Marketing and brand teams so often focus solely on customers. This presentation will share thoughts on internal branding and how one can translate a brand for employees in such a way that it will inspire and motivate them to live the brand and deliver distinctly branded experiences in every interaction with customers.
Hi Everyone
Thanks for giving me a chance to speak to you today
To tell you a little more about myself – I started out life as a marketer, but I’m too nosey so I’ve ended up getting involved in a number of things
One of my passions has always been customer experiences and process.
I worked at Sanlam and did marketing but also got a lot of opportunity to look at product and sales process design
Worked at kalahari.com, and also got a lot of insight into UX and customer experience
Now I’m at FlySafair and look after marketing and communications, third party sales channels, ancillary revenue streams and our customer contact center.
I’m joined by Veni from our call centre and Kurleen who looks after training and special projects in our airport locations.
I’m really excited to speak with you about today’s topic as it’s something that I’m passionate about and something that is so often forgotten.
The concept of a brand is a complex thing
If I ask you to name some brands now, you’ll give me the names of a number of products and companies.
If I ask you to describe them, you’ll tell me about the personalities that they have and what their ads are like
All of these things are great and essential because they create a feeling around a product and they generate sales
And That’s what Marketing does right… it creates sales..
But what we so often forget about it the internal aspect of a brand – the bit that reflects back into the company
And so often we forget about this
We let it face into the background, or it just kind of happens as a by product of what we do externally.
Executives and marketers will sit together in a boardroom and create strategies around how they want the company and the brand to be.
We write vision and mission statements. We write positioning statements. We ask what apple does and then we agonise for hours over a 12-15 word sentence.
When that’s done most companies and executives pat themselves on the back – that was a good day of work, we did well, this is going to be awesome.
They find a little corner of the website or a space in the annual report and the publish it there
But most companies file the exercise, go back to work and keep trucking just as they did the day before that workshop.
A few good companies take a bold step and tell their employees what the intended mission and vision are, what kind of company we intend this one to be. If they’re really good they might put up a poster, maybe brand a coffee cup or a mouse pad
“For people who drink liquids, Rand Water aims to be the coolest beverage in town” Our values are: Liquidity, transparency and flow.
Don’t even get me started on “corporate values”
So what’s the point of this internal brand- what are we talking about here and what do we mean.
And why are we even talking about this? How does it relate to the purpose of this conference, the purpose of this gathering?
The key point here is that Happiness Matters. Say it with me – Happiness Matters….
Happiness Matters
We’re here because we want to improve the customer experiences our organisations offer, and what we recognise is that one of the biggest factors to getting this right, is having the right people in the right frame of mind – and that frame of mind is happy.
Now Veni is looking at me going “boss” – she calls me boss. She’s saying “boss” you know what our call centre staff put up with everyday. The abuse. How are we supposed to keep them happy?
Let me tell you a little secrect out our environment. The airline industry, it looks super cool, very glamourous
I get approached by ad agencies all the time who want on our business – “we want an airline in our portfolio” they tell me.
But here’s the truth guys: People hate airlines.
“shame he’s down on himself – it’s not that bad Kirby”
No, no – I’m afraid it is. I’ve looked into this quite a bit actually and in all the research I’ve done, the aviation industry ranks near the bottom on customer satisfaction scores.
When we review the SACSI scores here in SA the countries airlines rank near the bottom overall in terms of satisfaction. I’m talking lower than banks, lower than cell phone companies, lower than Telkom…
And it’s not just in SA – NPS scores worldwide – highest recorded airline NPS score was +62 – South West Airlines in the USA 2009. That’s not a high score at all.
USA airlines were more on time last year than ever before and yet they had more complaints to the ombudsman.
Now we have a lot of challenges and we’re ready to tackle them – we are not afraid, but I’m labouring this point to give you a sense of the level of abuse flung at our teams daily – just so you can appreciate why Veni’s jaw is hitting her lap at these words.
Yes our people deal with unhappy customers and there are a few things that we can do to limit that, but the core point here is to help make that unhappiness the challenge – the purpose – the fuel that feeds our people’s fires. We need to make that unhappiness the motivation that drives our people
Now I’m not talking about brand yet--- I’ll get there I promise, but what I’m talking about is motivation, because you’ll see in a moment that motivation contextualises brand
Dan Pink is one of my favorite speakers.
He’s the guru on motivation, and if you haven’t engaged with his talks and book called Drive then I highly recommend that you do.
Dan talks a lot about the things that motivate people, the things that keep them engaged at work and the things that make them happy.
Happiness Matters.
Dan has studied a great deal of the science behind motivating people – he specifically looks at the idea that money or reward is an incentive that will drive people.
Pay people more money and they will do better work
Put in place punitive measures and people will do less bad work.
And he has found that this is true – for a limited number of applications.
Dan has found that this hold true when people are required to do simple tasks.
Here’s the illustration
Explain experiement
Test groups – one told just trying to find the average time it takes to get this right
Versus if you get it right first you get a cash prize
The average people got it right first
Here’s the answer – the challenge was cognitive because you had to see the box not as a container for the pins, but as a tool to use – it required a shift of perception.
