Bruwer suggested a two-pronged approach
when organisations want to embark on designing strategic branding; an internal and an external point of view. Strategic insight within the internal aspect may be supported by culture surveys and studies. External insight is gained through competitor analysis and industry benchmarks.
Once these insights have been reached, organisations proceed to define their future brand positioning. This brand positioning forms a type of vision and needs certain anchors to ground and support the successful delivery. One such anchor is the organisational values. Bruwer suggests that organisations need one set of values as opposed to different sets across different products. Once these universal values are defined, the external and internal strategy is developed.
External strategy includes traditional marketing and positing practices. Internal strategy defines all stage of the employees’ life cycle and how to inculcate the brand in each part of the cycle through the desired formal policy and rites and rituals. The cycle includes stages from recruitment and on-boarding through to rewards and recognition programmes. It can even embrace ambassadorial alumni groups for people who have left the organisation.
Another key aspect of the internal strategy is communication segmentation. Bruwer continues: “Often management thinks that, from an employee perspective, one size fits all. We easily segment our external environment and tailor-make messages to reach different audiences and yet internally we do not follow the same practices. We need to ensure that we tailor-make our messages to certain audience clusters. It depends on the organisation as to how we group these people
and it is often not done by level. These groups could be those that have bought into the brand early, the champions or those who are disengaged. And it is critical that the branding strategy is launched internally first. We ensure, as far as possible, that we align our internal people first. There is nothing worse than people seeing changes in the newspaper first.”
Part of Raw Umber Consulting’s internal communication practice is to pitch concepts and campaign lines to staff before launch first. Feedback is captured and corrective action taken if necessary. But they normally start off with a leadership intervention. They believe a top down approach, where leadership teams become the brand and understand what they themselves have to do, is the best way to build a brand successfully. “People hear what you say, but they look at what you do. Everyone has a part to play. Employees in an intervention literally adding their own pieces to complete the picture” Bruwer iterated.
The communication platforms that are used
are described as ‘the holy grail’ by Bruwer. “I love technology, but it has caused managers and leaders to abdicate their responsibility of communication directly to their people. I see organisations reinstitute ‘old ways’ such as town hall meetings. We have found that, especially in organisations where there are many managerial levels, people want to hear messages directly from their manager. I think people have underestimated the power of that one on one communication. Non-verbal communication platforms lose out on things such as tone of voice and body language that enriches the conversation.”
Other communication channels include World Café discussions, making individual Executive Committee members responsible for individual values and gatherings that give employees
April 2012 | Management Today 77
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