It is absolutely essential to face the facts when a brand is in turnaround mode. Letting everyone know exactly where the brand stands relative to where the brand should be is a critical step. Facing the facts is the starting point for revitalization.
However, letting people know just how awful things are without providing the necessary information on how the ship will be righted is inadvisable. People need to know what is going on, what the changes mean to them and what they will need to do differently.
Boeing’s new CEO just told employees how difficult things are with the Boeing brand in disarray. And, then, he allowed the external press to learn of his admonition to employees. What he did not do apparently is let people know what the plan is for revitalization. Without the plan, employees just know the bad news, not the way forward.
The way forward for employees is a serious commitment to Internal Marketing.
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Internal marketing:
- Helps communicate the brand purpose and promise in a common manner.
- Helps align the organization.
- Helps educate new hires while reinforcing the brand among all employees.
- Helps provide employees with a common set of goals.
- Helps ignite brand excitement and belief in every geography in which the brand operates.
- Helps generate internal and external trustworthiness.
Boeing badly needs an Internal Marketing plan. Why? Because your people come first.
This is a marketing management truth: External plans, strategies and programs will not be as successful if you focus on the outside world before you focus on your own people. Not only must internal marketing precede external marketing, internal communications must be credible and consistent.
Wayfair used the Boeing approach last year. First, in an unfortunate public disclosure, employees were told to work harder. “Employees, you are not doing enough for Wayfair. Spend more hours and exert more effort. Laziness doesn’t have a role at Wayfair.” Then, before the harder work might have started, Wayfair announced layoffs accounting for 13% of employees, over 1000 people. The chairman of Wayfair’s Board and a co-founder of Wayfair told employees that if Wayfair went bankrupt “shame on everyone.”
This behavior reduces internal and external trust in the brand-business. And, trust in the leadership. The only way to achieve internal trust, alignment and commitment is through Internal Marketing.
Recent research in economics reports that brand success is “unthinkable” without “effective internal marketing.” The research states that it’s essential to create a working environment where employees believe they can achieve brand goals.
This is why the 2003-2004 turnaround at McDonald’s shared the strategy and the ads with employees first before activation in 110 countries. Employees were already well-versed in the communications before external audiences were exposed.
Internal Marketing is more than internal communications. It is not enough to just communicate the management message. The goal is to create advocates for the management message. Internal Marketing defines both brand-business and personal success.
For internal marketing excellence, everyone must:
- Work toward the same destination.
- Know and believe the same brand purpose and promise.
- Have the same definitions of brand priorities … know what success looks like.
- Understand the same common metrics.
Here is a proven approach for brand-driven internal marketing. Although there are four different phases, these phases are all connected, creating an ongoing virtuous circle. The four phases for building internal commitment are:
- Education
- Inspiration
- Implementation
- Evaluation
Education answers the following questions:
- What are we doing?
- Why are we doing it?
- Why now?
- What does this mean for me?
These questions are personal. People must know what is going on and how strategies and activities affect them. Even if what is happening is not a massive change, it is essential to ground employees in the need-to-know details and how these will affect them. Employees want to feel valued.
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An article in Harvard Business Review online states, “Today, more than ever, people want to feel valued, treated with respect and given the opportunity to contribute to something important.”
Education addresses employee value, employee respect and employee contributions. Tell people the benefits of what the brand is doing or planning to do. Tell people the game plan. Be transparent. Openness and honesty help build trust. Give people the chance to know what are and what will be the opportunities and challenges.
Teach the Brand Purpose and Promise. Begin at the beginning. Ensure the on-boarding program, and any re-boarding program, includes education on the brand purpose and promise. Remind everyone that the brand purpose – the North Star – is a possible dream. Let people know that the organization can make progress towards this vision. We can do this together.
Provide employees opportunities to learn about the brand. Use whatever communication channels work best for your people. Be creative. Use all of your external marketing skills.
Inspiration is all about reinforcement.
- Reinforce the brand programs through common language.
- Reinforce job objectives: listen. People may find that their job has additional or fewer responsibilities, accountabilities and activities. Let them know why.
- Reinforce a results culture. Look for ways in which to celebrate performance improvements. Always describe wins.
- Reinforce the value of the great efforts of team members, regardless of where they work and what they do.
- Reinforce among all employees that they are valued by sharing information with them ahead of the press or the public.
