Quality Service Marketing
I forgot to mention this in my last post when I told you about Bill McEwen’s book, Married to the Brand.
At the end of the book, readers are offered a complimentary six-month trial subscription to the Gallup Management Journal. It’s a great way to keep up with the latest in customer- and employee-engagement.
If you’re looking for a great business book, I highly recommend Married to the Brand: Why Consumers Bond with Some Brands for Life by Bill McEwen, Gallup Press. And here’s why.
Insightful
What’s different about this book is that it looks at the emotional connections consumers have with brands from the consumer’s perspective. McEwen uses the dating-courtship-marriage metaphor effectively without being overly schmaltzy. He also shares the metrics used to measure both the rational & emotional aspects of “customer engagement.”
The building blocks of brand attachment leading to this type of engagement are based on:
Making the Case
McEwen draws on extensive Gallup research across a broad range of industries to demonstrate the profitable “payoff of customer engagement.” The research reinforces the importance of employees who create customer-brand relationships leading to engagement – or disengagement.
According to McEwen: “When it comes to building customer connections, it matters greatly how well the company’s employees are managed … Engaged employees contribute more. They stay longer, and they’re more productive. And, of critical importance, they also promote stronger and longer-lasting customer relationships. Simply put, engaged employees help to produce engage customers.”
Here’s to a long & healthy relationship!
A good read
Well written, Married to the Brand provides substantive content that can easily be read in one or two sittings — my kind of book. And one you’ll want to add to your business library.
As a follow up to my recent post on Internal Marketing vs. Internal Branding, here’s another difference-turned-similarity between the two concepts.
Internal Marketing requires an ongoing effort for the care & feeding of customers and employees. Most people think of applying Internal Branding, however, only when they’re launching a new brand or revitalizing an old one.
But …
According to marketing & branding consultant Debra Semans, this suggests a limited view of Internal Branding:
“Too often,” she says, “companies just do internal branding when they launch a new or changed brand and then assume everyone gets it. But people forget, new people come on board [who weren’t exposed to the previous internal branding efforts], and then you get brand creep. The ideal is that it becomes part of the way they do business, their culture … you have to maintain it in order to maintain delivery of the brand promise to the marketplace.”
So Debra recommends Internal Branding be included in an organization’s ongoing training program as a “refresher course” as well as part of new employee orientation.
Makes sense to me … Internal Branding, like Internal Marketing, is not just a use-it-only-when-needed tool.
I’ve gotten a lot of questions lately about the difference between internal marketing and internal branding. Some folks use the terms interchangeably, but there are a number of differences beyond semantics … or so I thought until I began to clarify what these concepts mean, how they’re different, and where they overlap.
I asked my colleague Debra Semans, an Atlanta-based marketing & branding consultant, to help me with this. Debra has extensive experience with internal branding.
Exploring the Two Concepts
I define internal marketing as “the application of marketing inside an organization to instill customer-focused values.” It bridges marketing with HR (Human Resources) to attract, motivate, and retain employees, with an emphasis on getting employee commitment to marketing and organizational goals. Think of it as an umbrella concept encompassing any & all activities, events, internal public relations, etc., that reinforce the importance of customers AND the employees who take care of them.
According to Debra, internal branding is “the process of aligning day-to-day activities, business processes, job designs, and recognition & rewards with the brand identity to drive business results.” It is part of a focused brand strategy that helps employees understand and integrate brand value(s) in their respective roles to ensure they can effectively deliver on the brand promise.
Where Internal Marketing & Internal Branding Overlap
Where They Differ
Regarding this last bullet point – as Debra describes Internal Branding’s scope: “From understanding the piece parts of the brand so that they can use it as a guide or standard for their day-to-day decision making, to communicating about the brand in ongoing internal communications vehicles, to building brand-based rewards into compensation models, Internal Branding is geared to making the Brand part of the organization’s operations – and yes, culture.” [OK, the two concepts are similar in this context in that they both impact organizational culture.]
The Bottom Line
So the differences between Internal Marketing and Internal Branding aren’t as clear cut as I thought. Some of their tactical executions may vary, but the desired outcome is the same: engaging employees for marketing and organizational success.
As Debra says of her work and mine: “Internal branding and internal marketing aren’t all that different. Maybe the only difference is that I’ve been riding the brand wagon and you’ve been on the customer service train.”
What Do You Think?
And now, dear readers, tell me what you think of all this. Semantics aside, what do Internal Marketing and Internal Branding mean to you? I’d love your input.
To Learn More …
For anyone who wants to learn more about either or both topics, come see Debra and me at the American Marketing Association’s Marketing Workshop this spring in Austin, TX. On March 13, 2006, I’ll be presenting my session on Internal Marketing (“Marketing from the Inside Out: Engaging Employees for Strategic Advantage”), and Debra will be doing her session on Internal Branding (“Living the Brand – the Dimensions of Internal Branding”) on March 15, 2006.
