So how does an organisation manage its customer experience to ensure its people, processes and culture are reinforcing customer expectations? A key foundation of customer experience management is internal branding.

Internal branding in essence is ‘living’ and ‘delivering on’ your organisation’s brand promises. It is an organisation-wide initiative that enables all employees to understand how they can personally impact on a customer’s experience and contribute to building the company’s reputation and brand.

Many organisations fall into the trap of developing an advertising strategy with the intention of communicating how wonderful and customer-centric the organisation is. While the advertising direction may be in-line with the organisation’s brand, where it falls down is where what is being promoted is not being delivered.

The result of this is that both customers and employees are disconnected with the organisation, as UK oil company Total experienced. The company ran an ad campaign featuring the perfect employee called Steve who spends his time running around helping customers with heavy loads, childcare and car maintenance with the tagline ‘You’ll find people like Steve at all of our service stations’. The company did not reinforce this customer expectation with training and additional support to help employees, leaving both the employee and the customer frustrated and disappointed.

Internal branding today is all about connecting employees with an organisation’s brand and ensuring the internal brand experience is authentic. Just ask one of the 46,000 employees of The Dow Chemical Co. about the authenticity of their internal brand. They will most likely point you to the ‘I Am the Human Element’- an internal campaign which celebrates the contributions and successes of their employees, helping the organisation achieve its vision.

FedEx is another example of an organisation that has focused on building a strong internal brand and as a result is considered one of the world’s most admired companies and trusted employers. The company’s workforce not only know and believe in the values instilled by their ‘People-Service-Profit’ internal brand, but they can cite chapter and verse the actions they and others have taken to deliver the FedEx brand and what it means to them. This level of employee engagement delivers significant benefit to FedEx in terms of high performance and strong profits.

So perhaps it is time to consider the benefit to your organisation of building a strong internal brand. Recent transitional times with a turnover of employees, changing management styles or the merging of departments may have had more of an impact on your internal brand than you realise.

Reinvigorate your employees on what your organisation stands for and build passion for your brand promise. Not only will you reconnect with your employees and improve engagement but you will also reconnect with your customers and improve profitability.

The definition of brand needs to go one step deeper because those attributes that make a product or company stand out from others stems from something beyond image and below the surface of what we see – that part of the iceberg that lays underneath the waterline.  These are normally considered core values.  That is, those values that help us create a relationship with products, services and companies so we then grow to know and trust them.

The lines between image and brand were recently blurred when QANTAS launched a campaign over Twitter asking customers what their dream luxury in-flight experience would be.  Whether the timing of this campaign was intentional or not, QANTAS customers used the medium as a platform to comment on the airlines current operational and industrial dispute issues.  The attempt to garner some support and goodwill towards the company was entirely misdirected.  Instead of creating a polished image of QANTAS the campaign really exacerbated the internal issues and drew attention away from QANTAS’ key brand message.  Evidently, this exercise has been dubbed “the Hindenburg of social media” but goes to show that when something is not right at your core, where your brand draws its meaning from, then no amount of “image polishing” that can fix it.

Another example of how image and brand are interrelated is shown in the current plight of Kyle Sandilands.  Love him or hate his brand message is about sensationalism and as such in his need to be “sensational” he can go very awry.  His recent public outburst cost Austereo 60% of their sponsors which estimated to be worth $8 million.  The bankable image of the man has truly tanked and we are seeing glimpses of what he truly values.  It was reported that Holden was the first sponsor to leave Austereo citing disconnect in values of the shows and the Holden brand.  Next to follow were The Good Guys.  What sponsors are starting to see is Kyle Sandilands brand, and values. Sponsors are then making judgement calls on whether his brand is congruent with theirs.

So whereas QANTAS tried to use a competition campaign to polish its image in an attempt to gloss over what was happening in the company on an operational level, the sentiment felt by its customers did not change – customers wanted more.  How was QANTAS going to address the issues the company faces whilst still being “the spirit of Australia.  The opposite occurred with Kyle Sandilands.  His real and overtly sensational self bubbled to the surface from his core and tarnished his incredibly bankable image.  These examples highlight the very tenuous but also very real link between image and brand because really the two cannot be separated; your brand is your image is your brand….

