSINESS.

Brands make people do things. They command people to think and buy, to want and do. They motivate people to consider and choose. They push people to do everything from pull levers in voting booths to fill shopping carts in a bricks-and-mortar store and on line. Their power is the target of billions of marketing dollars spent each year. A brand’s influential power may be its most seductive feature. The feelings a brand generates. The personal experience of connecting with a favorite brand. The commitment to a longer-term relationship with a brand, filled with loyalty and trust. Why else would you, as a brand-driven customer, spend money at a retail location for a cup of coffee you could easily brew at home? Or go out for ice cream you could simply store in the freezer?

2. BRANDS SIMPLIFY THE VALUE, OPPORTUNITY, AND RESULTS YOU EXPECT.

Brands boil down choice to what is ultimately simple.

They crystallize what you, the customer, need and want. They articulate what you anticipate and experience. They simplify what you receive and remember. Every day, as a consumer, you make buying decisions based on the reputation sealed in a company’s brand. You consider whether you trust a brand, believe in a brand, agree with a brand. And you remember what you choose.

Of course, this brand memory reaches beyond the items you purchase to the places you first choose to work. That’s what we found. For Mark, the first branded stop was flipping hamburgers and dipping ice cream cones at the well-branded Dairy Queen just as it was introducing its now-famous Brazier Burger. For Libby, it was working at a coffee shop at Marriott, a hotel chain that had already learned the importance of employees in delivering a consistent customer experience. Something about the brands helped us make these initial choices. Just as if we were consumers buying products. They also help us remember why we were there. Is it the same for you?

3. EVERY BUSINESS HAS A BRAND.

There’s no “get out of brand free” card. Every business has one.

Or, we should say, every business that wants to be known by someone for something.

Every business, no matter its size, no matter what it does, has customers. Although some may have more visible marketing to customers—because of what the business does—every business is known for something. As a result, every product has something in the market it needs to be known for—to sell more products. And that is the job of a brand.

At the same time, some businesses with many products or services may brand each product or service separately. The business overall may want to be known for one thing that captures the essence of all the consumer brands. That may be why Procter & Gamble, while branding specific products with particular labels, states on its internet site that “two billion times a day, P&G brands touch the lives of people around the world.”¹ “We want to be in touch, in the lead, and improving lives every day,” says Diana Shaheen of Procter & Gamble.² Or why Kraft, through its many branded products, makes an overall brand claim of “helping people around the world eat and live better.”³ And when Anheuser-Busch, while marketing its distinct products in distinct ways, places everything under an umbrella of “making friends is our business.”⁴

4. BRANDS ARE ULTIMATELY COMMERCIAL.

Businesses do not have brands just to have brands. They have brands because brands help them sell.

A brand is the shortcut to your process, as a customer, of choosing. To make it easy for you to base that choice on a sense of experience, reliability, reputation. To limit other choices you might consider. To move you directly to action.

As you consider the lessons of brand, you need to look at brand as shorthand for choice. A shortcut to action. A brand that does not lead to choice—the right choice—may entertain but it will not succeed. It will not make a difference to the business. And brand is all about a customer making the choice a business needs.

Brands are not passive. They do not merely appear. They are about action. Doing something. Choosing something. Believing something. They motivate people to buy. To choose. To vote. To commit. To recommend. To connect. Looking at any issue through the prism of brand forces us to think commercially.

So a well-branded company, like Hallmark, realizing the importance of keeping its brand alive and relevant, says to employees in a company publication, “The Hallmark brand sets our company apart from the others. As Hallmarkers, we enhance the value of our brand each time we uphold our brand promise of enriching lives. The action doesn’t have to be complicated or even plum colored. What if we simply focus on enriching lives every day? Think what a difference we can make.”⁵

5. BRANDS INFLUENCE CUSTOMER CHOICES AT EACH TOUCH POINT.

Every customer experience is a series of touch points.

A brand promises a specific experience at each touch point that you, as a customer, have with a product, service, or message a business delivers. A touch point occurs every time you come in contact with what a business offers. And at each touch point the brand can comfort or irritate, assure or frighten, satisfy or disappoint.

As a consumer you see this every day. You view brands through the touch points you experience. The foods you select. The restaurants and hotels you choose. The airlines you endure. The places you visit. The products you rely on. Brands assure you that a product or service you select will be functionally reliable to get the job done as well as to deliver an emotionally satisfying experience.