For some time now, I’ve enjoyed the tongue-in-cheek philosophy of E. L. Kersten, author of The Art of Demotivation and provider of anti-motivational posters & products on his site: www.despair.com. Here are a few choice quotes:
(Enjoy checking out the complete list of demotivational quotes.)
But I’ve also had mixed feelings. We all need to lighten up (like Sergeant Hulka, I have a “hell of a sense of humor”), yet I wonder if displaying these cynical, anti-Successories-type items might send the wrong message or be misinterpreted.
The sad truth is Kersten’s Despair, Inc. business wouldn’t be successful if it didn’t resonate with people. There are too many organizations out there whose only effort to engage employees is to display motivational posters and/or initiate token recognition programs. Kersten’s satire is an effective way to deal with these shallow efforts.
And for those of us who are passionate about employee engagement, it’s also an opportunity to poke fun at ourselves … while reminding us of the importance of our work.
My recent posts dealt with the employee-customer happiness/satisfaction link and employees as personification of the brand.
Unfortunately, some managers may be blind to these self-reinforcing relationships, but not customers.
Customers are quick to pick up on signals of employee frustration & dissatisfaction, whether conveyed deliberately or not. Consider a consumer’s experience in dealing with employees who:
Any one of these situations that repeatedly occur reflect negatively on a company, its employees, and management. Even worse, it puts an organization at risk to:
Here’s a case where preventative medicine is preferable to acute care. My prescription? A healthy dose of internal marketing’s 3 Rs (Respect, Recognition & Reinforcement) applied regularly.
I came across a great post (one of many) in Olivier Blanchard’s The Brand Builder blog that reinforces the happy employee-happy customer link (it even sports a title similar to one of my earlier posts).
What I love about Olivier’s post is “The Wheel of Customer Service and Brand Identity Doom” that models what he describes as “a self-perpetuating vicious cycle of substandard customer-to-brand experiences.”
It’s a great visual and one that many managers need to be reminded of. Sadly, there are also too many consumers and employees who would agree.
More to follow in my next post …
Here are some scary statistics from a recent survey by IABC (International Association of Business Communicators) and Right Management Associates:
Talk about a disconnect!
Internal Marketing Fundamental
Effective communication is one of the basic precepts of internal marketing – to engage employees, an organization needs to communicate (at a minimum):
How can employees effectively help their organizations move forward if they don’t know where it’s going or what is expected of them?!
Consider this
I’ll avoid going off the deep end here (no wringing of hands or gnashing of teeth). And I won’t waste time pondering the many reasons why this happens in organizations.
My question, dear readers, is this: where would your organization find itself in this survey? And if you think you’d be in the company of the 48% above, what will you do to improve your situation?
I had to comment on the recent passing of Peter F. Drucker, aka the “father of modern management.” I’ve followed his teachings throughout my career, especially as my work in services marketing evolved to focus on internal marketing and nonprofit marketing.
Drucker was truly a visionary who advocated:
Here’s my favorite quote from Peter Drucker, and it comes to mind every time I finish up an internal marketing session:
“If a client leaves this room feeling he has learned a lot he hadn’t known before, he is either a stupid client or I’ve done a poor job as a consultant. He should leave saying, ‘I know all this — why haven’t I done anything about it?'”*
Thank you, Peter, for your incredible legacy. You’ll be greatly missed.
*Note: No offense meant to those who attend my internal marketing programs; I truly value their interest & willingness to learn more about it. Most feel internal marketing is intuitive and already buy-into the concept (hence my experience of “preaching to the choir”) … the challenge is getting more organizations to put it into practice.
Just finished reading Bob Lamons’ new book The Case for B2B Branding – Pulling Away from the Business-to-Business Market. It’s a great overview of B2B branding, complete with many informative & insightful mini-cases.
And I was glad to see Bob recognize employees as the most important audience for a company’s branding message … even before customers.
Why employees first? According to Bob, employees must truly believe in your branding strategy for it to have a chance at success. How can they sell it (your brand concept) or deliver it to customers if they themselves don’t buy-in to it?
Every time someone (customer or prospect) comes into contact with one of your employees, the outcome of that contact represents “a chance to build or destroy your brand.” Makes sense, therefore, that employees be the first audience when it comes to introducing a new brand strategy or a new product, service, or program.
Employees first — sounds logical enough. Yet I know from experience that sound logic isn’t always applied in organizations. I’ve witnessed situations were employees were an after-thought. (“Our new ad campaign kicks-off tomorrow. By the way, shouldn’t someone tell our employees?”)
A good branding strategy, like charity, starts at home.