Are you selling a brand or a product?
POV*: Using your people to build a great brand
Using your people to build a great brand
When building brands, it’s common to think externally first and focus on customers to increase revenue. Yet the returns can come as much from inside the organisation as outside, through improved employee performance. Many of the brands we work with are now recognising this. We’ve seen that HR people are playing an increasingly important role in projects.
Research has shown that engaged staff are 44% more productive than satisfied staff.¹ The organisation’s brand is a key means of achieving this. Jim Collins, in his study of companies, Good to Great, observed: “That extra dimension [of great companies] is a guiding philosophy or a ‘core ideology’.” Doshi & McGregor in Primed to Perform find that: “[A strong brand identity] unites your team with a common objective, behavioural code, heritage and traditions. It feeds a total motivation culture.”
Focusing inside the organisation first doesn’t just yield benefits in terms of employee performance. It’s also the right place to start for building the external brand. As Richard Branson said: “Clients do not come first. Employees come first. If you take care of your employees, they will take care of the clients.” This is truer than it has ever been. In the age of social media, what employees are saying about the organisation is more visible than ever.
Despite this, research has shown that 60% of employees don’t know their company’s goals, strategies and tactics.¹ Organisations are starting to recognise this, meaning that many of our brand projects now start with an internal focus. We’ve also observed HR people playing an increasingly important role in projects.
For those wanting to approach their brand in this way, we believe there are four principles that are vital for success.
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1. Engage the leadership
Many brand positioning programmes are led by the marketing department. These are often the people who are most customer focused. And they are responsible for much of the marketing communications activity that will build the brand. But the responsibility for leading the organisation falls to the chief executive. To engage the business in the positioning, the champion of it must be the person at the top.
Leaders need to be clear about the behaviours and actions they are to uphold, and need to act as role models for the organisation. They are looked up to, so if they aren’t living the values of the company then the wider team can’t be expected to.
Bo Burlingham in his book, Small Giants, looks at smaller companies who’ve chosen to be great rather than big. Burlingham notes the importance of vision to these companies: “If there’s one thing that every founder and leader in this book has in common with others, it is a passion for what their companies do. They love it, and they have a burning desire to share it with other people.”
When a brand positioning has the buy-in and support of the leader, it becomes something more. It becomes a vision for the organisation. It becomes something that’s embraced by every department – from production and customer service, to marketing and HR. In this way, every aspect of an organisation’s behaviour is driven by the same guiding philosophy and the positioning becomes reality.
2. Align HR and marketing
Since an organisation’s staff are playing an increasingly important part in building the brand, it’s natural that the HR department’s ability to develop culture needs to be a central part of brand building. Work by Econsultancy found that: “As businesses transform to become ‘fit-for-purpose’ for a rapidly changing digital world, the HR function is playing a critical role in supporting change through a heightened focus on culture, learning and employee engagement.”²
One point we often stress to clients is that there is no separation between internal and external reputation. It is not possible to have an employer brand and a customer brand that are positioned differently, managed differently and built differently. Nicola Waring, Director of People at JW Lees, has found that the relationship between marketing and HR is one of the most valuable there is: “From a marketing perspective, you are trying to attract customers. From a HR perspective, you want to attract new recruits. If the key messages are inconsistent then how can you expect your teams to properly engage your customers?”
The Foundation explored this topic at one of their Forum events³, posing the question of whether all this means that the HR and marketing functions should merge: “All of those [internal and external messages] are the same message, and to achieve a true integrity all have to be planted in the same soil and ultimately tended by the same gardener.” This is something that brands are starting to consider, with companies such as Pizza Hut combining the head of marketing and the head of HR roles into one.
Whether a dual role is right for all organisations is debatable. The day-to-day work and skills of a HR director and a marketing director are still very different. It’s entirely possible for the two functions to work closely together, and ultimately the CEO becomes the person responsible for uniting the two – in the same way that they should take ownership of the positioning. Whichever approach an organisation takes, the key point is that marketing and HR activities must be totally aligned behind the same brand vision. As Nicola says: “I would implore all HR teams to make friends with marketing. They are creative in their approach, fun to work with and can provide insight to improve communication and engagement.”
