At Zappos, they position their brand to be “a service company that happens to sell shoes among other things.”  However, providing great service requires a customer-focused culture. So their number one core value for the company is “Deliver WOW through service.” They train and empower their employees to live and deliver “WOW,” and make “WOW” part of the every day vocabulary.  All new hires at Zappos.com Las Vegas headquarters, “including accountants, lawyers and software developers,” are required to go through Customer Loyalty training.

At Google, they realize that in order for employees to be champions of the brand, they must also be champions of their own products.  It is a culture norm for all employees to use Google’s products daily in their work, and there are ways to easily relay feedback and share ideas for the innovation process.  To make sure the “Google blinders” aren’t on, employees also try out all of their competitors’ products.  Through this practice, employees stay up to date on continuous product iterations and innovations that occur each day, and most importantly, know first hand what sets the Google brand apart from everyone else.

New Belgium is a microbrewery in Colorado with a large and loyal following. New Belgium has built a brand based on sustainability, which they preach internally as well as externally. After one year of employment, all employees gain an ownership stake in the company and a customized New Belgium bicycle, which symbolizes the company’s commitment to sustainability. Employee ownership also empowers employees to carry forth the brand on their own, without a mandate from above. In 1998 employee owners voted unanimously to turn New Belgium into the first wind-powered brewery. In addition, 1% of all revenues go to environmental non-profits.

All of these examples show great practices in internal branding, which can be defined as programs and tools to inspire and engage employees to “live and deliver” the brand. As many successful brands have learned, employees can be your most passionate and powerful brand champions.  However, brands can also fail because they lack the organizational buy-in, energy and momentum to achieve a sustainable and recognizable position in the marketplace.  Studies show that, on average, only about one-third of employees are actually highly engaged champions of their brand. This means, that many brands, new or existing, are at risk of failure.

Lessons

We recently worked with a company to develop a strong, recognizable brand and positioning and faced this very challenge – how to engage the entire organization to be champions of the brand.  Based on this experience, we wanted to share our learnings with you, because not all brands are like Google and gain instant brand enthusiasts in the hiring process.  When we started this work, we were focused on two important steps: 1) creating an effective and compelling brand strategy and 2) effectively launching the brand in the market.  However, there remained an extremely important step in the middle – launching the brand internally.  To do this, we first thought about our biggest organizational obstacles.  For any company embarking on an initiative to brand internally, here are some important questions to consider in determining the challenges ahead:

•    Do senior leaders believe enough in the importance of branding and the brand itself to stand behind it and invest in its success?
•    What is the current mindset of employees at the start of this initiative? Have there been failed branding initiatives in the past that may cause employees to be more skeptical?
•    How large and spread out is the organization geographically, and are functions and regions well aligned and in close communication?
•    Has the company ever had a customer centric mindset that lends itself to the importance of branding, or is there a “build it and they will come” mentality?
•    How well do employees believe in the strength of the current offering and its potential?

Even if your answers to these questions make you skeptical about the outcome of an internal branding initiative, our recent work in this area has unveiled some key initiatives that will increase your chances of success.

•    Have it come from within
•    Build circles of influence
•    Don’t just tell…inspire
•    Educate and engage
•    Make it more than words on a page

Have it come from within. When developing or revitalizing a brand, it is important to make employees feel like they are part of it.  When people feel responsible for the brand’s origin or direction, they have a lot more passion and ownership, versus when they are told by Marketing or the powers above what the brand is to be.  Methods to instill ownership of the brand range from a simple employee wide survey to gather opinions, to one-on-one interviews with various stakeholders, to having people from key regions and functions react to iterations in the brand’s development.

Build circles of influence. This is particularly important for large, complex organizations, in which Marketing is limited by the reach and number of people on the team.  Before a new brand strategy is rolled out to the entire organization, it’s important to immerse select employees in its development.  These individuals could be:

•    Organizational leaders: Senior management or individuals with strong influence within the company
•    Early pioneers: Individuals or groups who will be the initial implementers of any new brand strategy “proof points” in the market
•    Motivators: Employees with a natural skill to inspire others in the organization around an idea and who have strong passion for the potential of the company
•    International counterparts: Individuals in offices around the world that serve in one of the three roles above

Don’t just tell…inspire. In sharing the brand strategy with employees, it is important to take measures to inspire them to believe in the brand and its promise. This is important because emotions help people care.  When people are emotionally engaged by an idea or initiative, they are more likely to become part of it and take action.  Some methods to inspire include immersion workshops to generate excitement around the possibilities of the brand, or creative forms of media to communicate the meaning and essence of the brand.  These could include an object for their desk that illustrates the soul of the brand, a compelling brand film that conveys the emotional promise, or mocked up visuals illustrating the “imagine ifs” for the future brand.

