Authors: Susan M. Drake, Michelle J. Gulman, Sara M. Roberts

If you have any doubt in your mind about the value and importance of internal marketing to build employee loyalty and performance this book will make you a believer! In just under 250 pages this “how to” book covers it all: the benefits of internal marketing; interesting case studies; proper messaging; audience segmentation; appropriate delivery systems; measurement tools; survey samples; recognition strategies and integrated planning timelines.

A brief summary of the authors’ description of what internal marketing is all about:

“Here’s the long and short of internal marketing: Employees must buy your message before your customers do. They must understand why your product or service is important, know what it can do for customers, believe in its integrity, and be inspired to make it even better. Employees have to understand where the company is headed and why. And they must be treated as grownups who can handle the truth, even when it is unpleasant. They have to be dedicated to working together to build the business. And finally they should feel proud to tell people what they do and where they work. When they feel like that, everyone will know it—especially your customers.”

The “E” Factor

The process for creating motivated employees is based on practicing what the authors call the four “E” behaviors:

1. Engaging: Involve employees in helping create your company’s vision and then paint a clear picture of how to execute it. Let them help define the heart and soul of your brand…what makes it different, special and wonderful…valued by customers and employees alike. Then craft the story and keep talking. Authors cite Steven Jobs, CEO and founder of Apple as one who has an amazing talent for sharing a clearly defined story and cause as he articulates to his employees what Apple stands for and where it’s headed. He really gives employees something to believe in. The result: Apple is a “cult brand” and an inspiration to many of its employees and customers.
2. Enabling: Once the vision, mission and values are created a company must provide a supportive and positive work environment along with proper training, tools, direction and the power to make the vision a reality.
3. Empowering: Great companies provide the autonomy and platform for employees to do what it takes to do their jobs well. They give people permission to make mistakes. They let them know the desired outcome, but allow employees the flexibility to do it their way.
4. Ensuring: Great companies have methodologies in place to establish clear goals, accountability, measurements for success and give appropriate rewards and recognition for performance.

“E” Employees

“E” employees are the kind of people who:

• Take risks
• Make suggestions
• Support others
• Smile a lot
• Motivate their co-workers
• Enjoy work
• Attract trust
• Like customers
• Define service as whatever the customer needs (whether it’s an external customer buying the product or an internal customer who needs assistance with a project)

“E” Employees Wow Your Customers

The authors state that the greatest differentiator a company can achieve is its reputation—its brand—for phenomenal service, superior products and quality in everything it does. And that kind of brand is built on the shoulders of “E” employees.

Engaged employees are passionate about the company and their work and this comes through every customer interaction, every product or service and the quality of everything they do. At the end of the day, a company does not take care of its customers—employees do.

Enabled employees have the resources and information to provide better customer service, deliver higher quality products and services and help the company grow. Being enabled imbues employees with the responsibility and accountability to be successful.

Empowered employees have a sense of ownership that makes them extremely passionate about their work. They also have the freedom to provide the highest level of service for customers.

That’s why:

FedEx management focuses on internal marketing because they understand their “E” employees will deliver fantastic service, wow their customers and turn tremendous profits. They named their corporate philosophy after a concept called PSP—people, service, profits in that order.

Richard Branson, the highly successful entrepreneur, and CEO of Virgin has the same philosophy, “We give top priorities to the interests of our staff; second to those of our customers; and third to shareholders. This is not only a reflection on the importance of our people; it is also the most positive way of fitting together these three priorities.”

Southwest Airlines is also a firm believer in marketing to its employees. As a result the company has created one of the strongest internal brands and cultures in the world—a culture of happy, loyal employees who want to treat their customers well. Southwest has been able to sustain its culture by constantly strengthening its internal brand through its core values.

It Starts With Culture

The process starts with a company’s culture…a reflection of a company’s leadership, philosophy, history and shared beliefs and values. A company’s culture inevitably affects whether employees will support or hinder desired change; it drives behavior. Misalignment within a company’s culture can cause employees to be resistant and slow to change. They may even sabotage desired behaviors. Internal marketing communicates a vision of the company culture, strengthens an already powerful brand culture and gives employees a roadmap for action.

When management lives and communicates the culture every day two very important things happen:

1. Employees see that management adheres to the company’s stated beliefs, also known as “walking the talk.”
2. It proves that management believes employees to be the heart and soul of the company.