3. Move people
Dan Wieden, co-founder of advertising agency Wieden & Kennedy, talks about the need for advertising to “move me, dude”. This is similarly important internally when it comes to brand positioning and vision. It must inspire employees. The key here is the way the positioning is brought to life – it must be real, human and emotional, not full of brand jargon.
A while ago I saw a post on Facebook from someone who works for a large retailer. One Monday morning he arrived at work to find he had a new screen saver promoting the company’s new brand positioning. He posted a picture of it on Facebook with the caption “Ah great, a new brainwashing screen saver for a Monday morning.” Not only does this show the negative impact that an unengaged employee can have, it also highlights the need to bring the positioning to life in a meaningful way for staff.
Doshi & McGregor make a similar point: “A thoughtful organisation can create authentic purpose for just about any type of work. Yet one of the biggest mistakes a company can make is trumpeting a grandiose purpose that isn’t authentic. If a purpose doesn’t feel credible, it won’t improve your motivation.” As Antoine de Saint-Exupéry once wrote, “If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.”
In an earlier POV piece on brand narratives, we touched on how we’ll often bring a brand positioning to life using a video. We’ve recently created films for the Westmorland Family, JW Lees and Vestey Holdings to turn their visions into moving stories that can be communicated internally and externally.
4. Don't just say it, live it
Enron had these values displayed in their lobby: “Integrity, Communication, Respect, Excellence.” The company went bankrupt due to fraud and its executives were imprisoned. Too many companies spend lots of time and money creating a positioning and values, but then neglect the most important part – embedding them in the organisation.
Jim Collins found that: “The point is not what your core values are, but that you have core values at all, that you know what they are, that you build them explicitly into the organisation, and that you preserve them over time.”
A brilliant book for anyone interested in embedding a vision is Yvon Chouinard’s Let My People Go Surfing, which tells the story of how he built Patagonia, a business with an incredible vision that is rooted in sustainability and environmental awareness. His book details at length how they embedded the vision through a series of philosophies: product design, production, distribution, marketing, finance, human resources, management and environment.
When values and their corresponding behaviours are embedded in the organisation, they guide everyone’s behaviour and provide a solid foundation for action. They demonstrate to employees what’s acceptable and what isn’t. This requires a much more robust approach than simply communicating the values in reception. Organisations that do this well use a variety of techniques:
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Stories
Nike employs several senior executives who serve as corporate storytellers. They tell the story of how Nike’s co-founder, Bill Bowerman, decided that his team needed better running shoes, so poured rubber into the family waffle iron and created Nike’s famous waffle sole. Dennis Reeder, a Nike storyteller, says: “Every company has a history. But we have a little bit more than a history. We have a heritage, something that’s still relevant today. If we connect people to that, chances are that they won’t view Nike as just another place to work.”4 Thinking about what the brand stories are, and how to share them within the organisation, is crucial.
Gatherings
Two of our clients have particularly strong cultures and both of them use events. William Lees-Jones, Managing Director of JW Lees, hosts a meal each month for everyone in the business whose birthday it is that month. Symbolically, this is held at the heart of the business, in a pub attached to their brewery. Boutinot are a wine business that think of themselves as a people business. They hold a wide range of events to symbolise the importance of people – from choir clubs and fitness sessions, to evening meals in their office kitchen. Bringing people together is always a valuable activity, but, if these occasions can be used to reinforce the vision and values of the organisation, they become much more powerful.
Policies
Recognition that is tied to core values gives 79% of employees a stronger sense of company goals and objectives.5 Embedding the core values in recognition programmes is vital for ensuring that employees who exhibit the values are rewarded, and that the culture is reinforced. The same is true of the entire employee journey. The values need to be embedded in recruitment processes, appraisals and inductions. L’Oreal recently highlighted the importance of this last point by creating their own app for use as part of their cultural “onboarding” process for new hires. It reaches up to 10,000 new hires a year, and is available in 11 languages.
