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BRAND NEW BEHAVIOUR
 The logo is redesigned, all the signage has
changed and you may even have a new name. Now what? Karen Drury,
partner at fe3 consulting, which combines HR, brand and
communication, takes a brief look at ways in which organisations can
help their employees to ‘live’ their brand.
The
difficulty in encouraging brand behaviour is determining the level
of alignment between the brand values and those possessed by your
employees. If it’s a close alignment, then employees will want to
display behaviour that supports the brand promise. If employees’
personal values bear little resemblance to the brand, management
will need to put more effort into getting the desired behaviour.
Understanding the level of alignment gives you some idea of the
tactics to use to make the brand values visible in how people
behave.
“support the brand promise”
The
good news is that the tactics you may need to employ to encourage or
even mandate brand behaviour are ones you probably already use. Take
reward and recognition, for example. Pret a Manger gives silver
stars made by Tiffany to members of staff recommended by customers,
and teams in the shops are given a weekly bonus (or not) on the
recommendation of a Mystery Shopper. Both tactics are clear signals
of the importance of customer service, they support the brand
promise, and probably more importantly, they have an immediate
impact on staff.
Discouraging behaviour that is not in line with the brand
requires careful consideration – not because brand inconsistent
behaviour is difficult to identify, but because many managers are
under more pressure to deliver the numbers than brand behaviour. For
example, a senior manager in an organisation we worked in had the
best sales figures in the company. In a company whose brand values
included teamwork and respect for the individual, he was brutal,
rude and overbearing. Because of his stellar performance, his
behaviour was never tackled. Other employees watched carefully and
drew their own conclusions about the importance of brand values over
revenue and concentrated on the latter.
So
organisations should talk in depth, and at a local level, about
behaviours not acceptable in terms of the brand regardless of
circumstances, so managers can give rapid feedback and apply
sanctions with scrupulous fairness.
“motivate employees to live the brand”
 One
way to motivate employees to live the brand is to ensure that they
are involved in deciding how the brand values apply to them and
their work. This helps the brand values, often so bland in terms of
language, to have real meaning in practice. In a government agency
I’ve worked with, the types of work differed so significantly from
one department to another, that discussing applications at local
level was the only way in which the values were rescued from
abstract obscurity. After the values had been discussed at local
level (“What we mean by ‘co-operative’ in this department”) ideally
they would be added into personal performance reviews. All this
effort is pointless if senior management consider themselves exempt
from brand behaviour. Employees are quick to spot the double
standard and become cynical. One way to persuade senior managers to
become brand fans, is to demonstrate the links between
brand-consistent behaviour and other external measures.
Nationwide Building Society has developed a series of
measures called the Genome project, which investigates the links
between employees, members and business performance. One of the
elements contributing to employee commitment is the extent to which
senior management are perceived to live by the organisational
values. Commitment has an impact on retention (which has financial
implications) and how employees react with members, which in turn
contributes to business performance.
“move up the managerial agenda”
To
build individual company models which consider the associations
between behaviour and performance, needs a lot of data, expertise
and patience - for example, the Nationwide model was three years in
the making and work is still ongoing to fine tune it. Nevertheless
such models are very powerful. By making transparent the links
between behaviour and performance, brand values cease to be soft and
fluffy and move up the managerial agenda.
The
other way to help managers become brand fans (or at least brand
consistent) is to incorporate such data and performance measures in
organisational scorecards and personal reward schemes. For managers
who share the brand values, or consider brand-consistent behaviour
to be good for business, this is a reward for doing things they
might have done anyway – but is a good and tangible reminder of the
personal benefits of brand consistency.
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