People power

With cutbacks and downsizing the buzz words of 2009, employee engagement is more relevant and important than ever. Marketing budgets are being slashed, discretionary expenses and spending are all but disappearing and everyone is tightening their belts. Customers are still seeking life’s pleasures but they are far more discerning and need to justify value in every dollar they spend.

People are still looking for security in the brand they love, but many brands are open to attack from competitors because they are not delivering a truly differentiated experience. This experience should be special and build a positive reputation that the brand wants to be known for.

Having an amazing product, location and décor are all essential. However, if you take a closer look at what really differentiates the good from the outstanding; it is always the people.

Industry experts agree it costs at least five times as much to win a new customer as it does to keep a current one. More than ever, companies are relying on repeat customers, and employees are one of the most important factors in ensuring this. Are you making the most of what can be your greatest asset?

The experience customers remember, and hence the reputation of the brand, is primarily driven through your people. Ken Irons believes up to 70% of your customer brand perception is determined by experiences with your people. Additionally, according to the Journal of Applied Psychology, 68% of customers leave because of poor employee attitude and 41% of customers are loyal because of a good employee attitude.

With these statistics in mind, it really doesn’t matter how much you spend on other forms of marketing, if you don’t invest in engaging your people with the brand, you will never have a sustainable and valuable brand.

In the leisure and hospitality industries, the importance of customer service is widely understood but this is just scratching the surface of the real opportunity in your people. Many companies are driven by a service culture and hospitality focused companies are well known to invest more in training staff than most of the other industries. However, there is a massive opportunity to move beyond basic and generic training and engage staff in the brand to deliver true differentiation.

Unfortunately, many brands in the region focus on basic customer service training to tell their employees to smile and be helpful to the customer, but fail to engage them to deliver a true brand experience. Most employees are actually keen to help but they often just don’t know how to – they are not empowered. How many times have you been asked “how is your meal sir” when you have your mouth full or been constantly pestered with insincere questions at inappropriate times? This is not good customer service. Furthermore, it is neither providing a good brand experience nor is it providing real brand differentiation.

Just about every company invests heavily in marketing initiatives to tell their customers why their brand is different and special. However, this message rarely filters through to the employees. Most employees don’t understand the brand promise or values, so how can they deliver them? There is a major disconnect between what the organisation says and what it does.

Even more disturbing, most companies don’t even have basic communication channels to inform and communicate with staff about the brand and current promotions. Think of the amount of times you have responded to advertising for a particular offer, only to find the customer service staff have no idea what you are talking about. Not only is this a missed opportunity; it is marketing money wasted and could have a negative long term impact on the brand.

At The Brand Union, we help grow, develop and protect brands and believe that brand engagement is essential to the success of any brand. We define brand engagement as closing the gap between what an organisation says it does; and what and how it delivers to enhance performance and reputation. This involves a change in thinking; putting the brand at the centre of everything the company does and who they are. Brand needs to drive the core philosophy of the organisation, how all employees behave, rather than something the marketing team just does. Employees need to know what’s in it for them and why they should care.

We involve close stakeholders to help deliver on the brand promise. We then use planned frameworks to inform them of the rationale. This inspires them emotionally to be advocates of the brand and to integrate brand into their key behaviours. It is about inspiring, informing, integrating and involving employees.

Consider the average organisation. We believe that there are generally four types of employees in every company. Assume that the ideal employee is someone who both understands what the company is trying to do and is emotionally committed to helping it succeed. What proportion of employees do you think fall into this category? 80%? 60%? 40%?

Well, keep lowering your estimate. From research undertaken by The Brand Union, in the average company, this type of employee — we call them a “brand champion” — is outnumbered more than two to one by other types of employees and this figure is getting worse. Some employees, the “loose cannons”, may care about what the company is trying to do but don’t know what to do about it, while the “bystanders” know what the company is trying to do but don’t care. Unfortunately the “weak links” neither know nor care. To make matters worse, in the average company these weak links make up the biggest group — almost 40%, according to The Brand Union’s Global “Buy In Benchmark” survey.

That’s the bad news. The good news is that this means that most companies have tremendous upside potential. Imagine if we can transform the loose cannons to brand champions — suddenly, nearly two-thirds of the company’s employees will be committed and knowledgeable, and then the bystanders and weak links can be addressed.

Brands need to become the central organising principle for an organisation. They provide a framework against which to apply and communicate customer insight, strategic goals and objectives and organisational initiatives. They act as a code of conduct, a guide to “the way we do things here”. They provide the intellectual and emotional answers to the three questions every organisation has to answer: Where do we want to go? Why do we want to get there? And how can we do so?

Emotionally an employee starts in the awareness stage; “I know what we stand for” and then moves to the attitude stage; “It makes sense to me”. Then comes the ability stage; “I have the skills and knowledge I need”. Next comes the action stage; “I know what I can do to support our brand” and finally the advocacy stage; “I believe in what we do and I recommend our brand”.

Companies must ensure that their employees know, understand and believe in the brand so that they can recommend it to customers. However, this is not just something that we can do for a company; it needs commitment and leadership from within the organisation. Quite simply, it needs to be something that the whole organisation adopts and not just a marketing or HR initiative.

Many are realising there is a real opportunity and value in investing in people. However, it is still unclear how many will invest in truly engaging their employees in their brand. Those who do will be the brands we all talk about, pay extra for and aspire to work for.

Michael Hughes is executive director of strategy and engagement at The Brand Union. The company works with leading organisations across the globe to create intellectual connections and emotional commitments between stakeholders and the brand.

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