While it seems like the success and image of your brand is in your hands, every department and employee can play a role in improving it. From executives to assistants, each person involved in your business can bring something new and different to the table. This helps you gain a variety of viewpoints, and you may even come up with solutions you'd never thought of before.
To this end, we asked a panel of Forbes Communications Council members how everyone in the company can get involved to promote a positive brand image. Their best answers are below.
1. Define Your Brand Identity
Every employee needs to be a brand advocate but do they know what the company's brand stands for? The marketing team needs to communicate the brand identity whether it be during a new hire orientation or team meetings. Enlist and rally co-workers around the brand and turn them into advocates. Every touchpoint is a brand experience and employees are on the front line to convey its meanings. - Jeff Fleischman, Altimetrik
2. Document Your Identity And Values
Every brand should have identity and values training for employees. It helps if they're documented and baked into the company culture. Then it’s time to live those values! Engaged and enthusiastic employees do a better job of expressing positive brand attributes. With every line of code, in-store interaction or executive order, employees should be able to say that they executed on the brand promise. - Jessica Terashima, EZ Texting
3. Bridge The Brand Governance Gap
Brand teams suffering from large circles of concern (i.e. everyone going rogue with the brand) yet small circles of influence (i.e. brand governance limited to passive-aggressive emails and intranet updates) can end their frustrations with cloud-based content service technologies. Try managing, governing and distributing digital brand assets and guidelines to all departments using an ECM platform. - Lucy Mehrtens, Templafy
4. Establish A Set Of Core Company Values
A mission-driven company with a defined set of core values will always have a compass by which to operate. This translates into a well-defined brand identity by providing a rubric for anything from the rules of engagement to product development to customer service and beyond. With a common set of goals, standards and values, your brand's identity will be better informed by the sum of its parts. - Daniel Lalley, Brondell Inc.
5. Make Sure Everyone Knows And Buys Into The Company Message
While we may own the brand image, it is our fellow staff and colleagues who represent that brand to customers and partners every day. It is critical each employee knows and buys into, the company message, voice and purpose to become brand champions. After all, a brand image is only as strong as its last touchpoint, whether with the CEO, a service representative or delivery personnel. - Marija Zivanovic-Smith, NCR Corporation
6. Foster Empowered Brand Ambassadors
Not enough organizations focus on employee ambassadors. Sharing objectives, goals and key messages while also giving employees training and the tools to share information about their work in a preferred method ensures that all employees are both informed and confident to share the right information. Creating your internal brand ambassadors can be powerful! - Heather MacLean, Association of Professional Engineers and Geoscientists of New Brunswick
7. Have Your Marketing Team Disseminate And Exemplify Values
All companies should have a thoughtful set of values that can act as a north star for any employee. Everyone at the company, no matter their position, should know these values and act according to them. Marketing can and should play a huge part in disseminating and exemplifying these values. Remember that brand image starts on the inside and buy-in must start from the top. - Seema Kumar, servicechannel.com
8. Develop A Unified Communications Strategy
Ensuring that each and every employee understands the brand messaging and is able to easily and consistently share that message is the best way to ensure that your company is perceived in a positive light. Developing a strategy and training for all staff to serve as carrier pigeons for your brand is essential across all departments and business units. - Charlie Terenzio, Newswire
9. Have New Employees Meet With Marketing
I include a meeting with marketing in the new employee onboarding process. In that meeting, I let them know that whatever team they joined, they are also part of Marketing, because they represent the company/brand every time they mention it to a customer, prospect, friend, family member, etc. I provide them with an easy way to describe who we are and what we do, consistent with our positioning. - Tom Wozniak, OPTIZMO Technologies, LLC
10. Remember That Your Culture Is Your Brand
All too often people think that a rebrand is a new logo and new language, when in fact, it has to come from within and reside in your culture. If your employees are living your brand platform, it will show across all touchpoints of the customer experience. We recently rebranded and spent a year rolling out the new culture before revealing the new name and creative with huge success. - Heather Dueitt, MyPoint Credit Union
11. Provide The Right Training And Tools For Social Sharing
Everybody in the company, from the C-suite to entry-level factory workers, should be an advocate for your brand, not only people working in marketing. To enable employee advocacy companies need to provide education, training and tools to facilitate social sharing. Sending an email to every employee announcing a new product launch is clearly not enough. - Rafael Schwarz, TERRITORY Influence (a Bertelsmann group company)
12. Look For Brand Ambassadors During The Hiring Process
Recruit and hire team members who will be true brand ambassadors. Make sure to spell this expectation out beginning with day one of any new hire's orientation. Even more important is that those at the top meet this same expectation every single day. Believe in your brand and what your group is doing -- walk the walk, don't just talk about it or delegate it. - Jennifer Brantley, The Cowfish Sushi Burger Bar
13. Deliver A Manifesto
To deliver a brand experience worthy of five-star Amazon reviews, you need to go higher. You need to inspire and reignite the passion of your employees. Create a video about what your brand stands for and share it with your employees. Be authentic and skip the corporate speak. Deliver a manifesto about what you stand for and why your brand matters. Plant a flag. Own your mountain. - Stephen Dupont, Pocket Hercules
14. Encourage Consistency In Language
Every employee is a brand ambassador and should understand the company’s core values and purpose or mission statement. When employees discuss the company they work for, they should use language that is consistent with the company’s messaging. Consistency in marketing across all fronts, especially communications, is key! - Nishat Jones, Victory Packaging
15. Take A Top-Down And Bottom-Up Approach
Brand image, including driving a customer-centric culture, starts at the top. It entails executives "walking the talk," but also requires a "bottom-up" approach. Deploying champions throughout the organization is an effective tactic to keep the drumbeat going. These designated people can serve as mentors to increase employee engagement in achieving collective goals. It takes a village. - Stacy Sherman, Schindler Elevator Corporation
