Internal branding is all about the strategies and tactics you employ to encourage your staff to understand and believe in your brand so they naturally deliver on-brand products and services to the market. Internal branding can relate to the actual core service delivered or to all of the key ancillary services that are delivered in support.

Your brand position is your promise to the market as to what they can expect when they buy from you and deal with you. If you are to build and maintain your desired brand, you need to deliver your fundamental brand promise every time the market experiences your products and services or have any other contact with your company.

Deliver an on-brand experience and you will reinforce your brand position and validate all of your external marcomms spend that focussed on telling the market what your brand is all about. Deliver an off brand experience and you will break a fundamental promise of what you said you are about as an organisation - a broken promise that is exacerbated by the promises made in your advertising, and is not easily forgiven by your customers nor the other people they tell about it.

And the key to aligning your organisation, your staff and ultimately your culture, is through the internal branding you do.

Internal vs external marketing

In many respects, internal marketing is more important than external marketing (particularly in service sectors), as it focuses on the customer experience - the one time when you know that people are paying attention to what you are doing and saying (as opposed to your advertising, which by its nature is a bit hit and miss in terms of gaining people's attention).

However, internal marketing receives nowhere near the same attention or budget spend as external marketing. Some of the reasons for this are:

• It can be less visible to staff than advertising and the short-term return is not as directly measured as with more direct external marketing


• It is perceived as the 'less sexy' side of marketing without the perceived pizzazz of external marketing


• It requires co-operative effort with other internal business units (particularly HR) and therefore is not as easily controlled/governed by Marketing


• There is far less experience in this area and it is not as well understood by marketing practitioners - external marketing is the 'familiar' option for marketers


• It may require a diversion of some budget away from traditional external marketing, which may concern those who do not understand or appreciate the value it brings to businesses

Management and Board buy-in

As with any organisation-wide initiative, internal branding requires management and Board support to work. Management and the Board should initiate and support internal branding initiatives. Management will need to walk the talk with passion to influence culture and staff behaviour. Time should be spent with management to help them understand the brand and fully appreciate the impact the customer experience has on brand and the business and the critical role they have to help build brand internally.

Also, rather than discussing brand in brand/marketing terms, the key is to focus on the impact on staff, customers and ultimately the business. There should be a clear nexus between internal marketing, brand and the business.

This is where an external expert can assist. I call it the 'marriage effect'. Your spouse can tell you the same thing a thousand times, but as soon as you hear it from someone else you finally pay attention and consider it a good point. In this analogy, Marketing is the spouse and Management often needs to hear it from someone else!

HR and Marketing

As internal marketing is about influencing culture and behaviours, HR has an incredibly important responsibility in your business' ability to build and deliver your brand. Having to rely so heavily and work with another business unit can be a challenge for some marketing areas. This could be because Marketing is used to having full control over marcomms outputs. Also, the HR area may not understand/appreciate their role in internal branding or they may have so much else on they don't see it as a core area of responsibility and give it little air time.

It is important for both Marketing and HR to fully understand and appreciate their respective roles in internal branding for it to work. Marketing should involve HR early in the piece to help generate understanding and buy-in and should recognise and leverage HR's skills in the areas of people, change and culture. Equally, HR should recognise that Marketing's skills are in the branding, marketing and communications areas and should allow Marketing to lead in these areas.

Although it is a joint effort and a balancing act of who will do what, Marketing should maintain the overall responsibility for internal branding. This is simply because the ultimate objective of building and maintaining brand is core to Marketing and is less likely to be lost amongst other initiatives.

Back office staff are not second-class citizens

Businesses that spend some quality time and effort on internal branding usually focus on the customer-facing areas of the business first. Using the Pareto Principle (the 80:20 rule), this is exactly the correct thing to do, initially.

Trouble is that back office areas such as legal and finance are not involved and never really appreciate or understand brand. This potentially presents a few problems:

• They have ideas too - some of the best ideas and initiatives can come from these areas


• They can be bottlenecks - if they don't understand why some things are being done and changes are being made to processes and outputs they may make it difficult for areas to implement creating frustration and resentment


• They can make it easier for the front office - if they know what is being done and why, they can structure rules and processes to facilitate rather than hinder progress

The level of involvement of the back office will of course depend on the time and budget available, and what else is going on in the business.

A model for internal branding

The model below shows the key elements of an internal branding program. Organisations that address all elements will be in a much stronger position to deliver 'surprise and delight' brand experiences to the market. As we have already discussed leadership commitment, we'll move on to structural alignment.

