Company Branding Articles
Internal Branding – the Key to reconnecting your Customers and Employees
Customers drive sales and profitability. So how do your employees interact with and engage customers? How would your customers describe their experience? Do your customers have an expectation on how your employee will represent your brand?
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.
Leadership – Taking Your Brand to the Frontline
The importance of the role managers play in infusing real change is under-estimated in most organisations. Whilst it’s true that perhaps certain leaders are born, the significant majority are developed into becoming leaders. Your position as a manager or supervisor gives you the authority to accomplish certain tasks and objectives. This power does not make you a leader, it simply makes you the boss!
If you Google the word ‘leader’ or ‘leadership’, there are 487 million hits. That’s a lot of information which can only add to the confusion of what leadership really is. Leadership is not the sole responsibility for ‘people at the top’, everyone can learn to lead by tapping into the abilities that lie within each of us. Leadership differs from management in that it makes the followers want to achieve high goals, rather than simply bossing people around.
Influencing Organisational Culture
Naturally, having a strong culture is great competitive advantage; indeed the strength of corporate culture can significantly affect corporate policies such as employment, managerial and financial structures. Organisational culture directly influences the likelihood of success for a company’s change strategies. As evidence suggests, team members are more inclined to embrace change when the organisation’s culture is aligned with the mission and goals of that company. (Ref: Edgar Schein, The Corporate Culture Survival Guide, California: Jossey-Bass, 1999)
Meaningful Employment Value Propositions for Generation Y
Generation Y is widely defined as the people born between 1982 and 2000. In total there are in excess of 5.15million Generation Y people currently living in Australia. Understanding how they view the world is critical as Employers grapple with skills shortages and an ageing population. Companies that can understand and cater for the needs of this younger group of workers will be more likely to attract and retain this critical group of workers.
In an article published by the Australian Leadership foundation Mark McCrindle explains that Generation Y’s have lived through “the age of the internet, cable television, globalisation, September 11 and environmentalism. Such shared experiences during ones youth unite and shape a generation. There is an ancient saying that bears much truth: People resemble their times more that they resemble their parents”
Brand is Image and Image is Brand….
For those that believe brand and image are separate and in no way linked may need to rethink their position. In the media recently have been two prime examples of how brand and image are closely interrelated, albeit almost the same thing. Brand in its simplest context are those attributes that makes one product or company stand apart from another. Image is how products and companies present themselves, through logos, colours and artefacts.
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.
Think Different
Whether you are a lover or hater, promoter or detractor, a user of Microsoft Windows or Google Android, there is one thing we can all agree on. Apple Inc. with Steve Jobs at the helm has influenced ours lives in one way or another. You may be a “disciple of the church of Apple” or wishing to bring it down, either way Apple has been on the tip of your tongue. This blog post aims to discuss how brands, especially brands like Apple, can evoke such strong emotional responses in us, either on a conscious or subconscious level, and whether brands are simply a function of clever marketing and advertising or evolve from somewhere deep within the psyche of an organisation.
Employee Engagement for Competitive Advantage
Your brand is only as safe as your least engaged employee. Engage your employees and align them with your corporate vision and values, as they are the face that represents your business at all levels, interacting with all stakeholders. Employee engagement is also an effective source for competitive advantage. Not only are employees an asset that is dynamic, flexible and resilient, but they are also difficult for your competitors to replicate, a source of value and uniqueness.
Data or Analysis: What gives the greater edge? The debate continues…
In part two of this debate, the question of what truly gives a competitive edge is explored through looking at the types of data captured, and poses a further conundrum of what is the better type of data, quantitative or qualitative?
In the previous blog (posted 12th August, 2011), the position was taken that it is the uniqueness of data that can provide quality insights that help establish a sustainable competitive advantage; but in saying this, the unique data needs to be matched by quality analysis. However this raises the question of how data can be “unique”? Should you look for the hard, quantifiable and crunchable analytics or the more “soft touch” that is afforded with qualitative data?
When Brands get Branded
The difference between having a brand and being branded is an issue that has arisen in the news recently. The plight of Tiger Airways and The News of the World are examples where a company has lost the brand reputation and, as a consequence, have now been branded by the public. A quote from billionaire businessman Warren Buffett comes to mind and managers at the top and middle ranks of the two companies could have heeded its warning. Buffett was quoted as saying, “It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that you’ll do things differently”.
What does your Political party really stand for?
Political parties traditionally are the embodiment of a set of strongly held beliefs about the way a country and economy should be managed. Sadly, most political leaders now spend more time thinking and worrying about their public image than they do about what they and their party really stands for.
In his recently published book “The Dumbing Down of Politics” Lindsay Tanner explains that political leaders are now obsessed with achieving media exposure. He goes on to explain that serious political debate about the big issues is being lost in a political sideshow that is more concerned with appearances than substance. In essence many political parties are now poorly positioned as brands. Brands actually stand for something – many political parties do not.