Positive Hiring Intentions – most employers are planning on hiring more people

Widening gap between candidate and employer salary intentions – most candidates expect more than employers are prepared to pay

Skills shortages – 54% of employers in Australia are experiencing difficulty in filling critical positions. This number is significantly higher in WA and QLD. Australia is ranked fourth out of 39 countries for skills shortages in critical roles.

These factors combined have moved the pendulum of power well and truly back into the favour of employees. Reality is that well qualified candidates in the trades, sales and marketing, engineering, mechanical, accounting and technical trades have an abundance of choices.

Candidates in these professions can afford to be choosey about which roles they accept. For recruiting Organisations having a good reputation or brand in the marketplace becomes mission critical. To minimise turnover rates Organisations need to be able to deliver on the psychological contract that exists between them and their employees. Work places that don’t satisfy employees basic and higher level needs will find it increasingly difficult to attract and retain staff.

Not only do organisations need to meet candidates increasing salary expectations, they need to provide an environment where people enjoy, achieve and are actively engaged in their work. Leadership, strong organisational values, a great culture and team based incentives become increasingly important in this kind of environment.

Smart Organisations are being proactive in positioning their Organisation to deal with this storm. They are developing their Employment Value Proposition (EVP) and they are investing in building the culture of their organisation to maximise their ability to attract and retain their people. Increasingly successful organisations also measure the level of engagement of their workforce. They continually look for ways to deliver on the promises that they have made to their existing employees and look for ways to become more attractive to potential new hires.

The bad news for employers is that this situation is not a temporary. In spite of the Global Financial Crisis the ageing population and the mining boom mean that this storm is likely to continue to worsen for years to come. Organisations need to reinvent themselves and review how they engage their existing and potential workforces to successfully navigate the storm.

Historically, the Qantas brand has been built on a solid foundation with a mix of two things: safety and reliability, as well as being Australia’s friendly ambassador to the world. Qantas’ positioning on safety and reliability comes from its extraordinary track record, also famously plugged as the world’s best in the Oscar-winning movie Rain Man: “QANTAS…QANTAS never crashed”. Qantas’ long-standing ambassador role harks back to its first overseas passenger flight from Darwin to Singapore in 1935. Since then, it has consistently reinforced that status by stirring feelings of patriotism: the use of the Flying Kangaroo logo in 1947 and the ‘Spirit of Australia’ slogan, the use of emotive advertising featuring sweeping shots of iconic Australian tourist attractions, the co-branded marketing campaigns with Tourism Australia (more recently Oprah and John Travolta).

Today however, the Qantas brand operates in a significantly different landscape, which in turn raises questions about whether it can still rely on the same brand associations and positioning. Whilst safety and reliability are sine qua non for the airline industry, perhaps air travel has become so pervasive that amongst well-known brands, safety and reliability are assumed to be a given or must-have (as industrial psychologist Herzberg would term it ‘hygiene’ factor) and may no longer constitute a point of difference. Volvo and safety worked well for a while; but for Mercedes Benz, prestige and performance are its selling points because their customers who look for those things largely assume that they are also getting safety as a standard. Similarly, Singapore Airlines has been consistently profitable by positioning its unique service experience, not because it screams “safety and reliability” in its advertising.

Recent events may have also changed public perception of Qantas’ positioning on safety and reliability. Recurring grievances and industrial action by Qantas engineers and maintenance personnel may have created lingering concerns about aircraft operating fitness. Even if regulators ensure that unsafe aircrafts do not take off, what will delays and cancellations do to an airline’s reputation for reliability? A scan of social media revealed that there is substantial chatter voicing concerns about Qantas’ safety standards, and with the speed at which negative word-of-mouth spreads in social networks, every minor issue now would be magnified and widely disseminated.

