There isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t think about marketing. I believe that every day presents a new opportunity to market your brand, whether through the suppliers and customers you meet or the business plans and strategies you are working on. Everything you do says something (good or bad) about your brand. Everything.
Most companies spend quite a bit of money marketing their brands and are always on the look out for new ways to speak to their customers. From the traditional (media placements, promotions and advertisements) to the expensive (sports sponsorship) and the innovative (guerilla marketing), there are so many ways to make your brand top of mind. But are we necessarily getting the best return on our considerable investment?
We often forget about one of the oldest (and most powerful) marketing tools – word of mouth – and how powerful it can be when it flows (naturally) from the hearts and mouths of your employees, in addition to your clients. When all things are equal in the customer’s mind (cost, product, etc) you can bet that the people they deal with, your employees, are really what make them chose your company time and time again. So best we invest in them wisely.
Imagine spending R5 million on sponsoring a big golf day only to have your customers overhear a group of your employees bad mouthing your leadership team at the next hole. It kind of negates any goodwill created. Because what employees think, say and do around your brand counts for a lot more than we think.
I once heard someone say that a brand is like an iceberg – 10% of it is visible externally and 90% hidden and its this 90% that determine how the 10% is perceived. A big chunk of that hidden iceberg is your employee base. Their actions, behaviours and attitudes are every bit as important as the policies, products and procedures they carry out. How your employees feel about the company affects how they deal with your customers. But here’s the trick – it has to be authentic. So a few teambuilds here and there won’t really make much difference.
But do we even how our employees feel about our brands? And even if they do feel empowered, motivated and inspired, is what they are saying and doing necessarily in line with the brand’s values and how we want the brand to be perceived?
Let’s turn this on ourselves for a second. Would we know how to “sell” our brand? Would we know what the brand stands for and not just what innovative products we offer? Would we know how to answer the difficult questions about our past as much as the exciting ones about our future? I bet it might be harder than we think. Perhaps it’s time to put ourselves on the spot and see whether marketing would give us a 10/10 for good intentions and a 3/10 for proper execution.
And that’s another point. If we want to turn our employees into brand ambassadors we need to integrate this into your company’s workings, which means marketing has to work closely with HR. In Deloitte, there is a group of people who focus specifically on the ‘talent agenda’ (recruitment, inductions and development) and are jointly responsible for reporting into to marketing and HR. They know that how they grow the company’s employees has to be in line with the brand’s values and how they want the brand to perceived in the public arena.
We would do well to remember that our employees are our biggest brand ambassadors or saboteurs, whether you want them to be or not. So best we make sure they tweet good things about the company on Twitter instead of talk badly about it around the braai.
