Employees as Brand Ambassadors

Marketing Wizkid and my buddy Mayank has an excellent post on why employees are organizatio's biggest brand ambassadors. He suggests how organizations can strive to create a brand ambassador out of each employee.

Brand Ecology: First step of the transformation is mapping the brand ecology – how various interactions with the brand happen, both internally and externally. More importantly, how the employees interact with the brand and what kind of relationship they share. Once this is done, one can analyze if the interactions and relationship is in line with the defined philosophy of the brand and its essence. Identification of the gaps is essential so that proper actionable agenda can be chalked out to fill those gaps.

Brand Story: Based on the understanding of Brand Ecology, a brand story needs to be developed that can, in simple terms, explain what the brand is, its philosophy, and how employees are expected to drive it. People learn and adopt change readily if done with excellent story-telling.

Brand Communication: The next step is the role of communication. Here the focus is on the channels of communication to bring out the relationship that employees are expected to have with the brand. It may be through use of stationary, frequent informal talk by the leader, stickers, dress code, official parties and get-togethers, etc. The important thing here is reinforcement of the desired brand behaviour from employees.

Brand Alignment: Brand conscious employees are expected to perform three functions: to perform their work, to align brand values and philosophy to their work, and be the brand ambassadors.An organization which endeavours to create a battery of brand ambassadors out of its employees must develop processes that measure an employee’s effectiveness on all these three parameters of his work.