Brand promise + Company’s ability to deliver = Business results

Eight Steps to Success

The authors have identified eight steps to implementing a successful internal marketing program. A lot more detail is provided in the book but here’s a very brief outline:

1. Set a course from A to B – SWOT analysis and goal/objective setting for the plan.
2. Define your audiences – Segmentation by associate profile, level of responsibility and location.
3. Assess the climate – Take the pulse of the organization by area or department. Are employees happy, disgruntled, trusting or suspicious?
4. Define your key messages – Motivational, strategic, news, training, management directives, and recognition.
5. Match the vehicles to the message – Company meeting, video conference, newsletters, email, and intranet.
6. Choose the champions – Leaders and managers who are articulate, enthusiastic, well liked and have a vested interest in the success of the program.
7. Execute the plan – Launch strategy and scale. Timelines, milestones and frequent communication.
8. Measure and adapt – Measure performance against objectives: focus groups, surveys, interviews.

What I’ve shared are just few of the ideas and thoughts from this great book. If your company or brand is overpromising and under delivering, Light Their Fire will provide you with inspiration and direction that could reignite your organization and set it on a course for new growth.

Of course, reading the book is the easy part. Implementation will take serious dedication and commitment.

Watch for the next book review on Living the Brand. In the meantime if you have any thoughts on internal branding in your own organization I’d love to hear them.

Over the years, much good “how-to” stuff has been written about the subject of strategic marketing, branding and brand building, with the end game being to help marketers identify new ways to persuade more people to buy and become loyal to a brand, e.g. external marketing. But another very important and often ignored market is even more critical—the internal market—the very employees in a company or organization who can make or break the brand for the customers it is trying to attract.

John Wanamaker, the famous retail magnate considered by many to be the father of modern advertising, once said,

“Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; trouble is I don’t know which half.”

I’d like to take that idea one step further:  The majority of any brand’s marketing dollars is wasted if investments are not also made in internal HR and marketing initiatives to create a strong brand culture; e.g., hire, retain, educate and inspire company associates to consistently and enthusiastically deliver on the brand promise. Why invest large sums of money on promoting an idealized image and set of expectations through external marketing initiatives if the brand itself under delivers? Yet many marketing and brand managers still believe advertising and promotion is the Holy Grail to drive sales and market share.  Internal brand-building continues to take a back seat, even though now more than ever, market success is ultimately determined by the holistic brand experience one has with products or services and their intimately related touch points.

In a recent article by Sara M. Roberts, author and president of Roberts Golden, an organizational change management and internal marketing consultancy, she underscored the importance of the following statement:

“How many employees does it take to make a brand?  Every one of them.  How many employees does it take to break a brand? Just one.”

Larry Oakner, Director of Brand Culture at Interbrand, also wrote in his white paper, Managing Your Brand Through Your Employees,

“What makes the difference between a ho-hum brand and a truly great one? A company’s employees.”

So in the weeks ahead, I’d like to share a few mini reviews from what, in my opinion, are three great books on the topic of motivating and inspiring employees to deliver on the brand promise. Each book brings a fresh and different perspective:

Light Their Fire

First a little about the authors: Susan M. Drake is the founder and president of Spellbinders, Inc., an internal marketing and communications consultancy; Michelle J. Gulman is an independent consultant who specializes in change management and internal marketing; and Sara M. Roberts is the founder of Roberts Golden, a San Francisco-based consultancy that specializes in change management and internal marketing solutions. Their book, Light Their Fire: Using Internal Marketing to Ignite Employee Performance and Wow Your Customers, does a great job of providing step-by-step approaches to engage employees in the vision of a business or a brand and to empower them to make decisions that build brand and customer loyalty.  The book includes practical tools and case studies to address the role of internal marketing in a variety of situations.

Living the Brand

Nicholas Ind is a writer and brand consultant based in Scandinavia. He’s written several business books including The Corporate Image, Great Advertising Campaigns, Branding Governance and The Corporate Brand. In his book, Living the Brand, Nicholas explores ways in which organizations should endeavor to engage and empower their employees to create “brand champions.” He advocates that organizations need to build meaning into ideas so that employees can genuinely live the brand in their day-to-day lives.  The book explores the nature of branding and explores why people have become such important definers of the brand. Perhaps his biggest point is this: both organizations and people need values—they are essential to well-being and a sense of worth.

Brand from the Inside

Authors Libby Sartain and Mark Schumann bring yet another fresh and relevant perspective for proven ways to link strong  emotional connections between employees and brands. Libby is a senior vice president of human resources for Yahoo and is responsible for leading Yahoo’s global HR efforts. Mark is the former global communications practice leader for the consulting firm Towers Perrin, where he counseled leaders of major corporations around the world on how to engage employees during challenging situations of defining change. Brand from the Inside is also a great “how-to” book that provides step-by-step instruction on how to motivate employees to consistently deliver on the experience the customer brand promises. The book is complete with examples and case studies from companies that prove how the “employee brand” can contribute to business results.

