your people, your brand: creating an experience brand means looking at brand experiences from the...

Creating an experience brand means looking at brand experiences from the inside out

Your People, Your Brand:

3/ INTRODUCTION

4/ WHY ALIGN?

7/ THE 5 PRINCIPLES OF INTERNAL ALIGNMENT

7/ PRINCIPLE #1 PURPOSE-LED

8/ PRINCIPLE #2 CREATIVE AND CUT-THROUGH

9/ PRINCIPLE #3 USEFUL

10/ PRINCIPLE #4 INTUITIVELY DESIGNED

11/ PRINCIPLE #5 EXPERTLY DELIVERED

12/ ALIGN BY DESIGN

13/ TALK TO JACK. LEARN MORE. FURTHER READING.

13/ ABOUT JACK MORTON

WHAT’S INSIDE

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Your brand is what it does.

No one knows this more than employees and partners who not only deliver brand experiences to customers and prospects but also experience it themselves – from the inside out.

As a result, successful experience brands don’t just focus on the customer experience, they take a “Brand2Everyone” approach that delivers consistent, compelling experiences for every stakeholder, across every channel and touchpoint – including employees and partners (see figure 1.). Experience brands understand that a customer’s or prospect’s path to the brand passes directly through their own people. And if those people aren’t aligned to the organization’s purpose and brand and business ambitions, there’s little chance of delivering the kind of positive experience clients will want to repeat and share.

Forthcoming research* will show the overwhelming impact of a brand’s people on their customers: 4,000 people in four key markets (US, UK, China and Australia) identified service and the people behind it as top influences on how they rate brands before, during and after the sale – impacting intent to purchase, loyalty and what they’re willing to pay.

INTRODUCTION

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Figure 1.

Introduction - Your brand is what it does. 3/

The downside: bad service is the main reason people give for having a bad experience, one that’s still very much worth sharing, but not in the way you’d like.

Brand2EveryoneGovernment

Investors

Employees Channels

Consumers

Media

Partners

Prospects

“The central issue is never strategy, structure, culture, or systems. The core of the matter is always about changing the behavior of people.” John P. Kotter, Harvard Business School

Externally, an aligned workforce drives more revenue and customer loyalty by delivering consistent brand experiences, improving time-to-market, and personalizing the experience to meet customers’ needs. They know what, when and how to engage clients and partners successfully on behalf of the brand – not because of a thick manual they were handed during orientation, but because of the shared knowledge they have that comes from the organization’s culture. Corporate cultures are really just a set of limits and pressures that guide the way people behave. There is no single process that drives or defines culture. Rather, it is driven through many overlapping and coordinated processes around the things we say, the stories we tell, and the things we

reward and recognize. A culture is simply the sum total and reflection of our shared experience – an organization’s institutional memory.

Aligned workers are the sign of a strong corporate culture that adds value through greater employee engagement, effort, innovation and retention.

In addition to our own research, there is a growing mountain of data to support the fact that experience brands with highly engaged employees do better—whether they’re measured by strength of their culture, the quality of the customer experiences they deliver, or quality of internal communication. For example, a five-year

Why align?

So, while the rest of the world looks at brands as nouns, we look at them as verbs. Brands are experiences – and those experiences start with employees and culture. What matters is how employees behave on behalf of the brand. As John Kotter has said, “The central issue is never strategy, structure, culture, or systems. The core of the matter is always about changing the behavior of people.”

Yet foundational research by Jefferey Pfeffer of Stanford Business School estimates that only 12% of companies have a sufficiently motivating culture to give them a competitive advantage.

What the 12% know is that there is real value available to brands that focus on people-centered practices and positive brand experiences internally. When employee behaviors are aligned to brand and business ambitions, the workforce is more flexible, consistent and engaged, and able to drive value in many different ways.

Introduction - Why align? 4/

Figure 2.

study by Watermark Consulting showed “customer experience” leaders significantly outperforming other companies, achieving 22.5% growth compared to the S&P, which shrank an average 1.3% during the same period.

But aligning employees to deliver powerful brand experiences is hard work because it’s about changing behavior and directing the way people act in increasingly complex situations.

It means delivering internal experiences that engage and entertain, even as they educate employees and partners on the way “we” treat our customers, prospects, partners and colleagues.

That, in turn, means focusing on inspiration as much as instruction, exploration and evaluation. Because, as Chip and Dan Heath have argued, changing behavior is both an emotional and a rational process that requires campaigns that appeal to both**.

