Before we start reading this article, let's do a little test:
Open the WeChat official account of your company or its brand.
Check how many friends are following this public account?
Just browse the last 2~3 articles and see how many friends have read them?
Image source: The Paper
Why do we need this test? Let's put this question aside for now and look at a case story:
Tiffany's Internship at Disney
Tiffany, who studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, interned at Disney in Florida, USA for two months during her freshman summer vacation. This time allowed her to transform from being skeptical to believing in happiness. Tiffany's internship at Disney mainly involves cleaning and sanitation. If it is your company and an employee comes to intern for only two months during the summer vacation, how much effort would you put into training him/her?
Image source: gretatsai.com
The internship journey at Disney was very different from the first day. The training place was called Disney University. The training is not about everyone sitting in a row and listening to a lecture, but more like a ceremony. You will receive your own name tag and a hat with Mickey Mouse ears. When you leave the internship, the original hat will have a tassel, just like graduation.
Disney's corporate philosophy is Create Happiness. During the training, Disney showed the interns a lot of videos and pictures, as well as letters from parents, writing about their wonderful experiences at Disney or wanting to thank a particular employee in particular. Tiffany said that after reading one or two letters, you may not feel anything, but if you read "a lot" of them at once, you will feel that it is really true.
The training course includes many parts, and the one that Tiffany looks forward to most is the course that involves interacting with tourists because it feels like the most fun. But Disney delayed teaching them and instead waited until the last day to actually take the interns on a tour of the park.
Image source: gretatsai.com
Why not teach? Tiffany discovered that because this kind of thing cannot be taught, there is never a correct answer to interacting with tourists and solving their needs. Tourists from all over the world will always have hundreds of questions, which cannot be fully covered in a standard training manual. You must rely on practical experience to judge, answer and handle them.
From the very beginning of your training, Disney makes you truly believe that this is a paradise where magic is created. For you, this is a two-month internship, and in the end you're doing pretty much the same thing. But for tourists, this may be a very rare opportunity to come to Disney. What kind of experience are you going to create for them? The extent of the impact depends on the performance of employees when serving. That's why Disney spends so much time and energy on training.
From Tiffany's story, we can see why we often see heartwarming stories about Disney in the media and receive grateful letters from customers, because all employees believe in and follow Disney's corporate philosophy - Create Happiness. Before you impress your customers, have you impressed your employees first? If even employees don’t believe in the company’s values, how can they convey enthusiasm to customers?
Today we will focus on the following topics: The hidden corner of marketing - "internal marketing"
Simon Sinek, a famous American author and organizational consultant known for discovering the “Golden Circle Principle”, said:
Customers will never fall in love with a company unless the employees love it first.
——Simon Sinek
When you think of marketing, we tend to look outward: you might immediately think of marketing to consumers/customers, where we develop strategies to attract them, show them what we have to offer, bring them into our brand world, and convince more people to buy. But there’s another “market” that’s just as important: your people, the people who make your brand come alive and who can bring it to life for your consumers/customers. Yet, many companies and brands often overlook or underestimate this critical group.
1. Internal marketing with a weak presence
“Internal marketing” is a very simple concept in its literal sense: in addition to influencing consumers/customers externally, you also need to work hard to influence your own employees internally to build or increase brand love and loyalty.
Furthermore, in addition to letting employees understand the company's vision and brand core spirit, a mechanism should be established to listen to employees' needs and enable them to be willing to share the company's brand value. This will further build consensus and enable everyone to embody the brand spirit in their daily work, thereby creating the brand experience that the company hopes to provide to consumers/customers.
It’s true that it’s not a marketing rule to focus on creating brand favorability from within, but if the employees who represent the brand and communicate its promise to the outside world don’t appreciate it themselves, how can they credibly and authentically convince consumers/customers to do the same? Customers and other stakeholders often view employees and employee behavior as synonymous with the brand. Therefore, companies must build an emotional connection with the brand among their employees and establish a sense of identity and respect for the brand.
2. The importance of internal marketing
According to a Gallup survey of more than 3,000 randomly selected employees in the United States, only 41% of respondents believed they were very clear about the "company's value proposition" and "the differences between their own brand and competitors." It is worth noting that if the statistical results are further analyzed according to the job levels of the respondents, this proportion is 60% and 46% among senior and mid-level managers respectively, but it is significantly reduced to 37% for general grassroots employees.
The survey shows that most employees have only a very vague idea of what kind of brand the company wants to build, while these grassroots employees may be the ones who face and serve customers every day.
