The marketing department needs help building a unique and strong brand.
The definition of branding is quite simple:
It’s everything you do to activate your brand identity within the organization and in the market, with the goal of creating an attractive brand.
The objectives for building a strong brand are also super simple:
- Add new, valuable associations that make the brand relevant and interesting to its target audience.
- Increase brand awareness so that all potential customers and employees understand the brand’s unique qualities and benefits.
- Build new and strengthened relationships, making the brand top-of-mind for customers the next time they’re ready to buy in the brand’s product category.
It’s also clear that marketing alone is not enough to build a unique and attractive brand:
- It’s not just about what the brand communicates, but also about the distinctive actions and initiatives the brand undertakes that make customers feel it stands out positively from the competition.
- Product quality and development determine whether there’s substance to the brand’s propositions.
- It’s interactions like “the chat” with customer service after an incorrect delivery or the daily conversations with the regular customer team that build trust, confidence, and lasting customer relationships.
- Whether the company behind the brand has leadership and culture that support the brand’s identity plays a crucial role in the brand’s credibility.
- It’s the enthusiasm of employees, resellers, and customers and their convincing endorsements of the brand that ultimately determine if potential customers choose to buy into the brand.
Thus, every department and employee in the company plays a crucial role in building a strong brand. Branding is not just the responsibility of the marketing department; it’s a task for the entire organization.
If you want to create a unique and strong brand, you must embrace branding as a team sport.et unikt og stærkt brand, bliver du derfor nødt til at dyrke branding som en holdsport.
Get out of the building
A few posts on the intranet where the strategy is explained in leadership jargon won’t be enough to get the whole organization on the branding team.
You need to get out of the building.
Go to the employees and step up to explain the basics of the company’s strategy, brand, and culture.
The organization needs to understand how their daily efforts contribute to building a unique and attractive brand. This is the fundamental requirement for employees to support the brand’s promises to customers in their daily work.
That’s what we did after CEO Henrik Kastbjerg, along with a large leadership group, announced that the 13 IT brands gathered under the itm8 umbrella would now become one itm8 and a united organization of over 1,900 employees (sorry, m8s).
On our Co-Cre8 tour, we visited all 18 of the company’s locations in Europe.
Over two months, we gathered employees at local offices in Denmark, Sweden, and the Czech Republic. We provided an overview of the benefits of “One itm8” and explained the strategy and its positive impact on the organization in a language that was easy to understand.
At each location, we also conducted workshops under the theme “Living our 8 commitments.”
Employees were given the opportunity to suggest how we could live our unique values in the most compelling way and what we, as leaders, should do differently to make it happen.
It sounds simple and straightforward, but it’s effective to go out and explain to employees that you can only build an attractive brand if everyone supports the work every single day.
Top 3: Branding as a Team Sport
Here are my top three tips for getting employees to join your company’s branding team.
1. Create a clear objective with the brand associations you want to build
Employees need to understand the specific perceptions you want to foster in customers to be able to support this in their daily work. All too often, employees are left without a clear understanding of the brand’s goals (sometimes because company leadership is itself uncertain).
2. Explain the benefits of building a unique and strong brand for the organization
To motivate employees, you need to show them how a stronger brand will unlock tangible benefits—more loyal customers, greater competitive advantages, and more exciting growth opportunities, as well as new career paths. Employees naturally become more motivated to engage in branding efforts when they understand how a strong brand benefits both the company and their own personal development.
3. Make the desired branding efforts concrete for all departments and employees
Get department heads to map out the most significant actions they can take to help build the brand. Break down these actions into specific, understandable, and actionable steps for employees. Make it measurable so that departments and employees can continually evaluate themselves and document their meaningful contributions to the branding team.
Celebrate and reward the organization whenever departments and employees make significant contributions to building the unique and strong brand. Do as we do in our commitment #8 at itm8: “Celebr8 Success every single day.”