Increasingly, Qantas may also be perceived to be less Australian in spirit. Recent negative publicity about exorbitant executive pay smacks of corporate greed of Wall Street proportions. The spirit of giving executives a 70% pay rise while outsourcing operations to Southeast Asia would be perceived as fairly un-Australian. In fact, concerns about safety, reliability, and outsourced are linked: a recent survey of investors and shareholders revealed that 55% believe that outsourcing is the cause of many of its midair incidents. One could see that it would be slightly hypocritical to continue to capitalise on feelings of national pride among local consumers when a company is moving operations offshore because it no longer wants to pay national-average wages to its local workers. It may only be a matter of time when it strikes passengers that an Irish-led, part-British-owned airline can only control Australian skies for so long….until the next viable option comes around.

The branding challenges for Qantas are not straightforward, yet not insurmountable. Two of Qantas’ brand pillars, which have served its domestic and international markets quite well thus far, are weakening and the airlines is left scrambling trying to reinforce the same brand pillars with band-aids and PR spin. The domestic market may be forgiving because we are Australians (and we really don’t have a choice), but the international market is much less so. How will Jetstar and Red Q compete in the already-competitive Asian market? What will their respective brand equities look like when it can no longer rely on the endorsement of a once-strong parent brand? Building brand equity requires insights about what will make the brand differentiable and sustainable.

This link between celebrity and brand image is examined in new market research that suggests the stronger the attachment to a celebrity, the higher their purchase intentions of a brand the celebrity endorses (Ilicic et al 2011)*. Brands should thus seek out celebrities with whom their target market is engaged with to endorse their products. This may sound like stating the obvious, and it is to a degree, however the new finding here is hard evidence of the effect consumer-celebrity engagement has on the ability of celebrity endorsements to work.

For example, imagine a brand is considering two celebrities to endorse their product. One may be much more famous in terms of people who are aware of them and know what they do. The other is less widely known, but has a loyal fan base that is strongly attached to this person and happens to comprise the target market. This new research suggests the lesser known celebrity would be a better choice for this brand because the target consumer attachment to this person is higher, even though the other celebrity is more widely known.

Although further market research would be required to fully validate the findings discussed above, it provides an interesting introduction into examining the relationship between consumer-celebrity attachment and the effectiveness of celebrity endorsement. This is particularly important given the high-profile nature of celebrity endorsements, the hefty pay packets involved in these deals and the fallout if celebrity endorsements are not chosen carefully.

*Ilicic, J & Webster, C.M. 2011, Effects of multiple endorsements and consumer–celebrity attachment on attitude and purchase intention, Australasian Marketing Journal, Australasian Marketing Journal, vol 19, p. 230 – 237

Taking this further many organisations appoint brand ambassadors or spokespeople that represent the attributes that they would like consumers to associate with their product or organisation. A good example of this was Gillette who associated themselves with the world’s best performing athletes. In 2009 Tiger Woods, Roger Federer and Thierry Henry were Gillette’s global ambassadors. Securing these three ambassadors cost Gillette millions!

The strategy was simple Gillette wanted to have their brand associated with the world’s best performing athletes, they wanted to be viewed as the best performing, clean cut, international, multi-racial, multi-sport, global superstars. Through association many of the characteristics of the brand ambassadors were projected onto their products. As the tag line stated “Gillette the best a man can get”

This approach works wonderfully well when your ambassadors are viewed positively. It is however a two edged sword. Interestingly, two of three global ambassadors for Gillette fell from grace within a very short period of time. Tiger Woods ran into a fire hydrant outside his home and was soon exposed as a sex obsessed philander. Weeks later Thierry Henry found himself in the center of a storm of negative publicity after using his left hand – his shaving hand – to illegally propel France into the World Cup Finals.

Using an ambassador to endorse your product is not without risk and the Gillette experience highlights how closely aligned a brand’s fortunes are to their chosen ambassador.

