How do you teach others within an organization the value of brand consistency? In a world driven by personal identity and independence, it’s hard to show that the culmination of individuals communicating the same message is more impactful than one, single voice. To innovate, you need individuals to dream. To be successful in influencing brand change within a market, you need mechanisms in place to streamline innovations and dreams into one central message. It’s very challenging to encourage both individual growth and team work at the same time.
As a marketer, I am constantly looking at how I can better communicate the identity of the organization up front in words that the audience, including the internal audience understands. Companies typically have a mission statement, values and a strategic roadmap and in a perfect world, this is well communicated from the top down. Often though, the messaging stays within the top. It’s up to brand or marketing teams to take the mission statement, craft the identity and communicate to both the internal and external audience.
So often, the responsibility for this development and communication falls onto the executive or strategy team. I would argue the identity development and communication of that identity that involves how individual institutional projects are included should be within the marketing or brand team.
If your company has a strategy team, the marketing team should be working closely to align consumer or buyer needs with strategic initiatives. Then the marketing team can develop, reshape or shift the brand identity and determine how this should be communicated to the internal audience to make sure employees know how their individual projects fall underneath the larger vision and brand.
If your company has both a strategy and internal communications team, the marketing team should work closely with the strategy team to align consumer needs. This is followed by collaboration with the internal communications team to shape the identity and overall messaging before it’s communicated to the employees.
If you work with a small to medium size business and do not have a strategy or communications team, it’s fair to lean on marketing to work with company leadership to develop strategic initiatives, decide if and how that changes the brand identity and communicate that effectively to the internal audience.
Your internal employees are your companies’ best advocates, not to mention free brand ambassadors. If your employees are both encouraged to think independently, but also truly understands the organization’s value proposition to the consumer, you have a winning combination.
At the end of the day, for a marketing team, it’s understanding the value of the internal audience as a separate group versus expecting that everyone understands the same language.