Be watching for more in-depth reviews of, and highlights from, each of these books. In the meantime, if you have any insights regarding your own personal experience (success or frustration) with getting employees to buy in and support your brand’s promise to the external marketplace, share them here. More to come.

The New Rules of Marketing & PR

Here’s a “must read” book that in my opinion, does a great job of presenting how the web has changed things in a big way for us marketers. The full title is The New Rules of Marketing and PR, How to Use News Releases, Blogs, Podcasting, Viral Marketing and Online Media to Reach Buyers Directly.

The author, David Meerman Scott, is a well qualified authority and internet veteran having launched a marketing strategy with online content to reach buyers directly on the web way back in the early ’90s. He’s spent the last 18 years or so speaking and consulting with corporations on how to use web content to sell products and services. This book evolved out of David’s vast blog experience and an ebook he published called The New Rules of PR. After more than 200,000 downloads, David decided he had a hot topic on his hands so he went full bore into writing a hard cover. He broadened the subject matter to address marketing as well.

So here’s the essence of David’s insight…

The Internet has not only changed the way people communicate and interact with each other, it has also changed the way businesses can and should communicate with their customers and prospects. We all remember the old days when companies could only communicate indirectly through pricey mass advertising and press releases. The internet has changed all that because now a business can speak directly to and build closer relationships with customers and buyers.

Niche buyers can also be reached more selectively with targeted messages that cost a fraction of the traditional big-budget ad campaign. So rather than bombard them with advertising they’ll likely ignore, David advocates the internet allows a business to focus on getting the right message to the right people at the right time. And when people visit a company’s Web site, he says they aren’t there to get more ad fluff. They want value, information, interaction, and choice. As the book cover overleaf states:

“This one-of-a-kind guide to the future of marketing includes a step-by-step action plan for harnessing the power of the Internet, showing you how to identify audiences, create compelling messages, get those messages to the right people, and lead those consumers into the buying process.”

To top it all off he also includes some great case studies to prove his points.

In a separate presentation David made he summed up the old rules and the new rules of marketing like this:

The New Rules of Marketing™

A little while back, I finally got down to Blue Ocean Strategy in my ever-renewing stack of new books. Any book based not in opinion but in research gets my attention. In this case W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne spent a decade formulating their ideas based on analysis of 150 strategic moves across a variety of industries and eras (comparable to a lite version of a Jim Collins project).

Kim and Mauborgne came to the conclusion that most current industries are already overcrowded with quality competitors who are fighting over a limited number of potential customers (i.e., Red Oceans). They contend that in order for companies to experience significant growth in the future they need to look for uncontested market space (i.e., a Blue Ocean) outside of what they may consider their current market.

The authors provide an excellent systematic approach for a Blue Ocean search, but the big idea behind the book doesn’t feel that new. Almost 50 years ago, father of modern marketing Theodore Levitt spelled out these same essential elements in his most famous article, “Marketing Myopia”.

Putting the example Levitt famously used into Blue Ocean terms, the problem with the railroad companies of the early 20^th century was their determination to continue competition in the Red Ocean of railroad transportation while neglecting to look for a Blue Ocean in the larger transportation market. The focus of Levitt’s article was more on the barriers that keep companies in Red Oceans, while Kim and Mauborgne focus on strategies for finding Blue Oceans, but they share the same premise.

My issue with the book does not discount Kim and Mauborgne’s work; they have provided some valuable tools strategists would do well to employ as we plan our companies’ futures – a type of corrective lenses for our collective marketing myopia.

However, I do wish they had given credit to their distinguished predecessor who first so eloquently conveyed these ideas. And I particularly take issue with those who extolled the book as “breakthrough” and “original” as this does a serious disservice to those unaware of the rich provenance of the subject, perpetuating the idea that areas of strategic thought have somehow been overlooked and new strategies are the only thing relevant in a 21^st century world moving at broadband speeds.

Nothing could be further from the truth. The principals of marketing strategy are not being written (or rewritten) in the 21^st century. Adaptations in strategic implementation are made as new mediums and tactics become available (i.e., Web 2.0), but this is nothing new. Just as Blue Ocean Strategy is nothing new, only an expansion on a well-established idea – which is always welcome, let’s just give our “founding fathers” their due.