Symbols
Patrick Hanlon in Primal Branding tells the story of Lego’s headquarters in Denmark. Visitors are greeted by a doorway into a fantasy world. Over the next hundred steps, visitors are led through the birth and growth of a child, and to a fork in the road as males and females head toward their adolescent destinies. Lego is a company that is all about imagination and recreating the world. Their reception area is a reminder to visitors to put aside their middle-aged perspectives and return to the age of a typical Lego customer. Using symbols within the fabric of the business is a powerful way to remind people of what the brand is all about.
There’s no doubt that brand positioning is now about the employees inside the organisation as much as the customers outside. This approach builds a more engaged and productive workforce. And it enhances the brand’s reputation among customers. It’s a win-win situation. But bringing it about requires an alignment between HR and marketing. And it requires a combination of strategy and creativity. Having a vision is not enough; it needs to be embedded in the fabric of the organisation in a way that moves people.
— RG
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What’s your question?
If this article has struck a chord then we’d be delighted to talk more. If you’re asking a question like those below, then we can help.
What’s our vision, purpose or why?
How can we bring our positioning to life in a way that moves people?
What are our values?
How can we align behaviour with our vision and values?
References and further reading
- Baked In, Bogusky & Winsor
- Good to Great, Jim Collins
- Let My People Go Surfing, Yvon Chouinard
- Primal Branding, Patrick Hanlon
- Primed to Perform, Doshi & McGregor
- Small Giants, Bo Burlingham
- 1 The Times, 29 June 2017
- 2 https://econsultancy.com/reports/the-future-of-hr-in-the-digital-age/
- 3 http://the-foundation.com/2015/09/01/the-two-headed-people-challenge/
- 4 https://www.fastcompany.com/38979/nike-story-just-tell-it
- 5 http://www.recognizethisblog.com/2012/12/fall-2012-workforce-mood-tracker-recognition-linked-to-core-values-delivers-increased-roi/
Get out of your depth
Get out of your depth
David Robert Jones was born 8 January 1947.
He died 10 January 2016, having challenged and changed popular culture.
A singer, songwriter and musician.
As well as an actor, painter, publisher, editor, curator and artist.
Shifting shapes from androgynous alien through to bandaged and button-eyed prophet.
David Bowie, as he became better known, created, adapted and untethered many alter egos.
The flame-haired, platform-booted alien: Ziggy Stardust.
Hedonistic astronaut, Major Tom.
The impeccably dressed and darkest of all his characters, the Thin White Duke.
His exploration of otherworldly personas fuelled by his skills in mime and cabaret and a restless intellectual curiosity.
His musical influences were plentiful: John Coltrane, Harry Partch, Eric Dolphy, The Velvet Underground, John Cage, Sonny Smith, Anthony Newley, Florence Foster Jenkins, Johnnie Ray, Julie London, the Legendary Stardust Cowboy, Edith Piaf and Shirley Bassey.
Not forgetting oompah brass bands, whale song, jungle and opera.
He collaborated with Moby, Trent Reznor, Adrian Belew, Peter Frampton, John Lennon and Iggy Pop.
His worked influenced hard rock, new wave synth-pop, and funk, to name but a few genres.
He was impossible to pigeonhole.
So many albums and genres of music, not to mention fashion styles.
Folk-glam, plastic soul, full-on pop.
David Bowie was one of the most original artists ever.
He preached the idea of always going that little bit further.
“When you don’t feel that your feet are quite touching the bottom, you’re in just about the right place to do something exciting.”
Of going further than you feel you’re capable of going.
If you feel safe in the area you’re working in, then you’re not working in the right place.
Go a little bit out of your depth.
It won’t always feel comfortable, but that’s part of the process.
Take risks; iterate fast; and dare to be different.
Naturally, taking risks is part of our business.
But it can be unnerving for a client.
The art of persuading a client to take the plunge lies in the tight alignment of strategy and creativity.
Relentless curiosity, commercial insight, research and analytics.
Gaining a deep understanding of untapped opportunities and the big issues.
Not by having wacky, creative brainstorms.