On the journey from “no” to “know, believe, behave”, employee experiences are the central driver (see figure 2.).

Introduction - Why align? 5/

Time

On-Brand Behavior

Believe it

Get it

Live it

Rallying internal and partner teams to deliver great experiences these days means creating experiences for them that follow five key guiding principles.

The 5 principles of internal alignment

with real clients in real situations. The site thus serves to both recognize and reinforce on-brand behavior.

Another great example of a purpose-led alignment experience is a recent campaign we developed that was designed to engage and unite thousands of hospital employees, ranging from janitors and volunteers to surgeons and senior administrators, spread across more than 20 campuses. Hospital and health insurance system Scott & White Healthcare sought to align employees around a shared sense of the importance of each of their roles in the lives of the patients and families they serve. “It Matters” – a two-year internal campaign that won PR Week’s Employee Communications Campaign of the Year in 2011 – featured photos and stories of employees at all levels of the organization that demonstrated how what they do matters in the chain of patient care, serving people when they are at their most vulnerable.

Principle #1 Purpose-led: anchored in the business and brand’s purpose and intent.

Simon Sinek makes a simple but powerful point in his famed TED talk: When you want to lead people, you need to provide a purpose first. Start with why – and appeal to the emotional side of behavior change. Only after you’ve done that can you move on to “the way we do things” (How) and “the things we do” (What). Taken together, why, how and what is a useful framework for understanding organizational culture and how people learn the way things are done.

Walmart International is putting this framework in action with “The Walmart Way of Working”, a microsite and mobile app for managers around the world. The internal microsite is organized around a simple diagram that places the company’s purpose at the center (to save people money so they can live better), then progresses through the culture and behaviors (how), and common operating principles (what). The site provides managers access to videos of associates from around the world demonstrating the why, how and what of the culture

The 5 principles of internal alignment - Purpose-led 6/


Principle #2 Creative and cut-through: telling, enabling and building stories that cut through the clutter.

To engage employees, you need to be creatively engaging. Employees don’t define themselves differently just because they’re at work – they’re media consumers first. They expect clarity and great design in internal brand information, training and tools, just as they do with other brands in their lives as consumers. The amount of creative effort you put into internal alignment campaigns is directly tied to the resulting output of employees and partners.

Creative internal campaigns stretch the brand in new ways. KPMG recently deployed an internal program every bit as hard-hitting and strategic as you’d expect, but leveraging a photographic style so fresh and dynamic it looks more like a consumer campaign. Great visuals are often the difference between getting employees and partners to engage with your messages instead of merely enduring them. Put as much creativity into your internal campaigns as you do your external ones.

“Put as much creativity into your internal campaigns as you do your external ones.”

The 5 principles of internal alignment - Creative and cut-through 7/


Principle #3 Useful: helpful, generous, turning people into willing users and participants.

We all know the drill. You’re barely keeping up with your inbox, when, at the precise moment you think you can’t squeeze in another task, an email arrives from the CEO about a mandatory elearning module you need to take. Now imagine another scenario, in which the CEO sends you a special invitation to get information that will make you more successful in your job. The request recognizes how busy you are and offers you something truly useful – new knowledge, process, or skills – in exchange for your time.

We know which scenario will yield fewer groans – and better results. The more you offer something of value, the more impact your experience will have on your staff. The quality of any training and how it’s packaged are important; they’ll indicate to every employee in the company (and every partner asked to take the course as well), just how much (or how little) executive leadership values their time.

So you can look at it as a dose of medicine employees need to hold their noses and take simply because “the boss said.” Or you can seize the opportunity to demonstrate to employees and partners that you understand their everyday experience and value the brand enough to care about the kind of impression it makes on them, even if they’ve been with the company for years.

Johnson & Johnson’s Global Marketing Group (GMG) wanted to re-energize and re-energe thousands of marketing staff and partners around the globe with cutting-edge ideas and new ways to collaborate. The challenge – marketing to marketers – drew heavily on audience analysis and insights, and ultimately led to the rollout of internal website InsightsOut. Beyond the standard case studies and newsletters, InsightsOut included interviews, webinars and a behind-the-scenes video series with innovative marketing leaders at outside companies like Google.

The 5 principles of internal alignment - Useful 8/


Principle #4 Intuitively designed: anticipating how users will want to interact.

People today expect things to work. No manuals. No extended training time. Just an intuitive interface that they “get” right away, with a clear set of benefits for engaging.