Structural alignment

While an on-brand culture is incredibly important to develop, achieving a greater structural alignment with brand is an equally important, and in many respects a more controlled way to develop your on-brand products, services and customer experiences.

Structural alignment refers to the processes, procedures, systems and staff management programs you put in place to support your brand. The advantage is that you have absolute control over these and therefore quite good control over staff behaviours in relation to implementing them. In some respects, this is the science of internal branding.

Contrast this with art of developing a brand culture, which involves winning over the hearts of staff rather than requiring an arbitrary implementation.

Structural alignment includes:

• Empowering your staff to deliver the brand promise - set parameters for your staff to do what it 'reasonably' takes to deliver on your brand promise. By setting parameters within which staff can operate, you create an environment where staff feel safe to be creative in delivering brand. Setting brand delivery parameters recognises the fact that you will never be able to cover all situations in your scripts and procedures and that often, your staff will do their very best work knowing the latitude they've got.

Case in point is Fedex. Staff have flown jets overnight with just one lonely parcel (which was missed and left behind in the depot after close of business) to make sure they delivered on their brand promise of guaranteed overnight delivery. This is an extreme case, but Fedex had created parameters where staff felt safe to do it.

Providing latitude through parameters introduces some commercial risk, so you will need to carefully consider what the parameters are for your particular organisation and industry that control risk, but allow staff to deliver your brand promise in a way that surprises and delights your customers.

Richard Branson spearheaded a new breed of corporate leaders with a new visible style of leadership. He created a positive environment for his staff by setting some pretty wide parameters for service delivery.

• Procedures - having the right procedures in place can assist in the delivery of on-brand services and can also help control the parameter risk mentioned above.


• Recruitment - if you recruit staff who are more aligned with your brand values and personality, they will more naturally deliver on-brand experiences to customers. Ideally, your employment brand will reflect your external brand.


• Induction - brand should form a central theme for staff inductions. New staff should leave the induction understanding what the brand is and why the business focuses on it. It's also an ideal opportunity for company leadership to walk the talk.


• Performance reviews - if staff are aware of one simple question they will be asked at performance review time, it will help focus staff attention on brand for the year: 'What did you do this year to help {your company} deliver its brand promise of {whatever your brand promise is}. What gets measured gets done.


• Recognition and reward - recognise and reward on-brand behaviours and initiatives. What gets recognised and rewarded gets done.

Staff commitment

Staff that understand and believe in brand will naturally alter their behaviours to deliver on-brand experiences to the market. Belief in brand can also be incredibly motivating and unifying for staff. By understanding what your staff value, tying your brand into it, and involving your staff in idea generation and in implementation, you can create an army of highly passionate internal advocates for your brand. Companies including Virgin, Bendigo Bank, Singapore Airlines and Dell have done a sterling job of this.

The two best ways to generate staff commitment are company leadership consistently cascading brand and through internal marketing communications.

The most effective way to build brand internally is for leadership to walk the talk every day. By consistently discussing, considering and applying brand in their day-to-day dealings, staff quickly take their cues from management.

A powerful technique is to encourage all management and staff to ask themselves the three golden internal branding questions:

1. Is what we are doing consistent with our brand?


2. Is our decision going to build our brand?


3. How would our customers see what we are doing/about to do?

By getting these three simple questions into the culture, this will help facilitate a focus on brand across the organisation. It also facilitates clarity for decision making and helps unify staff behind one common purpose.

Internal marketing communications will help keep brand top of mind, keep brand relevant, and provide support for organisational leaders' cascading the brand through their interactions with staff. Think about applying the same level of effort and creativity to marketing to your internal stakeholders as you do your external. After all, staff are internal customers.

One of the best ways to promote brand internally is to regularly ensure that staff hear the voice of the customer and feel the experience they've had with a brand. Hearing how customers were surprised and delighted with the experience they had and how they benefited from it is a great way to close the loop and motivate staff. This is best done through story telling - ideally from the customer's own mouth on video.

Touch-point alignment

Wherever your business interacts with customers and the market, these are the touch-points that deliver tangible brand experiences. With better leadership commitment, structural alignment and staff commitment to brand, aligning your key touch-points with brand will be a much easier proposition. Exceeding expectations is the best way to generate customer satisfaction and loyalty.

See our other paper entitled: 'The Brand Experience WOW Factor' for more information on how to surprise and delight your customers every time they deal with you.

Internal branding is the emotional connection you develop with employees on the inside so they in turn can connect with people from the outside. Consider looking at it as giving staff a cause, not just a job.

Bruce Stafford