“Brands win or fail with their employees”
Nils Driever, Senior Strategist
Brands live and die with the people who are enthusiastic about them (or not). How convincing a brand can appear externally therefore depends first and foremost on how well it is understood internally. Motivated employees are definitely not everything - but without them, everything is nothing.
This is precisely why many brands fail before they have really got started. Complex brand constructs, an aloof purpose or brand communication that has nothing to do with the reality of the company will not fill any employee with life. Quite apart from the fact that internal communication is often limited to handing over a few PPT charts and design manuals. This means that the brand is clinically dead.
That's why the basic rule for brand appearances and processes is to think about taking employees along with you. Plan time, space and budget for implementation. The task for agencies like us is: brand positioning, design guidelines and the like must be formulated as simply and comprehensibly as possible.
People like to be inspired, as long as they understand what they should be enthusiastic about and why. In our projects, we achieve this with activation programmes that we set up individually for each organization. They usually include communicative components such as launch events, town halls and internal campaigns, supplemented by structural change formats such as onboarding, train-the-trainer programmes and brand champions, who carry the brand concept throughout the entire organization.
Suddenly the following happens: Because in such lively brand projects, people from the entire organization work on the same topic - from Customer Service to Field Service to People & Culture. Branding is then no longer just a matter for marketing, but for the entire organization. And the corporate brand becomes a topic for those who have to bring it to life on a daily basis.