At each touch point you test the authenticity of the brand promise. Every time you touch a brand, you ask, “Am I getting what it promised?” And if you experience disappointment, you may wonder, “What other brands may be available that may deliver the same thing?” As UPS announces to its employees in a special brand publication, “living out the brand doesn’t come solely from mission statements. Or product differentiation. Or lower prices. Or snappy logos. It flows from the intersection of culture and people. It flows from the living, breathing brand.”⁶ This lives every day at UPS. “Our promise,” says Tom Pizutti, corporate employee communications manager, UPS, “is that we will make each customer feel as if they are our only customer.”⁷

6. BRANDS DEFINE YOUR CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE.

Brands paint the picture a customer steps into.

Every day, in every corner of the world, customers make choices. Some choose to buy. Others to avoid. Some recommend a particular brand. Others complain. Some complete a transaction; others engage in a relationship with the business that produces the product or service.

As a consumer you look to the brand to define the experience you choose. You expect Ritz-Carlton to offer luxury because that’s what the brand promises. You expect to “have it your way” at Burger King because that’s what you repeatedly hear. You look for the friendly skies because the brand says that’s a fair expectation. “The consumer is boss,” says P&G’s Diana Shaheen. “Our purpose is to improve lives in small but meaningful ways every day.”

The brand promise frames what you expect and defines what the product or service—and the business—should deliver. As you use what you purchase, you ask yourself if the product or service lives up to its promise. If the promise foretells the experience. If the experience ultimately lives up to the expectations the brand sets.

Brands adapt as customer experiences change. Take, for example, what’s happening today on the Internet. This new dimension of the customer connection intensifies the experiences a brand defines. For example, as a customer, you can sit in front of a computer to shop for a car. Once upon a time, you would go from dealer to dealer to kick tires and consider options. Now it can all be done online, transforming the car-buying experience from potentially confrontational to fully informational. You can use a myriad of consumer reports and reviews, sites like Yahoo! Autos, to compare before starting to shop. You call the shots with the click of a mouse. It’s no surprise that, in response, the automaker must dramatically change how it presents its brand. No longer is the televised image the only way to convey the look and feel.

7. BRANDS CONNECT CUSTOMERS TO A “BIG IDEA.”

Brands do not simply sell. They capture the essence of a mission.

The power of brand doesn’t stop with a specific choice or transaction. It doesn’t end with functional and emotional connections.

The potential for brand can create a “halo effect” for the entire business if it delivers more.

A brand is at its most powerful when it reaches beyond the product to represent an idea emerging from the soul of the business. When purpose reaches beyond the sale to advance the relationship—to engage you, first on a functional level for being reliable and then on an emotional level that will touch your feelings. Real brand power occurs when the brand reaches you inspirationally; when you connect with the “big idea” the business and brand stand for. When the brand reveals what happens inside the core of a business, giving you a glimpse of what makes a business tick. What the business believes in. Its values. Its heritage. Its icons. And a bit of its soul.

Why else would Apple, so brilliantly, make you believe you participate in a cause, not simply that you buy a product? Or Disney make you feel, as parents, that childhood without a visit to the Magic Kingdom will not be complete? Or Whole Foods make you feel, as you buy organic peanut butter, that you are somehow helping to keep the world healthy? Consider the “creative impulses of young storytellers” that are “bits of magic stored in Crayola brand crayons, markers, paints and colored pencils, or unleashed in the pliable potential of Silly Putty.” Or how, “for nearly 100 years Hallmark has believed in the very best of human nature” and how that belief stirs a passion “you see and feel in everything that bears the Hallmark name—in a store, in your mailbox, on the internet, on your television.” As CEO Don Hall remarks, “We are invited to give voice to people’s feelings—of joy and grief, of compassion and healing. We provide ways for people to express themselves” and “help them reach out with words of hope and encouragement every day. These are enduring human needs, which is why I have such confidence in the future of our company.”⁸

A brand can connect a customer to what a business is all about—its character, personality, and values. To be remembered, a brand can give a face to a business. And to be revered, a brand can create a sense of comfort, a degree of security, a spirit of hope. It can symbolize the larger meaning of what a business stands for—the idea, experience, or relationship. The way Disney “is dedicated to making the dreams of families and children a reality”⁹ or how the Body Shop is committed to “passionately campaign for the protection of the environment, human and civil rights, and against animal testing within the cosmetics and toiletries industry.”¹⁰

8. A GREAT BRAND WILL STAND THE TEST OF TIME.

The power of brand is not simply for the short term. A great brand is in this for the long haul. It will last through fads and fashion, trends and styles, economic ups and downs. Articulating a core that will not change with the times, even as products and services ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Introduction
• PART ONE - GET SMART!
• PART TWO - GET READY!
• PART THREE - GET IT DONE !
• PART FOUR - WHAT IT MEANS FOR YOU
• NOTES
• Acknowledgements
• THE AUTHORS
• INDEX
• End User License Agreement