Then they setup the experiment differently a second time and the incentivised people won – because it was more simple.
So what Dan realised is that when it comes to more complex cognitive work the answer is to pay people enough to take the question of money off the table.
Low pay does demotivate – but increased pay does not always motivate.
Autonomy being give me enough room to do what I need to do – give me enough rope to hang myself but don’t micromanage me. Let me control my own work and my own future.
Mastery – allow me to achieve daily. Let me get better at what I do. Allow me to take steps and recognize me for those achievements. I want to feel like I’m getting somewhere.
Purpose – I want to understand what the work I’m doing means. Why do I get up every morning, because it’s not to earn a salary – and if that’s what you believe – then you’re probably in trouble.
Do you agree with these things – do they make sense?
Now let’s talk about an internal brand
I said at the start the internal brand is often ignored and becomes a mere product of the brand that we project into the market place.
I said we sit in boardrooms and we determine what a brand’s purpose, positioning, mission, vision is
And then, if we’re good, we tell people what these things are.
My biggest bug-bear is corporate values. Executives sit in a boardroom and cook up values and then dictate to employees that these are what your values are.
And they’re usually virtuous, so it’s hard to argue them, but I’ve seen “profitability” as a value.
How the &%*^%&^ does that happen?
If you remember one thing from what I’ve said to today, please remember this:
Do NOT make your brand a mask that you require your employees to wear – it does not work. It does not work.
You can have them answer the phone “yellow, MTN”, you can call them “Dynamos” or “Navigators”, you can have them chant everytime they get a tip – but don’t give them a mask to wear and expect them to be happy and motivated
No I believe that a good internal brand – a strong internal brand is one that embodies these things
It’s one that has an element of Autonomy – it can be applied as is appropriate to the user.
At FlySafair our principle is around loving what we do.
Chantal had a brief consultation with us and she told my CEO that he’s a bit like a love-sick teenage girl – and he agreed. It’s not a bad thing.
But I want to give you an example of how this autonomy if internal brand is applied.
I want to tell you about Kyle and Kamo
These people both love what they and they are encouraged to express it in their own ways.
Kyle is an outgoing funny camp, over-the-top kind of guy. His passengers love him, he puts on a show, he teases them, but when you deal with Kyle you see one thing – He loves what he does. You feel it. He really loves what he does.
Kamo– is more serious. She is all about professionalism and she makes sure that all the ts and crossed and I’s are dotted.
She’s a perfectionist – she’s on-point and you can tell that she loves what she does.
Now we don’t have it right everywhere, don’t get me wrong, but with our crew, we have this right. They are so passionate and we hear it from our customers all the time.
Mastery is a tricky one, because a lot of mastery is something that comes from within your employees. You have to open the doors for mastery, to make opportunities but it has to come from within their will to make it happen.
From a brand perspective there are however some important things to consider.
First of all – make a quest for mastery and element of your brand culture. Avis, we try harder, Standard Bank – Moving Forward, Apple – think different. These are great. And it doesn’t have to be in your pay-off line, it’s a cultural thing – it’s about humilty. We are darn near the best, and we’re not going to hang back.
But internally, you have to recognise your people – push and pull. We often do a lot of pushing – seldom enough pulling.
When your people achieve, recognise them, make them feel like movie stars – allow them to realise and appreciate that they’ve reached a new level and that they are doing well. Make those activities part of your brand – put their faces in nice newsletters or on posters or whatever!
But from a brand perspective, we’ve been building up here to the biggest one of all. You know what the last factor of motivation is… it’s purpose.
In case you haven’t realised it yet, purpose is absolutely key – it’s the lynch pin
It’s the keystone
Now before you go back to your organisations, don’t run to sit around your boardroom tables to think up a purpose. If you business is anywhere, you actually already have one. When outlining your purpose create nothing new
You’ll be building a mask
If you don’t already know what your purpose is then find it. Look deep and reflect carefully.
Your marketing department should know what it is.
Once you’re found your purpose, know one thing. Purpose is a fish.
Like a fish – it’s slippery. It moves and changes slightly all the time. The body of purpose is fluid and it can dart from one direction to the next in the blink of an eye.
Purpose binds us and allows us to move together – like a school of fish. Sometimes it’s personal and sometimes it’s collective
If you catch purpose – it dies. Don’t think you have it or that you own it – you have to observe it and respect it. AND
It needs to keep moving forward all the time – it cannot stop, or it will die.
And that’s
And that’s what the internal brand has to do – it has to be the window to that fish
It has to remind us what that fish is
It has to be cultural – in our air
It has to be visual – in our face
It has to be tangible – give us examples
It has to be ritual – we do it daily.
Who’s job it is to build this brand?
Anyone who cares about custmore experience.
It should come from your senior teams and it should come from marketing but beware of marketing because they pain masks everyday.
And that’s an interesting conflict because if marketing raises concerns with you that the internal brand is not matching the external brand, then let me tell you what… you actually have an external brand issue – because people buy authenticity.
So how do you build a successful internal brand?
You don’t
You find it and you nurture it