The BIG Kahuna

Do you know how people perceive your company? We?ve come up with a short test, click on the image below.

As I travel the globe and speak to clients about branding one thing I find consistently is the lack of an internal branding strategy within organizations. Clients are still somewhat behind on external branding never mind internal branding.

How important is internal branding??Internal branding is and should be the backbone of your organization. You need to seriously consider developing a plan to roll out your brand strategy internally.

Here?s why.? Let?s hypothetically say that you?re Volvo and your brand positioning is safety. Everything you say and do to the public screams safety. You?ve covered yourself as far as external branding is concerned. But you?ve neglected your employees. Sure you say your safe but your employees don?t know what you?re talking about. They?re not part of the program so to them it?s all talk.? Eventually your employee?s lack of knowledge or understanding of the safety positioning will be undermined.

Soon customer service will have cracks in their armor and customers will start to form a new perception of your brand. Just because you say safety doesn?t mean you live safety.?Getting all employees on board is just as important as getting clients to perceive you as you want. Maybe even more important.

Here are a few tips that you can use to develop your internal branding efforts:?

1. Blog ? Develop a blog and invite employees to join and participate. There you can discuss your brand and the direction it?s headed.
2. Social Media ? Facebook, LinkedIn, and MySpace are great tools to form groups and share experiences. Use this to your brands advantage.
3. Newsletter ? Develop an e-newsletter where you showcase employees, case studies, wins and company happenings.
4. Brand Team ? assemble a group of employees that protect and represent the brand. This group will make sure customer?s interests are protected and that employees understand the promise of the brand.
5. Training ? A fun way to do training is to develop a name and brand it. Call your training (your company) University and give out certificates, diplomas etc. Employees will enjoy the training more if it?s customized.

These are just a few tips you can use to improve your internal branding efforts. But remember your employees need to understand and speak the brand.

This will be the first branding tip in a new category we’re adding called Branding Tips (original huh). Here’s a tip for those that are on tight budgets. I know it’s not going to sound like we’re reinventing the wheel here but it’s still seldom done.

 Develop an e-newsletter, compile a list of emails from customers and prospects and email to that list regularly. Duh! But look around at your competitors. Are they doing it? I can’t tell you how many branding agency websites I visit that don’t have an e-newsletter. How dumb. Why wouldn’t you want to communicate with clients and prospects on a regular basis?

   E-newsletters are very inexpensive to set up and run. Even if you’re not computer savvy most of the e-newsletter companies are WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get). Which basically means all you need to know is how to write in Microsoft Word. Here’s what you need to do:

1. Purchase and e-newsletter service or hire a branding company (like us) to get you ready for your e-newsletter
2. Add a sign up box to your homepage that says Sign Up For Our Newsletter Here:________________________
3. Compile a list of all your client and prospect emails and add them to your email service
4. Write a beneficial (to your client base) article on a monthly basis and email it out.
5. Sit back and sign new clients
6. Send thank you letters of praise to Brand Identity Guru for recommending this tip and making you a fortune

That’s branding tip 1. Hope you enjoyed it!?

 p.s. There are many different views and grey areas for spam. I will leave that up to you to decide. But here is the definition of spam:

The word “Spam” as applied to Email means Unsolicited Bulk Email (“UBE”).

Unsolicited means that the recipient has not granted verifiable permission for the message to be sent.?

Bulk means that the message is sent as part of a larger collection of messages, all having substantively identical content (like an e-newsletter).

A message is Spam only if it is both Unsolicited and Bulk.