Inspire Employees to Live the Brand for Bottom-line Results

Creating a brand promise is only the first step in building your brand to drive your business. Companies with winning brands are those that have employees who know what they need to do to deliver value to customers. To engage employees in brand delivery, you need to focus behaviors and motivate people to deliver the promise at every point of customer contact.

Brand Delivery Expertise

At Gagen MacDonald, we don’t develop brand promises – we promise to help companies deliver them. We call it called brand delivery. And that means helping you to deliver the expected “brand experience” consistently at every point of customer contact. We do this by engaging your people, using our experience and a selection of proprietary tools, including message maps, brand delivery modeling and brand/business strategy alignment.

Some people name this internal marketing or internal branding – we call it strategy execution. And we know what success looks like…and we know the energy that motivates a company when its people get behind the brand and in front of the customer.

Our Observations on Brand Delivery

Your brand strategy must be your business strategy.

For a brand to be successful, the brand strategy needs to be the business strategy, not a separate initiative out of alignment with the business. They are the same. There is no room at all for internal brands that are not aligned or in conflict with the business strategy.

A brand promise tells customers what to expect AND informs employees what to do. Believe it or not, your brand promise needs greater explanation inside the company than it does outside the company to get people to buy it. It should tell employees what they are supposed to do and what actions are required, whether people are in supply chain management, maintenance or customer service. In fact, the brand needs to simplify the business strategy to motivate action.

The brand must be top of mind and guide decisions.

Brand delivery must be championed inside the company. It requires cross-functional, organization-wide understanding, commitment, and action. The brand should serve as a model for decision making within the company.

© 2005 Gagen MacDonald LLC