It Won’t Happen On the Outside If It Doesn’t Happen On The Inside

By Rick DeMarco

When companies develop marketing strategies, they spend a significant amount of time creating plans to position their brand to the market and to their customers with extensive media planning and communication initiatives.  All of these initiatives form the foundation for increasing brand awareness and preference and growing market share.  Clear messages and campaigns are developed that let the market know about the Brand Positioning and the Brand Promise and the related goods and services that support that Brand Promise.

However, if equal importance is not placed on developing plans to activate the brand strategy internally, there is a high risk that there will be a disconnect between the brand promise the company makes and the successful delivery of that promise by the employees.   Employees and customers both play an important role in the successful activation of a Brand Strategy.  Every touch point between an employee  and a customer must consistently deliver on the brand promise.  This means that the company must make a concerted effort to educate, inspire, and empower ALL employees around a consistent strategy and brand promise.

 As Brand Manager at KitchenAid, I was part of a powerful multi-brand team that managed all products and services for Whirlpool, KitchenAid, and Roper to insure that each brand delivered on its promise and focused on taking share from competitors, not each other.  Much effort was placed on aligning the senior leadership team around the three- brand strategy and the activation plans for each.   However, an equal effort was not placed on educating, inspiring, and empowering ALL employees so they consistently represented the brand in the manner in which the company wanted it to be represented.  One day, a service employee was taking care of a problem with a KitchenAid dishwasher when the customer asked him why she should buy KitchenAid and not Whirlpool or another brand.  The answer the service technician gave her resulted in my worst nightmare. All of our hard work differentiating between the three brands was for naught when this customer was told that all brands were alike.

Now that incident happened at a time when social media was not as prevalent as it is today.  So even if a customer had a bad experience, it did not necessarily mean that the experience would be shared to a broader audience.  Today, social media and the proliferation of use of the internet could make that incident become instantly available to millions of people and could dramatically impact the success of that brand strategy.    

If it doesn’t happen on the inside, it will not happen on the outside.  In order for a company to successfully activate its brand strategy and deliver on its brand promise, it must place equal emphasis on both the customers and employees to insure a consistent experience with the brand.