A famous article in Harvard Business Review, “Selling the Brand Internally”, accurately summarizes the importance of internal marketing:
Internal marketing is the best way to help your employees develop a strong emotional connection to the products and services you sell. Without this connection, employees may undermine the expectations set by your ad. In some cases, this is because they simply don’t understand what you are promising the public. In other cases, it may be that they don’t actually believe in the brand and feel disconnected, or worse, hostile toward the company. We’ve found that when people care about and believe in a brand, they work harder and become more loyal to the company. Employees are united and inspired by a shared sense of purpose and identity.
—— Harvard Business Review, 2002
3. The impact of weak internal marketing on sales and operations
Impact on Sales: If your salespeople aren’t excited about your brand or are confused about its mission and core values, they can’t effectively sell to customers. Salespeople who truly identify with the company’s culture and brand will perform better because they are authentic. This authenticity can even overcome mistakes in the sales process or lack of sales tools, and inauthentic employees can destroy the best, most well-funded sales system in the world.
Impact on operations: High employee turnover, increased recruitment costs, and reduced productivity.
4. How to do internal marketing
Another example of a brand is Nike. Its success is not only due to its amazing products, innovative marketing and sports star endorsements, but more importantly, its corporate culture. Nike has established an internal culture that is perfectly integrated with the Nike brand that is recognized by the public. It also means that working at Nike is as inspiring, innovative and trendy as the brand itself. So how does Nike create a culture that is consistent with its brand image? The answer is simpler than you might think: communication.
Internal marketing is the execution level of "brand internalization". A successful internal marketing system will eventually achieve the ultimate goal of brand internalization.
Image courtesy of Lens Hood
From internal communication to brand internalization is a complete process, but it cannot be achieved overnight. It is also a long-term and continuous project. Nevertheless, companies can grasp the following principles:
1) Clarify the company’s vision and brand core spirit: Let all employees have a clear understanding and recognition of this, and understand what kind of customer experience the company hopes to create. For example, Starbucks will carefully create a brand demonstration space and invite supervisors and employees to experience it from the customer's perspective and actually experience the ideal experience Starbucks hopes to provide.
2) Establish the concept that "everyone's work contributes to the brand": Most people often mistakenly believe that branding is the responsibility of the marketing department. Companies should let every employee understand how their work affects the perception of consumers/customers, and list as many specific practices as possible, the principles of choice when facing situations, and inappropriate behaviors that should be avoided, to assist and encourage everyone to become the best spokesperson for the brand. For example, H&M uses its employees as models for posters and videos. This approach not only allows employees to pay more attention to the impact of their own work on the brand, but is also a way to recognize employees and promote recognition.
Image source: old.marketing-interactive.com
3) Activate internal communication mechanisms: Companies should view employees as internal customers and communicate with them through various media and channels to keep the organization focused on its core vision. And through sincere and open listening and dialogue, we can improve organizational transparency, so that employees have both a rational sense of contract and responsibility towards the organization and can develop an emotional sense of belonging and identification. Based on this psychological foundation, they can then express their dedication from the bottom of their hearts.
4) Integrate internal marketing work into the talent selection and training process: Successful brand internalization begins with hiring like-minded talents. Clearly communicate the company's vision and values during the recruitment process to help job seekers understand which behavioral traits are in line with the corporate brand spirit, and try to attract talents with brand DNA to join the team. At the same time, employees’ brand awareness can be continuously deepened through various forms of on-the-job training such as workshops, training camps, and lectures.
However, it should be noted that internal marketing and brand internalization are not superficial efforts of mechanically reciting slogans. Business operators should use inspiring methods and lead by example to make employees feel that the brand spirit truly exists in the organization and feel honored to be a part of the brand. Only in this way can they truly motivate employees and gain their recognition. In addition, a good working environment, an open and simple interpersonal atmosphere, and the personal charm of the operator are all driving forces for employees to fall in love with their work, the brand, and the company.
So back to the test at the beginning of the article, if you find that the number of people following the company or brand’s official account or the number of friends who have read the articles is far from the number of your colleagues and friends, then it most likely indicates a problem - there is a problem with the internal marketing of your company . Although the number of readings may have a lot to do with factors such as content quality, and this indicator cannot represent all problems, as an employee of a company, if you cannot even complete the simple action of reading, how can you expect external consumers to be motivated to pay attention to the brand?
The transition from internal marketing to brand internalization is a never-ending continuous project that requires patient and sincere efforts. Once an enterprise establishes a culture of practicing the brand spirit, it will become the most unique and powerful competitive advantage that cannot be copied.
Instead of impressing 10 customers, the management is better off impressing 5 employees, because the 5 impressed employees will definitely impress more than 10 customers! Surveys show that for every 3% increase in employee satisfaction, customer satisfaction will increase by 5%, and profits can increase by 25% to 85%!
![[Big brain hole] The BMW H5 advertisement they made lasted 77 minutes and received over 100,000 views, when everyone said that H5 was outdated](/upload/images/67cc18bae124e.webp)