But by displaying to the client that we understand their business and their numbers, so that they are more prepared to take the creative leap.
To hold their nose and to jump in with both feet.
— DB
Creativity happens in the shower
Creativity happens in the shower
I’ve always had my best ideas in the shower. Or when dropping off to sleep. There’s a scientific explanation for this. One which can help us design our working practices and environments to be more conducive to creativity.
In my previous post I looked at how we all have the capacity for creative thinking because we all have a left and a right brain. When we’re given a problem to solve, the left brain logically considers the various possibilities. When no solution presents itself, brain activity shifts to the right hemisphere, which allows more unexpected possibilities to be considered.
An idea occurs to us when a new configuration of neurons forms in the brain. Giving the brain some downtime aids this process. During relaxing activities, such as taking a shower, more alpha waves radiate from the right hemisphere. Studies have shown that until these waves are produced the brain will be unable to solve insight puzzles.
So, time to relax is important, but we can’t all work permanently from our showers. Another aspect to consider is fresh perspectives. These can help the brain to form connections that it may not previously have considered. In his TED Talk, Steven Johnson explains that throughout history ideas have tended to come from places where people from different backgrounds are likely to have new, interesting and unpredictable conversations.
Many of the world’s most creative businesses have applied this principle to their office designs. At Pixar, the toilets, kitchen and other communal facilities were purposefully placed at the centre of a circular office so that everyone would be forced to bump into people from different departments. They wanted to foster chance conversations. In our own office, we’ve covered the walls in magnetic sheeting and everyone sticks up work-in-progress rather than keeping it secret on their computers. This encourages spontaneous comments and observations.
Team composition is another important principle. Brian Uzzi, a sociologist at Northwestern University, Illinois, explored this by studying Broadway musicals. He evaluated 472 different productions between 1945 and 1989, measuring the “social intimacy” of the teams working on the productions. A team that had worked together several times before would have high social intimacy. His work showed that musicals with low social intimacy were more likely to fail because the artists didn’t know each other and struggled to share ideas. But equally, when the social intimacy was high, success was also compromised. Uzzi concluded that creative collaborations have a sweet spot: “The best Broadway teams had a mix of relationships. These teams had some old friends, but they also had newbies. This mixture meant they could interact efficiently, but they also managed to incorporate new ideas.”
This doesn’t mean we should all work in a constant hubbub surrounded by colleagues with whom we share medium social intimacy – or at least not all the time. Periods of lone working are as important as serendipitous interactions. Steven Johnson gives the example of Darwin, whose autobiography says that his theory of natural selection arrived in a Eureka moment while sat in his study. However, a scholar named Howard Gruber went back and looked at Darwin’s notebooks. He found that Darwin had the full theory of natural selection for months and months before his claimed epiphany. He had the concept, but was unable to fully think it through or articulate it. Great ideas often fade into view over long periods of time.
Susan Cain, in Quiet: The Power Of Introverts In A World That Can’t Stop Talking, highlights how difficult it can be to find time for ideas to gestate in the modern world: “Calls, texts, emails … even when we’re alone we’re never really alone any more. In the old days a two-hour train journey might be a time when a manager would sit and think about some issue or other they’d put on the back burner, or just let their mind roam over how the business was doing and what they could improve. Now, there’s no reflective time.”
Jason Fried’s TED Talk highlights a similar point. You cannot ask people to be creative in 15 minutes. To think deeply about a problem and be creative you need long stretches of uninterrupted time. Yet offices are inherently places where people are interrupted a lot. While open-plan offices and meetings can help foster creativity on one hand, there is also the need to allow the time and space for solitary working.
Everyone has the capacity to be creative, but by thinking about our workplace design, collaborators and working practices, we can all unleash more ideas within our organisations.
— RG
References:
- Quiet: The Power of Introverts In A World That Can’t Stop Talking, Susan Cain
- How Flashes Of Inspiration Work, Wired
- Where Good Ideas Come From, TED Talk, Steven Johnson
- Why Work Doesn’t Happen At Work, TED Talk, Jason Fried
- Work With Strangers, Wired
