A company’s employees.

Your employees are the critical link between your company and your customer. Your employees must actively deliver your unique brand promise every day, all day. Certainly, many companies champion customer service: McDonald’s, Fairmont Hotels, Nordstrom. However, few companies translate their brands successfully into employee behavior. Companies strategize at the highest levels – push the marketing and communication teams to craft customer messages, invest in expensive marketing campaigns – yet employees are often the last to truly understand their company’s brand.

Companies are learning that their brand stands or falls on the internal relationship with its employees as much as their external promises to customers. Aligning your organization, operations and culture with your brand values can provide competitive advantage. However, it is an incredibly challenging process. For a brand to come to life, it must permeate the organization’s culture, training, performance and evaluation systems, internal communications, and every employee’s responsibilities.

Sounds good, so how do you do it?

Internal brand alignment uses company-wide communications and employee-focused education to help employees understand and actualize their important and valuable roles in expressing their company’s brand and its values through their behaviors. To succeed, you must recognize the following:

• The individual employee must be the central focus
• Efforts must be endorsed by top levels, embraced by middle management and engaged by all
• On-brand actions must be incorporated into employees duties not added on
• Brand values must be translated into real and practical brand behaviors
• Frequency and consistency of communication and action are the levers of success
• Results must be measurable, qualitatively, with an outcome that is financially quantifiable

A successful brand alignment initiative educates employees with the same clear and consistent story. For instance, Caterpillar, the global builder of earthmoving equipment and diesel engines, has conducted its One Voice brand education for all its employees around the world since 1993.

Understanding a single brand story motivates employees by helping them understand the company’s vision and business strategy from their own perspective. When done well, it optimizes performance by setting a single standard for behavior resulting in an increase in the level of employee engagement that drives improved customer satisfaction. Organon, a worldwide healthcare company based in Holland, just recently instituted a new Mission, Vision and Values internal program to establish a common set of standards for its 13,000 employees.

Still, many organizations fail at enfranchising their employees in their branding.

This is due to three reasons:

First, many companies do not differentiate their employee populations. A “sheep dip” approach to internal branding does not acknowledge the different needs of internal employee demographics.

Second, actual financial outcomes have been difficult to quantify and substantiate. Employee retention, customer satisfaction and internal brand awareness are seen as “soft” numbers.

Last – and surprising – many organizations are so externally focused on the customer, and the shareholders, that they are pursued above all others, excluding the actual messenger of the brand – the employee!

Success can be quantified:

• Fortune magazine’s “Most Admired Companies” stock prices appreciated 50% over peers after instituting employee motivation and alignment efforts
• Satisfied employees are on average 30% less likely to leave, saving 1 to 1. 5 times annual salary per employee turnover
• Employees with a high level of engagement are 38% more likely to have above-average productivity
• A significant improvement in communication effectiveness is associated with a 29.5% increase in market value

These are great numbers – worthy of pursuit. Perhaps the benefit of internal brand alignment can be summed up in a simple equation:

engaged, productive and focused employees
= delighted, loyal customer
= business/shareholder value

The challenge of internal brand alignment is ensuring your employees deliver on the promises your brand makes to the market. And that means making employees the first to know.

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Larry Oakner is the Director of Brand Culture at Interbrand.