Educate and engage. Knowledge is power, so it is important to create a central forum to educate the organization about the brand and all of its elements.  It is also important to clearly connect the brand strategy back to the role of every individual in the company.  Concepts that stick in an organization are clear, not abstract or ambiguous. In order to make something clear and easy for others to understand, you should explain it using concrete images that take advantage of existing schemas in the audience’s mind.6 Without this information, employees, especially those outside of Marketing, are disengaged from the brand.  An individual who works in Accounts Payable is not likely to realize that her actions and dialogue with customers, partners or vendors can speak volumes about the brand.  Many brands address this through a creative and inviting brand website that is accessible to employees, vendors, partners, etc. and contains information, guidelines, role play scenarios, etc. as well as a place for open dialogue and questions.

Make it more than words on a page. Depending on past experience with the organization or previous employers, many or some employees prefer to reserve their efforts and go into “wait and see” mode when a new brand strategy is launched internally.  Without tangible proof points that the company is making impressive changes in its approach to align with the new brand, they might feel as if they are wasting their energy on something that will never come to fruition.  This does not mean that a company has to spend millions changing its entire go-to-market approach to turn employees into believers.  In fact, new branding efforts that are broad and spread too thinly across every aspect of the organization lose their meaning and commitment and are usually unsuccessful.  Instead, the best approach is to identify select initiatives within the company that will have the biggest initial impact for the brand relative to the level of required investment, and start there.

Conclusion

“A brand that captures your mind gains behavior. A brand that captures your heart gains commitment.” When implementing a new brand strategy, employees can be your toughest customers, however, when the organization is rallied around the brand, it can be a formidable force in the market.  We have seen this through the incredible success of brands like Zappos, Google and New Belgium, all of which have enviable brand ambassadorship.  By capturing employees’ hearts, giving them the tools and information to engage, and proving leadership’s commitment to execution, an organization can succeed in creating powerful brand champions.

Sources:

Brandeo. Brands: Zappos Brand Based on Great Service Not Lip Service
Building a Customer Focused Culture, Presentation by Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos
Interview with Google employee
www.newbelgium.com
“7 great places to work” CNN.com
Employee Brand Engagement: It’s Not a Myth—Happy People Make Happy Businesses.
Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, Dan Heath and Chip Heath
Scott Talgo, Brand Strategist
lil 1/2 pint

“As long as the centuries continue to unfold, the number of books will grow continually, and one can predict that a time will come when it will be almost as difficult to learn anything from books as from the direct study of the whole universe. It will be almost as convenient to search for some bit of truth concealed in nature as it will be to find it hidden away in an immense multitude of bound volumes.” Encyclopédie (1755)

The same principal holds true in a professional context. Case in point: the NASA Challenger disaster in 1986. The scientists who tried to persuade their superiors to postpone the launch had all the right data, but it wasn’t presented in an easily digestible form, as statistician Edward Tufte points out in his book, Visual Explanations. These are the two charts scientists had describing the O-ring erosion, which led to the crash.

It is only when this same data is charted along a temperature axis (thanks to Tufte) that the problem becomes abundantly clear: cooler temperatures increase the chance for damage.

Of course, not even 18th century French philosopher Denis Diderot could have foreseen the emergence of computers and the internet, which have put massive amounts of data within our reach. As marketers, we now have access to enough numbers to make our heads spin, from volume projections to time spent on websites and everything in between. And while all of this information can make our jobs easier, we need to make sure that we aren’t overwhelmed by it.

So what does all of this mean? Information is, at its basic level, a tool that we use to make decisions. Before diving into all of the information at our fingertips, we need to ask what decisions it is enabling us to make and filter out unnecessary information accordingly.

We also need to make sure we are giving consumers the right amount of information, as too much can only get in the way. Consider Apple, an over-used but nonetheless relevant example. In product packaging and on the products themselves, Apple displays only the relevant pieces of information. The only visible words on the computer I’m typing on right now are “MacBook Pro.” Beyond that, the product design speaks for itself, and Apple has recognized this.

That’s not to say everything should be simplified. In today’s consumer-powered market, many consumers are looking for large amounts of product information when making purchases. But this information shouldn’t be thrust upon them. Rather, it should be easy to find when sought out by consumers.

The bottom line: Keep it simple, know your end goal, and use information selectively to achieve it.

Image source: AskTog.com

With new product failures exceeding successes, is it surprising that the rate of failure is not declining over time? As innovators, are we learning from our failures? John T. Gourville, of the Harvard Business School, may have part of the answer. He argues convincingly that the answer may be the psychological costs created when new products force consumers to change their behavior. Essentially, he argues that new products must not only provide a significant perceived benefit (i.e.- less costly, faster, stronger, etc.) but also provide minimal behavioral change.

An illustration of this idea is the difference in adoption between the dishwasher and the microwave oven. The microwave reached 60% household penetration in 15 years while the dishwasher required almost half a century. The behavioral change from using a conventional oven to using a microwave oven (i.e. -open door, press button and cook) was minimal compared to the change in behavior required to use dishwasher.

Image source: susanonline

Open innovation, by definition, requires that a company understand and assimilate highly specialized information from diverse inputs outside of its traditional competencies. That sounds scary. It requires the company to develop a new set of capabilities. That sounds even scarier to anyone who has tried to teach an old company new tricks.

