In my experience, the inside never gets it wrong, and the more opportunity you give to the internal community to define itself, the more coherently you will define yourself to your customers.

This insight opens up a vast array of opportunities to engage the organization in building greater self-awareness, becoming more alert to shifts in the external environment and finding purpose and meaning in every job. Here are some examples of what works, every time:

Internal dialogue about positioning, promise and values.
Based on early experiments like the IBM Values Jam, I now pretty much insist that my clients field some kind of internal dialogue about the brand, preferably with an online component to cast the net fully. We've called these Brand Jam, Culture Jam, Brand Exchange, Brand Dialogue, Identity Dialogues; you name it.

• Sometimes these are highly interactive, as with Dynamic Funds a few years ago when we collaborated with Pollstream to field a real-time online discussion about Dynamic's values and whether they walked the talk.
• Or they can be hybrid – as with law-firm McCarthy Tétrault where we invited partners, associates and staff to voice their opinions about differentiation in the legal services profession, followed by extensive workshopping on the results.
• The engagement can be quick and small in scale – like the fast-track online exchange as part of Loyalty One's brand strategy, or global and large-scale as with StateStreet in which we invited almost 30,000 employees in six languages to give their view of who StateStreet is.
• Another great hybrid example is the recent identity development process at OCAD University in which we fielded a brief online survey to students, alumni, faculty and staff, and complemented the results with a series of highly interactive live sessions at the school.

Do not be afraid of the candor that arises in the dialogue. There will be some venting, but the overall result is rich with insight.

Regardless of whether the engagement is online or offline, hybrid, large-scale or small, global or local there is one vital success factor: continue the conversation. Use whatever channels make sense to feed back the results and tell people how they will affect the outcome of the project. Gather people together to reflect on the results, create an executive team-facilitated blog to talk about the issues that arose in the survey. You must continue the conversation in a genuine way.

WHERE OUR BRAND GOES NEXT: ONE BANK'S EMPLOYEES SHOW THE WAY

Q: What five characteristics best define us now, and what five should define us in the future? (Top 5)

FROM            TO

Expert            Collaborative

Proven            Evidence-based

Followers        Fast-followers

Ethical            Ethical

Risk averse     Risk-smart

[Naturally this all throws the role of outside consultant into flux, because if you are genuinely listening to the organization, you are no longer the Wizard of Oz, unveiling some brilliant brand idea cooked up in the black box of your agency. Authentic brand ideas come from inside – and I have never seen an exception to this rule.]

Engaging employees in brand implementation
At the other end of the process – delivering the brand promise - engagement is equally important and the upfront work will pay off well when the time comes to ask your people how they are going to fulfill the promise, no matter where they are in the organization. There are as many ways to manage this challenge as there are organizational structures, cultures and values to work with. You can use your imagination to create alignment methods that fit with any situation. At Sun Life we spent a year workshopping the brand idea with hundreds of leaders around the world, working through real-time challenges and issues using brand as a filter. The roll-out team followed up with targeted initiatives for specific functional groups – advisors, the tax group, HR, all supported by an online collaborative space where people could share ideas and experiences about what the brand means and how to use it as a decision tool.

The key is to embed the brand idea in the mainstream decision making processes of the organization. Don't create too many "brand" initiatives. People get fatigued with special programs and tend to move on to the next corporate project priority. Instead, engage people in the brand idea by giving them practical tools to use when doing strategic and business planning, build brand-right behaviors and brand metrics into performance targets for leaders, embed brand themes (without calling them that) into employee communications, events, awards and town halls – all opportunities to re-engage employees in a discussion of the culture that makes the brand authentic.

And most importantly, don't limit the engagement to so-called "customer-facing" employees. A strong brand is delivered by every actuary, every supply-chain manager, every flight mechanic, every single person in the organization. If you only engage the people in marketing, sales and service, you're missing the real transformational power of brand – to act as the north star, the unified purpose, that drives every decision.

NEXT POST: Engaging senior leadership in brand development. You might be tempted to skip this post, thinking, duh, of course you engage senior leadership in brand development. But actually it's a lot harder than you might imagine. But worth it. And it will be the topic of my next post.