Internal Brand Building

Our Perspective

Brand Tool Box is an innovator in internal brand-building programs. We have over ten years of experience designing and implementing internal brand-building programs for our global clients. Our perspective stems from the pioneering efforts of having been on the so-called “bleeding edge” of the emerging practice of internal brand building and the pragmatism that comes from the many years of coaching our clients through the myriad of obstacles implementing programs across an entire organization. We are convinced of the benefits and extremely passionate about internal brand building, more than anything we have experienced in over 20 years of brand consulting experience. Internal brand building can deliver a powerful employee engagement tool to every organization – unleashing the power of the brand inside the organization.

What is Internal Brand Building?

Internal brand building is an emerging practice when put in the broader context of the discipline of brand. It’s not complicated; it’s just new and different for most brand professionals since its success depends upon extending brand beyond the marketing department. In a nutshell, internal brand building is the process of creating enthusiastic, engaged employees who admire how the organization’s values and competencies make a distinctive difference for its customers.

Although this definition may appear to be a mirror image of brand building with customers, internal brand building demands an additional set of skills and a new perspective. Effective internal brand building resides at the nexus of brand management and organizational development. This new perspective leverages the relationship-building insights gleaned from brand management and the sensibility that the discipline of organizational development brings to understanding the human processes that can create positive change between employees and organizations.

Internal brand-building programs can take a number of different forms and levels of thoroughness. The robustness of an internal brand-building program is based on an organization’s level of available resources, senior management commitment, and the organization’s organizational development competency and experience. Although internal brand-building programs can take many different forms, most programs will resemble one of the following general frameworks.

Program Type Application Description Brand Announcement Usually associated with the introduction of new corporate identity or corporate brand re-positioning campaign. Brand-based internal communications program employing a portfolio of mass communications activities, including e.g., company event, posters, computer wall paper, memorable collateral, etc. Strategic Re-positioning Used to communicate a new strategic direction for the organization, often associated with arrival of a new senior management team or CEO. These programs are delivered by senior management and embody a more strategic and serious tone to the message, challenging employees to embrace the new strategy in their work activities. Most often these programs are not initiated as internal brand building, the brand word or theme is incorporated for style purposes, or to initiate a new corporate language. Employee Engagement As a full-ledged organizational development program these programs are designed to support a customer-focused change management initiative. As a robust organizational development initiative, these programs start with a solid statement of strategic intent, grounded in training experiences and re-enforced with on-the-job coaching activities. The program always includes a measurement component to develop understanding and level of employee engagement and customer impact.

The success of each program is based on program design, implementation effectiveness, and objectives for the internal brand-building program. To develop the most effective, sustainable brand-building impact, a combination of all three programs is essential.

Brand Tool Box Internal Brand-Building Program

The Brand Tool Box Internal Brand-Building Program is the most innovative organizational development program to connect employees with customers, based upon the distinctive qualities and proven track record of the organization. The program is the result of over 10 years of research and development, and numerous client applications.

Connecting Employees with Customers. Internal brand building is the employee engagement process to focus employees’ attention and behaviors on consistently adding value to customers. The resulting customer loyalty delivers tangible business results. Increasing customer loyalty can be measured in terms of: less price resistance, expanded portfolio of sales for each customer, increased customer referral, and customer service efficiency. The Brand Tool Box Internal Brand-Building Program is the most powerful, proven process to engage employees with customers and the needs of the marketplace.

Using the Power of Brand Alignment. Brand has now become the universal language that describes the unique relationship the organization has with its customers. One of the unique aspects of this innovative program is the use of the most practical and proven working model of brand on a business and personal level ever created. The personal brand concepts developed by Karl D. Speak and used in the best-selling book Be Your Own Brand, are an example of the straightforward concepts of brand and serve as the proprietary learning models used in the internal brand-building training workshops.

Brand Tool Box has created a powerful, proven, patent-pending process that creates engaged employees by facilitating the alignment of their personal brand with the organization’s brand. There are three unique aspects to the Power of Alignment process that deliver sustainable customer-centered employee engagement.

• The innovative alignment of personal brand to the organization’s brand creates a clear and powerful platform for employees to determine how their connection with the organization enables them to contribute to make a difference with customers and fellow employees.
• The use of the congruent learning models of brand, personal and business, creates a quick and effective understanding of brand as the organization’s framework for connecting with customers.
• The personal development activities embedded in the training portion of the process leave employees with a very positive feeling about themselves and organizational development.

Delivered with the Unique Combination of Organizational Development Best Practices and Brand Expertise.

Brand Tool Box has developed an innovative employee engagement program that uses a robust organizational development systems approach to deliver the true strategic benefits of creating a strong organizational brand. The Brand Tool Box Internal Brand-Building Program is built upon an organizational development framework that is steeped in a commitment to a practical implementation framework that has proven to create a lasting connection between the organization and its customers. The system is comprised of three integrated, coherent phases:

• Brand Platform Development - At the foundation of every successful employee engagement program is a clearly defined set of expected outcomes that anchor employees’ behaviors and decision-making. The brand platform process defines the specific outcomes to attain customer loyalty. This facilitated process produces a set of practical and precise definitions that describe the organization’s distinctive value proposition and how it makes a difference for customers, i.e., the organizations’ brand platform.
  
• Brand Immersion – At the core of this organizational development system is a set of training workshops instructionally designed for effective learning at all levels of the organization.
  
• Brand Reinforcement - An integrated and coordinated set of activities developed to reinforce the training into customer-focused behaviors. These activities range from a prescribed set of coaching sessions, revising HR performance systems, to research tools to measure changes in customer loyalty, all a part of this important phase of the systems approach.