by Sean McCoy (@TheRealMcCoyTRM) In a guest lecture to a strategic marketing honours group recently, I was preceded by a speaker who discussed the role of reputation and corporate communication. She made a clear distinction between brand and reputation.
The former, she suggested, belongs to the organisation and is essentially a promise made to the market — this is a simplistic brand definition I have always enjoyed. The latter, she purported, belongs to the stakeholders you engage with and is their assessment of the extent to which the organisation delivers on its promise — a superb nuance that is clearly stated and extremely critical.
Lies at the heart
You see, this is what lies at the heart of internal branding and the process of brand alignment. It is a key part of organisational strategy and architecture, and needs to sit centrally in the business, rather than as something ‘down the corridors of the building’ that someone in marketing occasionally does.
And it most certainly transcends the idea that we can put a few posters up, issue caps and t-shirts, and hold a company braai as a solution to building the internal brand. This is not intended to be flippant, but to seriously jolt us out of this thinking which, you will be surprised to hear, still prevails in many businesses.
True brand alignment means putting the internal brand at the core of business strategy, ensuring that it is driven by leadership and has a direct impact on shaping the values, culture and, ultimately, behaviours of the business.
Culture trumps strategy
While strategy is key, it has often been said that culture trumps strategy on any given day, so the link or, better still, the synthesis between strategic direction and culture of the business is vital — internal brand provides the glue that binds this.
Brand alignment goes beyond this, however, and it supersedes the world of the perceived ‘warm and fuzzy’. Ensuring an integrated and cohesive approach to brand alignment means that all of the ‘harder facets’ of the business are also aligned to this thinking.
Structures and systems are built to support this; knowledge, skills and abilities are driven towards achieving this; and technology serves as an enabler to further enhance and deliver this.
The nett effect
This means that internal brand mimics organisational architecture. The nett effect is that it lands internal brand as a key business capability, the resultant impact being that connections to external stakeholders are arrived at through the internal stakeholder — more succinctly put as our people —better equipping us to deliver on what my fellow guest speaker eluded to — consistent delivery of our promise — against which all external stakeholder will assess us and define our business reputation; on their terms, as opposed to what our latest marketing speak may suggest.
Capability is an acknowledged strategic tool and is regarded as a highly effective aspect of the resource-based view, if staying with an academic stream, and a key component of deriving competitive advantage. In simplified and pragmatic terms, brand alignment or internal branding is therefore a key opportunity for competitive advantage within companies, rather than a sadly neglected function, often relegated to the ‘caps and braaivleis’ thinking referred to earlier.
Whose responsibility is it?
Argument for a chief brand officer
In an ideal world, it is the chief executives who drive this, albeit that they do have busy day jobs. While we can hardly argue for more C-level roles in the current economic context, there is an argument for a chief brand officer to integrate the efforts of marketing, corporate communication, human resources and the line management functions.
This role can be adopted by an existing executive — and I again stress the seniority of involvement to make it effective and ensure resource allocation — whose primary role is to ensure that the respective disciplines drive this holistically, rather than in the often siloed and fragmented efforts of the business.
In the absence of formalised internal brand leadership responsibility, at the very least these teams need to work together seamlessly in order to achieve effective internal branding.
Dr Sean McCoy, MD and founding member of HKLM, is a prominent figure in the branding arena, with his expertise centered on client service, brand strategy and business development. Sean has been chairperson for the Brand Council of South Africa since 2012. He contributes the regular “The Real McCoy” column focusing on internal branding to MarkLives.
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