Among the most important of these new tricks is how to quickly and effectively triage information. To accelerate this process (and do it right) many companies have learned to use external subject matter experts to quickly and inexpensively synthesize information and assess innovation opportunities. It may be tempting to find the expert with gravitas but those having the most success are not using the big name HBS authors. They are tapping the “everyday” expertise of disciplines as prosaic as pharmacists, chefs and even auto mechanics. This “innovation triage” is a capability that tomorrow’s best-in-class innovators are mastering today.

Image source: safoocat

Business Innovation (biz’-nis in’-e-va‘-shen) n. a significant change to an existing business process, program, product or service that leads to profit growth

Note that under this definition innovation is well beyond “product” and, above all, it must lead to profit growth. Lampoon or savior? Profit growth sounds much more like savior to me.

Every so often I see a presentation or read a book that brings clarity to something that I have learned intuitively through my client work but haven’t quite articulated yet. Last week’s Front End of Innovation conference provided several of these moments of illumination.

Microsoft taps hard-core gamers to create the Xbox

Dev Patniak, the author of Wired to Care told the story was about how Microsoft entered the gaming and entertainment spaces. Several years go Sony’s Playstation represented a serious threat to Microsoft. With a DVD player and Internet access, Playstation was positioned to challenge the PC as one of the primary information and entertainment devices for the home.

Microsoft hired a team of hard-core gamers – people who indulge in all-night marathons of “first-person shooter” games driven by immense volumes of caffeinated energy drinks. This team created the Xbox and launched it with the blockbuster game, Halo. It was the most successful new game system launched in the US in over 20 years and successfully countered the Playstation threat. A few years later, Apple launched the iPod. Microsoft again recognized the threat. They moved quickly to have the Xbox dream team develop a response for Microsoft. The result was the Zune – a total failure. How was Microsoft able to enter one market with entrenched, mature competitors successfully and utterly fail in another using the same exact team and approach?

The difference between the Xbox and Zune

It turns out that the Xbox development was an “empathic process.” In other words, the developers knew exactly how to handle the thousands of little everyday decisions about how to create the Xbox because they intimately understood the life of hard core gamers. They were gamers. They literally developed a system based on their intuition as gamers. This team of gamers was completely disconnected from the audiophiles who were the initial buyers of mp3 players. They developed the Zune from reading research reports about the target segment. They had no intimate knowledge about the life of audiophiles and they never engaged any experts or luminaries with tacit, intuitive knowledge about audio.  Therefore, they had no intuitive basis for making all the daily decisions that impact what the product would look like and how it will be positioned.

Innovation success through empathizing with consumers

This pattern of success-through-empathy has been repeated at companies like Harley-Davidson (they all ride motorcycles) and Jet Blue (the CEO flies coach 2-4 times a week to intimately immerse in the customer experience). P&G makes its senior management spend several weeks living with research participants so they better understand, at an intuitive level, the lives of their target consumers. The primary idea is that corporations often mute rather than amplify our intuition about customers and we can lose touch with the outside world unless we create innovation processes that enhance our natural empathic abilities.

Polo Ralph Lauren is a highly empathic company. It never conducts market research – no focus groups, no ethnographies, not even secondary research. And yet it has developed and continued to maintain strong brands without gathering and analyzing data about consumer preferences and buying habits. This is almost heretical in the world of brand marketing.

But is it? I would make the case that Polo Ralph Lauren, like Harley-Davidson, is among the most empathic organizations. Walking around the Polo Ralph Lauren headquarters in Manhattan is like stepping in to catalog photo shoot in Nantucket. They all wear Polo Ralph Lauren and more importantly, they live the Polo Ralph Lauren lifestyle. Polo Ralph Lauren hires people who understand the target segment because they are the target segment. And their leadership embodies the values and lifestyle. People at PRL develop an intuitive sense of the styles and colors that will shape the next season’s fashions by living everyday in the world of their consumers. They are intuitively equipped to make the thousands of decisions about fashions and colors and advertising and branding that will strengthen their brands and appeal to their consumers because the result is intuitively appealing to them. Just like the bearded men on the assembly line in Milwaukee and the caffeinated gamers in Seattle have an intuitive sense of how their work will appeal to, well, them.

Image source: aagre_ve

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Join us for an evening of food, drink, and engaging conversation about becoming your customers’ habit, not just their choice. We will be introducing our partnership with Dr. Neale Martin, celebrated author of Habit. Dr. Martin will be discussing his breakthrough approach to marketing that uses a consumer habit lens to give companies a competitive advantage and increase customer loyalty.

When: March 24th from 5:00 pm to 6:30 pm

Where: (r)evolution office
3340 Peachtree Rd. Suite 1452
Atlanta, GA 30308

Refreshments and hors d’oeuvres will be served

Please RSVP to Erica Connelly, econnelly [at] revcompany.com

For more information check out the Rehab website.

Our own Brad White will be speaking at the 7th annual Front End of Innovation conference in Boston, MA. The conference is sponsored by the Product Development and Management Association (PDMA) and the Institute for International Research (IIR) and will be held from May 18-20, 2009.

Brad will be speaking the afternoon of May 18. Click here to register or visit the website for more information. Hope to see some of you there!