Your people are your brand
Your brand is your people and the way they represent you can make or break your brand.
Your strategy, message, unique value, design, copy, tactics, sales and marketing may all be aligned but if your people do not exude, live up to and reinforce the brand values you will create a disconnect that will short-circuit your brand.
The result? Inevitably from a human perspective its a loss of trust and indirectly from a business perspective lost-revenue. This is a large reason why apparently 54% of customers don’t trust brands – because they are given more reasons to doubt than they are to believe.
A good team of course starts with ‘good hiring’ but getting good people – and by ‘good’ I mean identifying those people who are ‘in sync’ from a values and outlook perspective as well as capable, willing and motivated – is the real challenge when job specs and recruitment is made so complex.
‘Good people’ continues with strong and consistent training and personal development – both in action and mindset, however a brand culture should encompass, empower and encourage behaviour, not necessarily define it or expectations around it. Are employees adhering to your new brand style guide, but couldn’t care less about the job they’re actually doing? Guess what? Then this will be your brand! Your customers will feel it too.
Be warned, building a brand that resonates with a target market, but which is built on the people you rely on to deliver and project your offering out, can be complex for the uninitiated – the alignments and brand elements all need to synchronise but this is by no means impossible.
Building a brand around your people (like Zappo’s staff as an obvious example) is a smart way to engage and bring in a strong human element to your brand – an element often overlooked by businesses because it’s ‘messy’ or ‘complex’. Make it about your people, even better link it to your customers, and you’ll build a brand worthy of attention which will magnify the attraction of those customers. Behaviour is infectious. Transmit the brand by the behaviour.
If your brand is your people, this perhaps brings us to one, defining, final conclusion – brand becomes all about what you believe and therefore what you want to say, how you want your people to ‘be’ and behave. Lead the way. Be the brand. Believe it or not it actually starts and stops with you. Where you take it is up to you.
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I hope you learned something new, insightful or useful from this blog.
As The Brand Entrepreneur, I believe in helping businesses build a ‘brand blueprint’ for business growth. I do this through a series of workshops designed to help businesses realise and communicate their ‘Why?’ to resonate with ideal customers and make a difference in the world. Successful brands in the future care about customers, not branding. I believe that future is now. I’m passionate about creating brand stories & design assets that help brands get ‘in sync’ and connected to customers they care about.
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