Building Internal Brand Believers

The key to nurturing a strong brand lies not just in reaching customers but in creating strong brand advocates within your organization, your internal brand believers. Internal advocates are the fuel our brands require, extending the narrative in a way that resonates deeply with each other and with your external audience.  

Every successful brand has a group of people who are not just aware of the brand’s narrative but deeply believe in it. These are your brand believers. These individuals are crucial because they interact with customers, influence product development, shape the public perception of the brand and can infuse these interactions with your brand promise. 

Creating a community of brand believers within your company requires clear, compelling brand messaging that aligns with the values and passions of your employees. This alignment is not by accident but by design, where the company’s mission and vision are not just communicated but ingrained through continuous reinforcement. 

• Inspire: Regularly articulate what the brand stands for. This isn’t just about company-wide emails but about integrating these values into every meeting, project, and company event. Ensure that your leaders walk the talk and bring your brand values to life in their actions. 

• Storytelling: Encourage employees to contribute their ideas and stories that align with the brand’s values. Use a Showcase to amplify the best of the best. This inclusion fosters a sense of ownership and alignment with the brand’s narrative.

Activation goes beyond just doing the tasks. Involve employees in the brand evolution process. This can be achieved through various initiatives that inspire employees through experiencing the brand’s impact firsthand. 

• Immersion Sessions: Conduct workshops that help employees understand and experience the brand’s impact on its customers, and its value in the world. 

• Recognition Programs: Highlight employees that exemplify the brand values that have brought the brand to life in an innovative and meaningful way. 

• Brand Inspiration Portal: Provide a brand inspiration portal that goes beyond communicating the details of the brand, and instead inspires the audience with brand stories, case studies, impactful videography, and animation. Bring the brand mission to life for them. 

Every employee has a personal narrative that influences their engagement at work. Aligning these personal narratives with the brand’s story can turn apathetic employees into active brand proponents. See this article for more on personal narratives.

• Personal Narrative: By researching your employees’ personal narratives, their values and motivations you can explore how the company’s brand narrative connects, augments or clashes. Giving you a clear roadmap to elevate the connection and resulting motivation. 

• Connect Career to Brand Goals: Show employees how developing their careers within the organization is aligned with advancing the brand mission. Creating the connection to the company purpose is critical creating an inspired workforce. 

In deploying a brand believer program within your organization, it is important to measure the impact you are having and assess if your program is achieving your intended outcomes. To understand the effectiveness of your strategies in creating brand believers, some metrics that can be monitored are: 

• Employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS): There is no clearer metric than this assessment of your employees’ desire to promote the organization to their peers and community. The challenge is in structuring the surveys to ensure candid feedback from a broad cohort of employees. 

• Social Media: Measure how often employees share the brand’s content on social media. What is the sentiment of the posts, and any resulting commentary?  

• Customer Feedback: Direct customer feedback is always informative. Mine this information for insights into how the employees that they interacted with behaved. Did they translate the brand promise into the customer experience?  

In summary 

Creating brand believers is not just about ensuring all employees know the brand, rather it is about building deep human connections between the employees and the brand mission, vision and values. Done right, this creates an internal culture of passionate belief in the brand which becomes contagious, spilling over to customer interactions and creating a strong, resilient brand image.  

By investing in your people within your company and ensuring alignment between their personal narratives and the brand story, companies can transform their employees into powerful advocates, ensuring that their brand thrives in the competitive marketplace.