Very recently we have had situations where undesirable people (people not chosen as ambassadors) have decided to support, wear or endorse a company’s brand.  In the USA Abercrombie & Fitch (a popular clothing brand) have offered to pay the cast of “Jersey Shore” to stop wearing their clothes on their television show.

The clothing company says in a news release that it’s concerned that having the people on this television program seen wearing its clothing could cause “significant damage” to the company’s image.

This kind of unwanted endorsement potentially creates an entire new revenue stream for people of undesirable profile. Mangers may well exploit their client’s negative image and deliberately associate them with desirable brands. It is entirely possible that we may well see more people being paid not to associate with brands than people paid for their positive endorsement.

Social media and reality television mean that there will be more people with negative images who will enjoy their 15minutes of fame. Having an undesirable brand ambassador attach themselves to your brand creates a raft of new issues for you and your brand.

These analysts are wrong; the share price of the Organisation has fallen by almost 20% since the scandal started and has wiped billions of dollars off the company’s market value.  So how can it be that what happened in a tiny division of News Corporation has had such a monumental impact on News Corporation’s overall share price?

The answer is that the company’s reputation or brand has been damaged and that this reputational damage has impacted the News Corporation brand throughout all parts of the empire. Investors, employees, customers, and governments will now think twice before doing business with anyone associated with News Corporation.

Stakeholders and media are asking how this could happen in an organisation managed and run by the Murdoch’s, a family famous for their tight controls and scrutiny of their businesses. People are questioning the culture of the News of The World – clearly the culture of this business was one that emphasised “getting the story” and paid little attention to the way the story was obtained.

 Additionally, people are wondering what the culture is like in the other parts of the Murdoch empire?  If this culture is prevalent in other parts of News Corporation what other scandals will be uncovered?

On a very personal level both Lachlan and James Murdoch have had their personal brands damaged. One would have to seriously question if they are competent to be Directors of this or any other company?

From a legal perspective in Australia a Chairman and all Directors of the business are required to act with the care and diligence of a reasonable person in a like position in a similar company.  It would seem reasonable that if phones were being hacked and millions of dollars “hush money” was being paid that the Chairman and all of the Directors would have, or should have known. For a Chairman and Director of such a large company to blame the people that they appointed is not acceptable. In the end the buck stops with the Directors.

From an ethical perspective the Directors of a company have a responsibility for the culture of a company. If a company’s culture is allowed to develop in a way that is not in the long term best interests of all shareholders they can and should be held to account.

The Murdoch’s have created a very powerful media empire over many decades. The reputation of News Corporation has been severely damaged within a very short period of time and this brand damage has cost shareholders billions. At the end of the day culture influences a company’s reputation and reputations can be worth billions!

Just reading the headlines alone one can see how quickly these companies’ brands have been decimated. Almost overnight Tiger Airways has gone from being a company that espouses affordability without compromising passenger safety and security to an airline branded as being unsafe and unfit to fly. The actual grounding of its entire Australian domestic fleet is estimated to be costing the company $1.5 million a day, their stock price is in decline and a minor shareholder has reduced its stake in the airline.

At the same time the damage to The News of the World brand has forced the Chairman of its parent company to shutdown the newspaper. The newspaper had a rich 168 year history reporting the news and now in the space of a few days it has ceased operation; all because of a scandal that has thrown the reputation of the company into turmoil and caused irreparable damage to the brand; not to mention the questionable ethical behaviours and criminal investigations currently underway.

How it is these companies lost control of their brands and let customers decide what to brand them? There is a myriad of issues that underlie these cases but from a branding perspective these companies failed to deliver on its promises. When a brand fails to deliver on what it is supposed to then customers and the public will retaliate. The News of the World failed to follow ethical journalistic standards and the public have been quite outspoken, to the point where the newspapers owners have closed the doors. Tiger Airways has failed to meet the required standard to operate in Australia, forcing the Civil Aviation Safety Authority to ground the entire domestic fleet. As a consumer would you fly again with a carrier that was once grounded over safety concerns?

