Globally, organisations and companies spend over $750 billion annually on advertising to boost their brands. They use best-practice marketing techniques in other areas as well. Yet, many marketing and branding professionals don’t realise the full potential of employee brand ambassadors to boost brand identity at little cost. Employee advocacy is an organisation's most powerful tool to build its brand image, so it's a good idea!
Inspiring every one of your employees to be a proactive brand ambassador helps ensure the delivery of brand promises to customers and improves employee engagement. This improves delivery as they become an example for other team members, further strengthening your brand and culture. Employees can become internal and external brand ambassadors with some extra thought, delivering a double impact.
The Brand Ambassador Challenge
Creating a strategy to grow employee ambassadorship via an employee brand ambassador programme is relatively simple in principle. Still, it requires involvement from not just marketing but also line managers and senior leaders. It's line managers who are the key to success.
The first challenge is that most current employees aren’t aware of brand promises to customers. Many are often unclear on vision, values, purpose and the broader big picture. The second is inspiring them to be a good brand ambassador. Even if they know all the brand promises and all about customers employees will only be brand ambassadors if great leadership motivates them to want to be.
Does it work? Employee brand ambassadors were a key part of my work in the creation of UBS, the global bank, and delivered a significant impact. The CEO set out a clear business case, cascaded and enabled by proactive entrepreneurial leadership at all levels, which inspired employees to become ambassadors.
The result? 51% increase in brand value and becoming a top global brand in three years, with higher-than-peer profitability and numerous awards. This is now a Harvard Case study; Towards the Integrated Firm.
How To Build Your Army Of Brand Ambassadors
There are four simple steps to growing your army of brand ambassadors:
- Building An "I Care" Culture
- Building Understanding
- Building Belief
- Taking Action
“I Care”, understanding, belief, and action aren’t discrete phases but more a day-to-day interweaving of a compelling and inspiring narrative for everyone. Let's explore these elements in more detail.
Building An "I Care" Culture
Before building understanding, belief, and action, you must create a culture where people want to give their best. Leaders becoming “I Care” leaders, an integration of authentic and servant leadership, can create this culture in three simple steps :
- Build a firm foundation of key task delivery skills: Prioritisation, Planning and Time Management, Delegation, Communication, and Giving Feedback. These give bandwidth for the next step.
- Getting the best from everyone: Simple day-to-day actions that require extra effort, e.g., asking for ideas, is 35% more effort, and just showing you care is only 26%. Showing how what people do contributes to the big picture not only gets over 30% more effort but also enhances understanding of the brand.
- Focusing the best on what delivers success: Ensuring all effort is focused on delivering strategic objectives and enhancing the brand, not wasted on low ROI activity.
Building Understanding
All employees need know the brand promises and see the big picture. This can be achieved via:
- Team meetings: Regular meetings to discuss how the team is doing, how it can be better, and how it fits into the big picture, including brand and customers.
- Townhalls: Where senior leaders share key messages about the brand and customers to enhance understanding further and build belief. Also, explaining new products, and encouraging social media advocacy. They have significant benefits if run well and should be a regular event.
- Lunch and Learn: A highly effective means to enhance understanding, improve performance and build networks. Here, customer-facing staff should brief non–facing teams in meetings or at lunchtime and learn about customer needs.Key influencers: Getting key influencers such as top talent and senior leaders play a crucial role by proactively talking about the importance of being brand ambassadors. This creates a feedback loop where ideas can be developed to ensure success.
- Key influencers: Getting key influencers such as top talent and senior leaders play a crucial role by proactively talking about the importance of being brand ambassadors. This creates a feedback loop where ideas can be developed to ensure success.
Building Belief – The Power Of Emotion
Belief moves employees from understanding to action. Belief is an emotional commitment. If employees trust their boss, built through simple day-to-day actions, they build belief in them and the organisation. However, the company values, employee brand, and customer brands must align for this to work well. Without emotional commitment, it’s unlikely that employees will become proactive brand ambassadors.
Taking Action
Taking action to boost the brand is much easier once understanding and belief are in place. Also, the power of employees' authenticity strikes a chord with other people. Then, just asking, “How do you think we could do better for our customers?” “How do you think we could communicate our brand message better?” “How could we help you be a brand ambassador?” focuses everyone on ensuring that everything they do positively impacts the delivery of brand promises. There are a vast number of different ways to engage employees – stories from Starbucks, Walmart & Maceys.
Spread And Embed: The Ripple Effect
You need to spread and embed; constantly using success stories, discussion and networking opportunities, team meetings and town halls, opportunities to meet customers, and anything which keeps the brand promises and customers in employees' minds as they work daily. This creates a ripple effect across the organisation, which becomes self-reinforcing and builds up until every employee feels that being a brand ambassador is part of who they are.
External Impact
Employees are seen as authentic, real people within their own social networks. This means employees can potentially use their social media to promote their positive view of the employer brand to their social networks. This builds further brand awareness and may be visible to your target audience of potential customers. This external use of social media platforms will likely be visible and encourage more employees to become brand advocates.
On The Road To Success, Brand Ambassadors Lead The Way
The power of employee brand ambassadors cannot be underestimated. They are not only employee brand ambassadors for customers but also have the credibility to become employer brand ambassadors for the organisation. They can attract potential new employees by sharing their experiences and positive reviews of working for the organisation. That can then provide the organisation with potential candidates to be prospective employees, significantly helping with recruitment efforts.
On using "I Care" Leadership, the CFO of a telecoms company said, “This is a no-brainer; it’s a licence to print money.” That’s true, but what is so inspiring is that it makes your organisation's purpose live in every employee so they go home happy and spread the word about how great you are as your army of brand ambassadors.
