Before there was a slogan you’d never forget (Nike), or a compelling marketing campaign and user experience that hooked you for life (Apple), or a brand whose values were unapologetically on display (Chick-fil-A), there had to be a bold, audacious vision. Bringing the vision to life in memorable ways demanded compelling storytelling. Otherwise, how do athletic shoes and gear, a computer and technology maker, and a chicken sandwich go on to become iconic brands?
Compelling storytelling doesn’t start with the customer. It begins with internal branding to employees. As the story goes with Nike, Just Do It came from a firm much like Hyperquake more than 20 years after Nike was founded. Those three words represented Phil Knight’s audacious vision and were modeled in how the company operated. When employees embraced it and bought in, it changed the trajectory and fortunes of the company.
Whatever your perception of internal communications or internal branding, set it aside. Then consider this perspective based on experiences from companies like yours:
Internal branding isn’t the fluffy, feel-good stuff you think it is. It’s fuel for the overall health of the business and its bottom line.
THE CASE FOR INTERNAL BRANDING
Making a significant investment in brand development and then rushing to market – without building the necessary understanding, awareness, and empowerment of employees to be effective storytellers – is a business plan that yields to a marketing strategy with built-in flaws.
Go home… before you go big.
The goal of any marketing strategy in today’s Attention Economy is to first capture attention. Great marketing and creative can achieve that, but ultimately it must deliver on a promise – one that likely cannot be kept unless employees are in on the promise and know what’s at stake. That makes your company’s home office your proving grounds, and why the marketing mantra of “go big or go home” is premature.
When Jim Collins wrote Built to Last 30 years ago, then followed it up seven years later with Good to Great, he talked about “cult-like cultures” and “cultures of discipline.” Throughout both books, what goes nearly unspoken is the discipline of internal communication. What Jim was saying then without today’s storytelling lens is this – internal audiences elevate the culture when they know the company purpose, the origin story, who they serve and why.
But beyond these brand basics, internal audiences also need to hear the innovation stories as well as the adversity stories that draw from history and experience. These stories validate the company’s purpose and what it values through tangible examples of setbacks and success. We've partnered with many companies that believe in the value of internal branding so much they've created heritage and archive centers devoted to telling their history.
It is the intentional narrowing of your aperture – even when you think you’re ready to seize the big picture – that yields valuable insights leading to results.
When there isn’t continuity and consistency to knit together the vision, values, brand, stories and marketing campaigns, the internal audience is the first to spot it. When companies overlook their internal audience, they forfeit opportunities for strategic course correction. Pushing out marketing that emerges from disconnected core elements will likely fail to resonate externally, translating into opportunities being squandered and money wasted.
Instilling habits, not optics.
Plenty of companies talk with confidence about their people being ambassadors for their brand. But what does that really mean? Cool environments masquerading as the culture, and wearing company-branded swag misses the mark. Your people need a paycheck, but they also want reasons to believe in the brand issuing that paycheck. Achieving that requires a commitment to reminding them of the company purpose, which comes to life through intentional and repeated storytelling. Because when they know the stories, they can share them like good ambassadors should.
Internal branding is more than a strategic advantage; it’s the foundation for creating a company culture that understands, believes in, and champions its brand. When employees are empowered with the right stories and vision, they become your most authentic ambassadors.
In part 2, we explore how to take this concept further – from uncovering the stories that matter to coaching credible storytellers and leveraging multiple mediums to engage your team. Learn how to build your brand from the inside out and ignite the storytelling potential within your organization.
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