May 2006

Where does a Brand begin? Quite simply, it begins with your employees. Customers decide very quickly if they want to do business with your company. This decision stems not necessarily on price, selection or convenience, but often on the interactions they experience with your employees. It is your employees who build and live the brand.

Your employees are your brand’s ambassadors. Every interaction between employee and customer is an opportunity to either enhance the brand image or detract from it.

Most organizations offer functional training that helps educate employees regarding the mechanics of their jobs. Some organizations offer attitude or motivational training that helps create a cohesive feel to the workplace. Both of those areas of training are essential, but another is equally important: BrandTraining. Such training prompts employees to learn more about the brand…embrace it and live it with every interaction among the employees themselves as well as in every contact they experience with customers.

BrandTraining provides employees with the guidelines needed to live up to the brand identity being created for your business. Without such training, people are left to their own interpretations of what the business “stands for” or what working for the company “means”. This approach is like the difference between telling your significant other to go shopping for a “gallon of skim milk” and telling them to just go shopping. With the former, chances are you will get the milk—in the latter you could get just about anything but the milk. The results are the difference between exact instructions for a precise task and general instructions for a precise task. You have a specific goal for the way your customers and prospects are to be treated. That way results in an experience that matches the brand identity for your company.

In addition, BrandTraining looks at more than the brand as it relates the employee’s job. BrandTraining examines the employee’s role from more than a functional standpoint, but from a level of deeper meaning as well. It looks at how that deeper meaning fits into the brand identity as a whole. Consider an example. For years, the brand identity amassed for The Home Bank has been grounded in its slogan of: Welcome Home! The brand has centered on the relationships established at the institution which relate very closely to similar relationships that one associates with another institution: Home. Employees that know to heartily treat customers like members of the family would respond differently to a customer’s loan request than they would if they viewed the transaction as merely processing loan information. Plus, a loan officer who understands the brand and also realizes a deeper meaning behind their job, such as helping that person achieve the dream of owning a home, driving their dream car, etc., is going yield different results than someone merely pushing paper. Both the employee and the customer will experience that difference and the brand identity will be further enhanced.  

BrandTraining gives the employees a target to focus on in doing their jobs. It gives them an identity within the framework of the company that transcends the function of the job itself. In short, BrandTraining helps the employee live up to something greater than just punching a clock.

Next month: Money for Nothin'

 © All Rights Reserved. Matthew Scott Trueblood and BrandVision Marketing. 2006.

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