Inspiration aims to create confidence, beliefs, passion and excitement. Help people believe in and look forward to the challenges and actions ahead. Inspiration means constantly communicating to energize and galvanize the internal community. Inspiration generates creativity: firing the imagination for innovation and renovation.
When Anthem Health rebranded itself as Elevance, employees shared in the rebranding efforts via core messaging about the new brand purpose. Elevance wanted to inspire everyone with the new common purpose of improving the health of humanity. As Elevance’s CMO stated, “If you don’t get the internal aspects right, than any good rebranding could go in an entirely different direction.”
Implementation addresses what the brand is doing now. What are the expected behaviors right now? The essence of implementation is: do it now. We need to get on with this now.
Ask employees about barriers and problems, then discuss ways in which to overcome these obstacles to implementation.
One of the best ways to implement actions is to create cross-functional teams, or CFTs. The combination of functions, geographies and levels of individuals with different ways of thinking and approaching problems and creating solutions is a highly effective way in which to support the brand.
At Elevance, one of the critical success factors was collaboration across functions and an organization-wide commitment to the rebranding timelines and the shared vision.
A cross-functional team highlights assets of the organization. The cross-functional team has the power to make things happen.
Cross-functional teams can:
- Define goals
- Develop strategies
- Provide guidance for implementation
- Be a role model
- Develop processes
- Define the common language
- Define the internal measurements
Evaluation is all about measuring progress. The goal is progress not perfection. Evaluation reflects the fact that if something is important enough to do, then that something is important enough to be measured.
Learn from failure; it is the right thing to do.
- Work on improvement.
- Set short-term goals.
- Have a consistent evaluation system
- Measure team success
- Articulate the correlations between program successes and brand successes.
As with all measurement, make metrics clear, global and customized to your internal situation. And, have one set of measurements. Do not give in to the desire to change measurements to satisfy every geography. My country is different does not apply to common metrics.
- Education: What? Why? Why now? What about me?
- Inspiration: Reinforce, Reinforce.
- Implementation: Do it now!
- Evaluation: Measure progress.
Internal marketing is always challenging, but the rewards are worth the challenges.
Sure, most people are uncomfortable with change. But, internal marketing helps people step out of their comfort zone, becoming active participants in brand growth, re-growth and enduring profitable growth.
To make the Internal marketing process smoother, here are some Internal Marketing Do’s and Don’ts:
- Do inform everybody. If you expect everyone to behave in a certain way, you need to let everyone know what’s expected.
- Do create a sense of urgency. Most people will wait for that piece of research or the results of a new campaign or a financial savior. Getting people to start moving forward now is a critical first step.
- Do define success. Let people know what the winning hand looks like. Explain and aim for understanding.
- Do provide educational opportunities. Train, coach and teach people so they can perform and change behaviors and attitudes.
- Do measure progress. People manage what they believe management measures and rewards.
- Do learn from failure. Continuous improvement is the goal. It is okay to fail as long as you learn from it and figure out how to improve.
- Do vocally and globally celebrate the small successes, provide feedback and give people incentives to move forward.
But…
- Don’t start with the difficulties. Starting off with negatives is not an incentive for anyone. Alignment will be easier if you repeat, “We can do this; We can do this.”
- Don’t encourage complacency. People will be reluctant to change. That is to be expected. But, if you are too comfortable, it probably means that you are doing the same thing or doing nothing.
- Don’t just talk. Just talking the talk will not bring about alignment. You must speak and do at the same time. Actions speak louder than words. Declarations must be backed up with deeds.
It is unclear whether Boeing is implementing an Internal Marketing program. Just telling people that things are bad is not a productive way of gaining enthusiasm and trust. Telling is not selling. Employees want to be sold on the idea that everyone is working together and that they know how their lives will be affected.
A great company culture depends on great company internal commitment. An aligned brand is critical. Organizational alignment is awesome. But, it is a challenge. The best way to achieve internal commitment is to incorporate these 4 phases of internal marketing into your brand organization.
Contributed to Branding Strategy Insider by: Joan Kiddon, Partner, The Blake Project, Author of The Paradox Planet: Creating Brand Experiences For The Age Of I
The Blake Project Can Help Build Your Brand From The Inside-Out. Please email us for more about our purpose-driven brand culture programs.
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