Companies should really take note of what happens in the coming weeks to these company’s brands. Tiger Airways may be granted the ability to fly again but will it be welcomed by customers? The News of the World may again publish news under a different name but will readers really ever trust them again? Perhaps if they fully grasped the warning Warren Buffett gave, they would have actually done things different to safeguard their brands from being branded.

Technology brands dominared the rankings, making up a third of the top 100. Top of the pack this year was Apple with an estimated brand value of $153 billion USD, an increase of 84% on last year. Falling to second place since last year was Google with an estimated value of $111 billion USD. In terms of brands that grew the most, Facebook led the way with a brand value growth of 246% since last year, demonstrating the ever-growing power of the social networking site. The brand values in the Millward Brown report were calculated using consumer behaviour and brand perceptions research, financial performance data and financial projections.

A key finding of the Millward Brown report was the importance of having a clear value proposition for what a brand can offer the individual. This trend is particularly evident in apparel, where consumers desire personal expression in their purchases. Consumers use brands to show something about themselves; as such, a successful brand needs to stand for something and be seen and believed to do so. To illustrate, Apple is widely known to stand for innovation in making people’s lives easier and allowing them to be connected to one another. Brands with a clear identity and personality were those that came out as most valuable.

In a climate of global economic instability and recession, consumers turn to trusted, recommended brands. Results from the Millward Brown report indicated that the highest value brands often had high recommendation and trust scores, demonstrating that strong brands are those that consumers can trust and would recommend to their family and friends. In particular, both Apple and Google had high trust and recommendation levels.

No matter what industry a company belongs to, having a strong brand that can weather the tough times relies on having a clear brand identity that is trusted and recommended by consumers, whoever they may be. Do you know what your company’s brand stands for? Perhaps more importantly, do you know what it stands for in the eyes of your customers?  Having a clear answer to this question that is based on sound evidence is a vital step towards creating a strong brand that can survive the tough times and can thrive when things get better.

The AFL has placed artificial barriers in the market to ensure that the rich clubs cannot simply go out and “buy” the best players. The AFL’s number one objective is to develop their brand. They do this in part by creating a structure that creates an even competition. A more even competition makes for closer games. Closer games enhance the popularity of the sport and this drives profitability.

The AFL’S salary cap combined with the AFL draft concessions limit a player’s capacity to switch clubs. This is in stark contrast to European soccer where there is a total “free market”

 In European soccer there are no salary caps and no restrictions on the recruitment and retention of players. This means that the wealthiest clubs like Real Madrid and Manchester United continue to get stronger.   They can recruit from anywhere in the world.  As a result these clubs have dominated European soccer for decades. Few clubs have the financial resources or the brand power to compete with them.

European soccer reflects the wider employment market. Employers compete in a global open market, with few restrictions. Large, successful organisations can offer their employees more money and more benefits.   Talented employees are unrestricted in choosing who they will work for.

Fortunately, smart clubs and smart employers know that players and employees don’t necessarily choose where they will play/ work based solely on the salary they will receive.

Indeed, there has been much research conducted into the role that salary plays. Salary is generally seen as a hygiene factor, or a factor that employers must be competitive on.  More important than salary is the psychological contract that exists between an employer and its employees, this specifically concerns mutual expectations of inputs and outcomes.

Indeed, there are numerous examples of players joining clubs where the salary that they receive is less that they would have been offered elsewhere.   Invariably players, like employees join and stay at the clubs who best address their collective set of needs. Clubs that consistently deliver on the promises they make in this psychological contract will attract and retain their players.

All professional sporting teams compete fiercely for the most talented players. These players make decisions about which clubs to join based upon monetary and non- monetary factors. Players want great coaches, strong relationships, a cohesive team environment, personal development, great facilities, common vision, a strong culture and the chance to be part of a successful team.

Increasingly loyalty and retention amongst professional athletes goes well beyond how much you get paid. Employees are no different.