Once the strategy is developed, activation work begins.
Marketing teams are usually quite capable of turning brand strategies into customer communication. And it helps if your creative partners participate in the brand strategy workshops. We augment this knowledge with a set of tools to help you use the strategy to create and evaluate external communications, to develop marketing plans and to assess customer reaction.
Internal activation and employee brands. Brand strategies often fail for lack of internal activation. In many B2B or service organizations, the interactions between employees and customers are more frequent than external communication touch points. The behaviors taken by your employees that reinforce the brand with your customers is referred to as your “employee brand.” We provide a path to employee alignment behind the new brand strategy, developing the employee brand.
It starts with on-boarding key stakeholders who were identified in the brand audit and by enlisting them as brand champions. Sometimes these stakeholders are functional heads. But there are unofficial leaders in an organization who should be considered as stakeholders. The on-boarding process accomplishes three things:
- It introduces the brand strategy results to the stakeholder
- It shows how the stakeholder’s opinions were incorporated into the strategy
- It reinforces that other points of view held by the stakeholder were heard, even if they were not accepted as part of the strategy
Once the key stakeholders are brought on board, we help you develop a plan to communicate throughout the organization. We can provide you with tools to ensure that your business plans address all aspects of the brand. We can facilitate sessions with individual functions or business units to identify desired new behavior and endings for old, inconsistent behavior. Finally, we help you reinforce the desired behaviors and make brand understanding self-sustainable.