We’re often tapped by clients to develop sales enablement tools and training that help sales people understand products, learn new skills and engage with clients in the most brand-friendly ways. These tools need to be easy-to-use and immediately graspable, or they face a lonely life on the already-crowded shelf of unused (and unloved) sales tools.

A recent Forrester Research report on sales enablement accused most organizations of practicing “random acts of sales support” where HR, product and portfolio managers, marketing, and sales all scramble to meet senior executive demands for increased sales. In an environment like this, the only tools that get used are the ones that are intuitive and can be put into action right away, with little in the way of explanation or training.

Digital sales tools help the SmartCloud brand teams at IBM enable sales people to talk clearly, crisply and with authority about the advantages of choosing IBM. Most are focused on helping sales teams identify client needs, and align them to IBM’s broad portfolio of products and services.

The 5 principles of internal alignment - Intuitively designed 9/

“The tools need to be easy to use....or they face a lonely life on the already crowded shelf of unused (and unloved) sales tools”


Principle #5 Expertly delivered: brought to life creatively, effectively and impactfully.

Any brand experience is only as good as the quality of its delivery – and that’s true of internal brand experiences as well. As a brand experience agency, our skillset encompasses making and doing as well as imagining and ideating. Sometimes our maker culture is focused on high-touch single engagements for extremely high-level partner audiences, like the C-level events we produce for IBM; sometimes we’re deploying lower-touch engagements across multiple delivery points – like the face-to-face sales training experiences we executed for the Samsung Galaxy S, touching thousands of retail sales reps spread out in markets around the country.

Whatever the scenario, we know that a creative campaign that is poorly executed is simply a bad experience. Neither we nor our clients get credit for simply trying. Results are what matters.

And while we’re on the topic of results: what gets measured gets done. So it’s fair to ask the question: If a brand experience happens and there’s no one there to measure it, does it make a difference?

(It may – but we’ll never know.)

If the experience makes a difference, then we should be able to see results somewhere along the line – whether it’s apparent in immediately measurable objectives like increased purchase intent, advocacy, consideration or purchase, or longer-term advantages we have to work a bit to identify, such as increased employee engagement (meaning effort, which means productivity), or retention (see figure 3.). Just like creative effort, your effort to manage return on your investment should be as rigorous for internal campaigns as for those intended for the consumer marketplace.

Figure 3.

IMPACT ACROSS INDUSTRIESOur experience with brands across sectors demonstrates that aligning employees and partners drives real value across industries:

A global consumer electronics client achieved +18% sales in retail locations where we aligned retail staff on product benefits.

A QSR leader typically sees 4% sales lift for franchises where employees are aligned on running promotional and upsell customer experience programs.

A telecomm client saw improvements at call centers including -23% call escalations, +15% service package up-sells, +14% customer satisfaction.

The 5 principles of internal alignment - Expertly delivered 10/

Align by designLike external brand experiences, your employees’ and partners’ brand experiences don’t just happen. They’re entirely under your control – and they can always be better. Whether start-up or category leader, you can ensure that your people are primed to support your brand and business ambition by paying attention to their experiences first.

Because, as we say: your brand is what your brand does.Joe Panepinto, Phd is Vice President, Senior Strategist at Jack Morton. You can reach him at [email protected].

9/Align by design 11/

TALK TO JACKFor information about Jack Morton, contact [email protected] us on twitter @jackmortonVisit us online at jackmorton.comRead our blog at blog.jackmorton.com

*LEARN MORELook for Jack Morton’s forthcoming research on experience brands in March 2013. Additional research and white papers can be found on Jack Morton’s Slideshare channel.

**FURTHER READINGPower: Why Some People Have it and Others Don’t, Jefferey Pfeffer (2010)

Forrester Research, Sales Enablement Defined, Scott Santucci (2010)

Switch: How to Change When Change is Hard, Chip and Dan Heath (2011)

ABOUT JACK MORTONJack Morton Worldwide is a global brand experience agency with offices on five continents. Our agency culture promotes breakthrough ideas about how experiences connect brands and people – in person, online, at retail and through the power of digital and word of mouth influence. We work with both BtoC and BtoB clients to create powerful and effective experiences that engage customers and consumers, launch products, align employees and build strong experience brands. Ranked at the top of our field, we earned over 50 awards for creativity, execution and effectiveness last year. Jack Morton is part of the Interpublic Group of Companies, Inc. (NYSE: IPG).

© Jack Morton Worldwide 2013

Talk to Jack. Learn More. Further reading. About Jack Morton. 12/