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When you think of marketing, you more than likely think of marketing
to your customers: How can you persuade more people to buy what you sell?
But another “market” is just as important: your employees, the very people
who can make the brand come alive for your customers. Yet in our work
helping executives develop and carry out branding campaigns, my colleagues
and I have found that companies very often ignore this critical
constituency.
Why is internal marketing so important? First, because it’s the best
way to help employees make a powerful emotional connection to the products
and services you sell. Without that connection, employees are likely to
undermine the expectations set by your advertising. In some cases, this is
because they simply don’t understand what you have promised the public, so
they end up working at cross-purposes. In other cases, it may be they don’t
actually believe in the brand and feel disengaged or, worse, hostile toward
the company. We’ve found that when people care about and believe in the
brand, they’re motivated to work harder and their loyalty to the company
increases. Employees are united and inspired by a common sense of purpose
and identity.
Unfortunately, in most companies, internal marketing is done poorly,
if at all. While executives recognise the need to keep people informed
about the company’s strategy and direction, few understand the need to
convince employees of the brand’s power—they take it as a given.
Employees need to hear the same messages that you send out to the
marketplace. At most companies, however, internal and external
communications are often mismatched. This can be very confusing, and it
threatens employees’ perceptions of the company’s integrity: They are told
one thing by management but observe that a different message is being sent
to the public. One health insurance company, for instance, advertised that
the welfare of patients was the company’s number one priority, while
employees were told that their main goal was to increase the value of their
stock options through cost reductions. And one major financial services
institution told customers that it was making a major shift in focus from
being a financial retailer to a financial adviser, but, a year later,
research showed that the customer experience with the company had not
changed. It turned out that company leaders had not made an effort to sell
the change internally, so employees were still churning out transactions
and hadn’t changed their behavior to match their new adviser role.
Enabling employees to deliver on customer expectations is important,
of course, but it’s not the only reason a company needs to match internal
and external messages. Another reason is to help push the company to
achieve goals that might otherwise be out of reach. In 1997, when IBM
launched its e-business campaign (which is widely credited for turning
around the company’s image), it chose to ignore research that suggested
consumers were unpre-pared to embrace IBM as a leader in e-business.
Although to the outside world this looked like an external marketing
effort, IBM was also using the campaign to align employees around the idea
of the Internet as the future of technology. The internal campaign changed
the way employees thought about everything they did, from how they named
products to how they organised staff to how they approached selling. The
campaign was successful largely because it gave employees a sense of
direction and purpose, which in turn restored their confidence in IBM’s
ability to predict the future and lead the technology industry. Today,
research shows that people are four times more likely to associate the term
“e-busi-ness” with IBM than with its nearest competitor.
Perhaps even more important, by taking employees into account, a
company can avoid creating a message that doesn’t resonate with staff or,
worse, one that builds resentment. In 1996, United Airlines shelved its
“Come Fly the Friendly Skies” slogan when presented with a survey that
revealed the depth of customer resentment toward the airline industry. In
an effort to own up to the industry’s shortcomings, United launched a new
campaign, “Rising,” in which it sought to differentiate itself by
acknowledging poor service and prom-ising incremental improvements such as
better meals. While this was a logical premise for the campaign given the
tenor of the times, a campaign focusing on customers’ distaste for flying
was deeply discouraging to the staff. Employee resentment, ultimately made
it impos-sible for United to deliver the improvements it was promising,
which in turn undermined the “Rising” pledge. Three years later, United
decided employee opposition was under-mining its success and pulled the
campaign. It has since moved to a more inclusive brand message with the
line “United,” which both audiences can embrace. Here, a fundamental
principle of advertising—find and address a customer concern—failed United
because it did not consider the internal market.
When it comes to execution, the most common and effective way to link
internal and external marketing campaigns is to create external advertising
that targets both audiences. IBM used this tactic very effectively when it
launched its e-business campaign, It took out an eight-page ad in the Wall
Street Journal declaring its new vision, a message directed at both
customers and internal stakeholders. This is an expensive way to capture
attention, but if used sparingly, it is the most powerful form of
communication; in fact, you need do it only once for everyone in the
company to read it. There’s a symbolic advantage as well. Such a tactic
signals that the company is taking its pledge very seriously; it also
signals transparency—the same message going out to both audiences.
Advertising isn’t the only way to link internal and external
marketing. At Nike, a number of senior executives now hold the additional
title of “Corporate Storyteller.” They deliberately avoid stories of
financial successes and concentrate on parables of “just doing it,”
reflecting and reinforcing the company’s ad campaigns. One tale, for
example, recalls how legendary coach and Nike cofounder Bill Bowerman, in an
effort to build a better shoe for his team, poured rubber into the family
waffle iron, giving birth to the prototype of Nike’s famous Waffle Sole. By
talking about such inventive moves, the company hopes to keep the spirit of
innovation that characterises its ad campaigns alive and well within the
company.
But while their messages must be aligned, companies must also keep
external promises a little ahead of internal realities. Such promises
provide incentives for employees and give them something to live up to. In
the 1980s, Ford turned “Quality Is Job 1” from an internal rallying cry
into a consumer slogan in response to the threat from cheaper, more
reliable Japanese cars. It did so before the claim was fully justified, but
by placing it in the public arena, it gave employees an incentive to match
the Japanese. If the promise is pushed too far ahead, however, it loses
credibility. When a beleaguered British Rail launched a cam-paign
announcing service improvements under the banner “We’re Getting There,” it did
so prematurely. By drawing attention to the gap between the promise and the
reality, it prompted destructive press coverage. This, in turn, demoralised
staff, who had been legiti-mately proud of the service advances they had
made.
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