MJ Braide on Brand Strategy

How strong is your corporate brand? Important question. How can you do better than guess at the answer? Well, you could spend six or seven figures on some quant research on reputation (which will do little more than confirm your gut about what people think of you), you can invest in a brand valuation (which will give you a nice round number that isn’t reliable and won’t tell you much about how well your business is performing) or you can put a PR resource on retainer to track the interweb for mentions, sentiment and buzz. Or there is Net Promoter Score, and no doubt myriad other ways to extract your dollars and distract you from what matters.  Even after all this expenditure of time and money, I don’t believe you’ll be any better informed than you are now.

But wait, there’s hope. Wander over to HR and ask them to give you the last three years of your company’s employee engagement data (and if they don’t have employee engagement data tell them to get busy and start collecting it).

My hypothesis – and I am about to launch a research initiative to test it – is that organizations with low employee engagement scores have weak brands and those with high employee engagement scores have strong brands. I have observed this pattern in every organization I have worked with that has had the data available. Naturally I cannot name names as we are talking about confidential data but there are winners and losers.

Ya, sure I get why we matter.

This makes so much sense. Time and time again, engagement surveys tell us that one of the most important motivators for employees is the image, reputation and brand of their organization; followed quickly by whether or not the employee can see the link between what they do and that central purpose.

If your employees don’t get it, I can assure you that your customers won’t, and not just because it means that your value proposition is not clear – but because it means that your employees are not clear on how to deliver the brand. Compare a WestJet to a Delta, a Tim Hortons to a Dunkin, an Apple to a Dell. A Google to a Yahoo.

The natural question follows: if my engagement scores are low, do I focus on fixing that or on building the brand? My belief is that you focus first on getting a winning external proposition, then you work with employees to help them figure out how what they do contributes to its achievement.  Too many organizations get caught up in creating “employment brands” that are remote from their market brands. Big mistake, and usually the source of a lot of ugly confusion.

Get your brand story right and create the line-of-sight that every employee needs to make it happen. And watch both your brand and the engagement of your workforce increase in lock step.

Stay tuned for more as I head out and start testing the hypothesis with my clients and others. And let me know if you’re involved with an organization that would be good to talk to about this.